Tidal Album Search Confusion

Posted by: Gavin B on 01 May 2018

Searching for albums in Tidal isn’t clear to me. I generally just type in the artist and look under albums for the one I want. I’ve just searched for Michael Kiwanuka to play Love & Hate. There appears to be two identical versions of this. Are they different and how can I tell?

Posted on: 01 May 2018 by Finkfan

Hi Gavin

ive found this quite frequently. I usually just click on album info to look for any differences. Sometimes there are extra tracks or more detailed track/album info on one version.

Another thing I have recently found that some albums become no longer available, so you just need to search for these again. They’re usually still there.

Posted on: 01 May 2018 by Gavin B

Hi Finkfan. That’s what I do too, but these two entries for Love & Hate really do seem to be identical! Sounds great anyway.

Posted on: 01 May 2018 by Finkfan

Yeah they do sound identical. The only difference I can find is the first ‘version’ has loads of info and the second has basic artist and times.

Posted on: 01 May 2018 by jsaudio

One may be Masters or MQA and you cant tell with the Naim app. because the streamer doesn't support MQA

Posted on: 01 May 2018 by Finkfan

I guess it could be. It would be good if Tidal could indicate that in some way on their app

Posted on: 01 May 2018 by ChrisSU

It's not unusual to see the same album listed 3 or 4 times, and yet more times as various remasters, etc. One of them is likely to be an MQA version, but you need to navigate to it via the Tidal desktop app to work out which ones to avoid;-) Even without the MQA issue, Tidal curation is a shambles. It's not just albums that are duplicated and triplicated, it can be artists and tracks as well.