2018-01-06, 16:22
Just to confirm, the Tidal2 works, thank you! Had some trouble to get it to the Xbox, luckily had just configured a NFS fileserver.
-Gustav
-Gustav
2018-01-13, 20:49
(2017-02-28, 17:21)favo Wrote: Hi Arneson,I agree, great add-on!
Your plugin works great. I just wonder if it's possible to implement gapless playback? For example when playing album "Morricone 60" (film music by Ennio Morricone) on Tidal desktop app, tracks 2 and 3 play seamlessly together. On Kodi with your plugin there is a pause between tracks. I know that gapless playback works in Kodi when playing flac files.
Thanks for your work,
Favo
I have two questions. I also experience problems with playing gapless albums like Pink Floyd - The Wall. I have set the add-on to the highest quallity (Lossless (ALAC, FLAC, or MQA); FLAC/MQA 24-Bit (Master Audio)) and also have the corresponding subscription with Tidal, but the add-on still inserts gaps in-between the tracks. It looks as if it is starting too late with the next track. Is there a setting to adjust this?
Secondly is it possible to speed up the interaction with Tidal? The process of searching for an artist or album is quite slow.
Thanks for your efforts,
Frans
2018-01-16, 00:09
(2018-01-13, 20:49)Frans6681 Wrote: I agree, great add-on!Hello Frans,
I have two questions. I also experience problems with playing gapless albums like Pink Floyd - The Wall. I have set the add-on to the highest quallity (Lossless (ALAC, FLAC, or MQA); FLAC/MQA 24-Bit (Master Audio)) and also have the corresponding subscription with Tidal, but the add-on still inserts gaps in-between the tracks. It looks as if it is starting too late with the next track. Is there a setting to adjust this?
Secondly is it possible to speed up the interaction with Tidal? The process of searching for an artist or album is quite slow.
Thanks for your efforts,
Frans
a "gapless playback" function is not a feature of a music Addon. My TIDAL2 Addon requests the stream URL when Kodi requests it from my Addon to play the stream.
On my Mac with Kodi 17.6 I have no problems with gapless playback. I tested it with the album Pink Floyd - Pulse and I hear no gap between the songs.
And the "Gapless Playback" in the Kodi settings is disabled in my system !
If you watch into the Kodi logfile you will see that Kodi requests the next stream URL 5 seconds before the actual track ends. That should be fast enough for
Kodi to play gapless.
Which platform do you use for Kodi ?
arneson
2018-01-16, 00:26
Hi arneson,
Thanks for the quick response.
I use Tidal2 on OSMC (17.6) on a Raspberry Pi 2. The gap (which should be 0 s) that I experience is about 7 seconds.
Frans
Thanks for the quick response.
I use Tidal2 on OSMC (17.6) on a Raspberry Pi 2. The gap (which should be 0 s) that I experience is about 7 seconds.
Frans
2018-01-16, 02:12
Hi Frans
Upon testing Pink Floyd - Pulse I can confirm that Krypton 17.6 on Windows has gapless playback working. Interesting though my Minix U9-H which uses the Amlogic S912 chipset in combination with LibreElec 8.2.2.3 (Same Krypton 17.6) has gapless playback working but with an unusual 50ms - 75ms gap. So, essentially not gapless :-)
I wonder if there is a lot of processing happening here (during concatenation of songs for gapless playback). You would have thought that concatenating two streams into one wouldn't cause much of an issue in today's standard CPU's but the evidence of your Pi2 and my two pieces of hardware does give pause for thought. The Minix U9-H does have a lot of CPU overhead but my windows system is much more powerful.
I have also found that hardware and driver combinations across many different devices and platforms each cause some unusual behavior for playback and includes stripping the first few milliseconds of the front of the track which essentially is caused by late signaling to your AVR or whatever output device you're using.
The only other issue that I can think of which is an extremely simple yet regular one is Wi-Fi/Network performance?
Are you using a Wired Connection or Wi-Fi?
Is your broadband connection particularly slow?
