burntscarr
Executive Producer
As of June 17th, Tidal announced an official statement going over their changes to audio formats and qualities.
The highlights of this are:
- No more MQA
- No more Sony 360 Reality Audio
- For stereo sound, FLAC was chosen
- For immersive sound, Dolby Atmos was chosen
- For hi-resolution audio, all tracks that were once MQA are in the process of gaining their regular FLAC versions, many are already available in CD Quality (16-bit 44.1kHz) and tons are gaining the higher resolutions (up to 24-bit 192kHz).
These changes are in motion already, but actual changes to the way the service currently works will not happen until July 24th.
On that day, all 360 tracks will be greyed out and marked as unavailable, same with MQA versions of tracks/albums. These changes will affect any services that make use of Tidal as well, including programs/bots to rip audio from there.
Changes this may bring (speculations):
- 360 Albums from Artists/Labels that care, will likely re-render their spatial albums into Atmos instead of 360 to release back to Tidal. This is how Apple has already had things done for a while now, since they don'e support 360
- Other services may soon follow:
--- Deezer announced forever ago that it would be discontinuing 360 support, since then very few tracks have come out in this format on the service, but nearly all of the old ones still exist on their servers.
--- Amazon currently supports the same 360 level as Deezer has/had. This level can contain up to 24 encoded objects, unlike Tidal's current level that holds a maximum of 10 encoded objects. With no other services using it, it depends heavily on the userbase of Amazon Music whether or not we'll continue to see Sony 360 Reality audio on the popular streaming services.
--- Other known 360-like things exist. 360 is an adaptation of a 22.2 setup, which already exists as the Hamasaki 22.2 format. These changes to Tidal should not affect any services or products that make use of Hamasaki's format.
What I'm doing:
- So far, I've decided I need to grab as much as possible to hold it somewhere.
- That somewhere was chosen as Telegram, same as my Dolby Atmos backups.
- You can go see them yourself on Telegram, by going to https://t.me/tidal360
The highlights of this are:
- No more MQA
- No more Sony 360 Reality Audio
- For stereo sound, FLAC was chosen
- For immersive sound, Dolby Atmos was chosen
- For hi-resolution audio, all tracks that were once MQA are in the process of gaining their regular FLAC versions, many are already available in CD Quality (16-bit 44.1kHz) and tons are gaining the higher resolutions (up to 24-bit 192kHz).
These changes are in motion already, but actual changes to the way the service currently works will not happen until July 24th.
On that day, all 360 tracks will be greyed out and marked as unavailable, same with MQA versions of tracks/albums. These changes will affect any services that make use of Tidal as well, including programs/bots to rip audio from there.
Changes this may bring (speculations):
- 360 Albums from Artists/Labels that care, will likely re-render their spatial albums into Atmos instead of 360 to release back to Tidal. This is how Apple has already had things done for a while now, since they don'e support 360
- Other services may soon follow:
--- Deezer announced forever ago that it would be discontinuing 360 support, since then very few tracks have come out in this format on the service, but nearly all of the old ones still exist on their servers.
--- Amazon currently supports the same 360 level as Deezer has/had. This level can contain up to 24 encoded objects, unlike Tidal's current level that holds a maximum of 10 encoded objects. With no other services using it, it depends heavily on the userbase of Amazon Music whether or not we'll continue to see Sony 360 Reality audio on the popular streaming services.
--- Other known 360-like things exist. 360 is an adaptation of a 22.2 setup, which already exists as the Hamasaki 22.2 format. These changes to Tidal should not affect any services or products that make use of Hamasaki's format.
What I'm doing:
- So far, I've decided I need to grab as much as possible to hold it somewhere.
- That somewhere was chosen as Telegram, same as my Dolby Atmos backups.
- You can go see them yourself on Telegram, by going to https://t.me/tidal360
