canned dragons
Qobuz A Year Later
My sister’s boyfriend recently asked me if I was still using Qobuz, a year after we first talked about the streaming music service. I answered in the affirmative, having just renewed my subscription a couple of months ago, at which point he told me that he had switched back after giving Tidal a try. The biggest issue he mentioned running into with Qobuz was slow downloads.
I could relate to the complaint. For the most part, Qobuz is amazing. The quality of the music, the selection, the interface, and the integration with Roon are all high points.1 The downloads are painful, though. They are almost unbearably slow. If you are old enough, they will remind you of days downloading MP3s over dial-up.2 Not only does saving music locally take a lot of time, but you need to have the app open while the download operation is taking place. That means, in effect, that you will start to download an album, then walk away or do something else, only to have the download operation stop partway through. It’s frustrating to try and listen to the new hotness (or old hotness) on your way to work only to realize that you only have part of what you had intended to save. This is not a rare occurrence, either.
One thing that my sister’s boyfriend noticed, though, was that some music was quicker to download. In particular, a Billy Eilish album was speedy to complete. I thought about it for a second and realized that must be a result of using a content delivery network (CDN). I’m not sure what cloud provider Qobuz is using, but I would imagine that more popular songs that many people are streaming (such as those by Eilish) get cached to an edge location. When they are retrieved from that cache, they are more easily available. This would explain why, when I’m downloading a 1993 album from the band Tiger Trap, it has to go all the way to the storage on the origin server. It simply hasn’t cached those files to the edge locations because not many people are accessing them.
This isn’t an easy problem to solve, because it’s architecturally an economy of scale issue. I suppose the only way to improve the situation is to get more people to sign up for Qobuz and download outsider music. Consider this your invitation.
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