I guess the best way to answer the above questions is; do you use a skin like Estuary that shows a circular loading animation in the center of the screen and does this loading animation start five seconds prior to the end of a song and continue on for a further seven seconds as you suggest until the next track begins to play? As if it does then this would indicate a network issue.
So, If I were debugging the issue you are experiencing then I would be inclined to rule out CPU load and network performance (local and broadband). Hope this helps get you closer to the answer.
Steve
Upon testing Pink Floyd - Pulse I can confirm that Krypton 17.6 on Windows has gapless playback working. Interesting though my Minix U9-H which uses the Amlogic S912 chipset in combination with LibreElec 8.2.2.3 (Same Krypton 17.6) has gapless playback working but with an unusual 50ms - 75ms gap. So, essentially not gapless :-)
I wonder if there is a lot of processing happening here (during concatenation of songs for gapless playback). You would have thought that concatenating two streams into one wouldn't cause much of an issue in today's standard CPU's but the evidence of your Pi2 and my two pieces of hardware does give pause for thought. The Minix U9-H does have a lot of CPU overhead but my windows system is much more powerful.
I have also found that hardware and driver combinations across many different devices and platforms each cause some unusual behavior for playback and includes stripping the first few milliseconds of the front of the track which essentially is caused by late signaling to your AVR or whatever output device you're using.
The only other issue that I can think of which is an extremely simple yet regular one is Wi-Fi/Network performance?
Are you using a Wired Connection or Wi-Fi?
Is your broadband connection particularly slow?
I guess the best way to answer the above questions is; do you use a skin like Estuary that shows a circular loading animation in the center of the screen and does this loading animation start five seconds prior to the end of a song and continue on for a further seven seconds as you suggest until the next track begins to play? As if it does then this would indicate a network issue.
So, If I were debugging the issue you are experiencing then I would be inclined to rule out CPU load and network performance (local and broadband). Hope this helps get you closer to the answer.
Steve
2018-01-16, 23:09
Hi Steve,
Looking at the CPU usage I indeed notice that it is 100% when changing over to the next track. The CPU usage is about 50% when playing a track.
The Raspberry has a wired broadband connection to the internet (according to my provider 200 Mb/s down and 20 Mb/s up), so I don't think that is the problem.
The loading animation starts 5 s before the end of a track and continues for about 5 s after it has ended. Next it takes about 2 s before the next track starts.
It seems as if the CPU simply isn't fast enough to complete the tasks necessary for gapless playback in the 5 s it has available.
I am willing to consider buying a new Raspberry Pi, but it would be nice if somebody can confirm that that will solve the problem.
Thanks for the help,
Frans
Looking at the CPU usage I indeed notice that it is 100% when changing over to the next track. The CPU usage is about 50% when playing a track.
The Raspberry has a wired broadband connection to the internet (according to my provider 200 Mb/s down and 20 Mb/s up), so I don't think that is the problem.
The loading animation starts 5 s before the end of a track and continues for about 5 s after it has ended. Next it takes about 2 s before the next track starts.
It seems as if the CPU simply isn't fast enough to complete the tasks necessary for gapless playback in the 5 s it has available.
I am willing to consider buying a new Raspberry Pi, but it would be nice if somebody can confirm that that will solve the problem.
Thanks for the help,
Frans
2018-01-16, 23:53
=10.5ptHi Frans
This is quite off topic from this thread but it may help others experiencing the same issue's during network playback of TIDAL content on underpowered SBC's
I'm glad we were able to get a reason behind this. Although it seems to be clear that it is a CPU issue, you may want to bear in mind that most SBC (single Board computers) lack hardware acceleration, even for simple things like wired network traffic. I've even seen some hardware based Wired network controllers in the back of £4k Sony TV's struggle to do more than 38 Mbps, even when they're on a port speed of 100.
