Hmm I'm not sure what I was seeing in the progress bar, most of what I've written above does not reflect at all how it behaves.

It has three separate phases, first looks for artists (0-100%), then for albums (0-100%). Both of these are very fast, the first one nearly instantenous. Finally, it tries to get the track metadata.

But getting the tracks is really, really slow, and with a previously populated database, it immediately goes to 99% and then seems to hang there indefinitely (I've waited for around 10 hours). I've tested the database integrity with sqlite3 (as suggested here), and since that didn't help (it just told "OK"), moved away the Strawberry database file and I'm currently testing, if the refresh ever completes. It is painfully slow, though.

It is possible I've never had a properly completed Qobuz part of the database.

Currently, it is possible to refresh the whole library of the user only.

This will take ages if the library has many artists on it. For example, refreshing my library will pull in a few hundred albums (or releases, some might be EPs, singles etc.) and 12 458 songs, which will take quite a long time.

Sometimes what the user actually needs, is adding one artists into the library, or perhaps refresh an artist's releases because a new release has been made (available in Qobuz).

I suggest a "refresh artists" in the context menu of an artist in the Qobuz library.

Not sure if this is possible or easy to do, or suggested before. My searches came up null (from this forum and github).

Cheers!

p.s. As a sidenote, it is nearly impossible to say if the refresh process has hung up (seems like the progress bar goes from 0 to 98% when just taking the artists metadata, while this part should actually go from 0 to 2% in terms of time taken); progress bars are notoriously difficult to implement so that they work roughly linearly, and I'm not actually sure what is going on, but assuming my hunch is correct (which it might not be) I'd suggest dividing process into artist, album and song metadata retrieval, and allocate the bar to these accordingly, say 1%, 1% and the rest (98%) to the last part, which also takes the majority of the time.

@alexp I'm speculating here (since I can not find any documentation on the feature after a quick search), but chances are the "devices" tab is meant for something else.

I.e. I believe this is only for H/W devices meant for media playback, mainly optical CD drives. It could perhaps also include MTP devices - some MP3 players use this protocol - albeit the protocol could also include other things besides audio. My BluRay drive does appear under devices.

After all, everything you've mentioned contains only regular files. How could Strawberry know if a removable device contains media files meant for Strawberry (or something else)? Strawberry can open regular files just fine.

@rlkeeney nice but that doesn't mean the issue doesn't exist. It is very to choose a next-to another option from any context menu, this might depend on the input device and user habits.

Smart playlist can have a lot of options in them, and quite a bit of user time consumed to create them. In terms of user input they might contain data which is somewhat time-consuming to re-enter and remember.

Removing an item this way without any confirmation might be good UX if the change can be reverted very easily and trivially (which might not be the case in this case).

@jonas, thank you!

I also only presumed Qobuz will be a can of worms to get the key (which it is). But after a few google searches I realized there are solutions I can work with. So I'm going to continue with Qobuz for the time being.

Hi!

The <RANT> part: (not aimed at Strawberry at all, but about streaming services!)

I'm tired of current streaming services poor support for Linux desktop environments. Currently I'm using Qobuz - and it's electron based application only works via Wine, does not integrate at all with my DE, and uses way too many CPU resources (and despite promises, Qobuz has not delivered a native Linux client - and even if they did, I'll bet it will have poor desktop integration, in case they'd actually deliver).

I still remember the MQA-snakeoil fiasco Tidal was a part of, and have a kind of lack of trust on Tidal (...and the "HiFi"-industry at large. It's sad but money can make bull*t walk).

Now this brings up an obvious need: I'd like to find a streaming service which works well on my choice of daily driver for an OS. I'm afraid that's too much to ask... Spotify used to be (and probably still is) the best choice in terms of UI/integration (comparing the official applications). I'd yet prefer the slim resource use and the simple, most user friendly UI of Strawberry =).

</RANT>

Which brings us to the question of the title - does Tidal currently work on Strawberry? I realize it is a lot of work to get any streaming service to work on strawberry. The service providers are not actually forthcoming or welcoming FOSS third party clients.

In case any other streaming service I may have overlooked can be made to work, I'd like to know! AFAIK Qobuz can not be made to work as they will not give individual API tokens for users anymore.

I'm seriously considering just buying music the old-fashioned way, but a streaming service would still fill a niche for discovering new music and parties / jukebox use.

Cheers!