May I recommend that you come away from versatile SBC's that are used for any application and try some of the dedicated SoC's (System on Chip) media players. Some of the brands that the international community use with OSMC or LibreElec for Kodi is WeTek, Minix and although expensive, the NVidia shield. Most of these boxes can have Kodi (via LibreElec) boot from SD Card so you also enjoy Android TV or, like me, I prefer to load LibreElec onto the internal memory for better Kodi performance as I'm not that bothered about losing Android TV. I believe OSMC is supported for many of these players too.
I should also point out that the latest Model 3B of Raspberry Pi is probably going to help a bit but it still lacks the performance compared to leading SOC media players which include dedicate GPU's for many types of hardware accelerated functions, specifically designed for media playback.=10.5ptHope this helps.
Steve
This is quite off topic from this thread but it may help others experiencing the same issue's during network playback of TIDAL content on underpowered SBC's
I'm glad we were able to get a reason behind this. Although it seems to be clear that it is a CPU issue, you may want to bear in mind that most SBC (single Board computers) lack hardware acceleration, even for simple things like wired network traffic. I've even seen some hardware based Wired network controllers in the back of £4k Sony TV's struggle to do more than 38 Mbps, even when they're on a port speed of 100.
May I recommend that you come away from versatile SBC's that are used for any application and try some of the dedicated SoC's (System on Chip) media players. Some of the brands that the international community use with OSMC or LibreElec for Kodi is WeTek, Minix and although expensive, the NVidia shield. Most of these boxes can have Kodi (via LibreElec) boot from SD Card so you also enjoy Android TV or, like me, I prefer to load LibreElec onto the internal memory for better Kodi performance as I'm not that bothered about losing Android TV. I believe OSMC is supported for many of these players too.
I should also point out that the latest Model 3B of Raspberry Pi is probably going to help a bit but it still lacks the performance compared to leading SOC media players which include dedicate GPU's for many types of hardware accelerated functions, specifically designed for media playback.=10.5ptHope this helps.
Steve
Just to let you know: I now have flawless gapless playback of Tidal streams on my Raspberry Pi with the Tidal2 app. I don't know what happened, but Thanks a million! 
2018-01-22, 11:16
Hi, first of all i like to say thank you for your awesome work and plugin.
I have a problem when im using the tidal beta 16 plugin with openelec 17.3 and my hifiberry dac on a pi3, while using the addon and playing music system is booting automatically. That only happend when using the add on. Do you have any ideas? Thanks and Regards Martin
I have a problem when im using the tidal beta 16 plugin with openelec 17.3 and my hifiberry dac on a pi3, while using the addon and playing music system is booting automatically. That only happend when using the add on. Do you have any ideas? Thanks and Regards Martin
2018-01-28, 19:19
On Kodi 16.1 as a Tidal hifi full $20 monthly subscriber, I've had zero luck to log in as anything other than a trial user on a Amazon Firestick.
On the version prior to Tidal2 version 2.0 beta16, at least I was able to finally log in but never use lossless.
I've tried everything I can think of and there's not a Tidal log to view that I can see.
On Tidal2, there's only one place I see to enter the Username, Password, Country, and Subscription type.
(Have no idea what a Unique Client Key is and that's blank. After dozens of attempts logging in and out and exiting Kodi and restarting, I even tried putting the password in there too.)
Sadly, I'm out of ideas and like the earlier version on Firestick, just gave up and then one day recently; Tidal just started to load. Then I learned about Tidal2 beta16, I'm not optimistic that will eventually happen although I've tried to restart as part of the exiting and relogging in process on occasion. Also tried uninstalling and installing twice. All log in information was saved but I did reenter both the username and password information to no avail.
On the version prior to Tidal2 version 2.0 beta16, at least I was able to finally log in but never use lossless.
I've tried everything I can think of and there's not a Tidal log to view that I can see.
On Tidal2, there's only one place I see to enter the Username, Password, Country, and Subscription type.
(Have no idea what a Unique Client Key is and that's blank. After dozens of attempts logging in and out and exiting Kodi and restarting, I even tried putting the password in there too.)
Sadly, I'm out of ideas and like the earlier version on Firestick, just gave up and then one day recently; Tidal just started to load. Then I learned about Tidal2 beta16, I'm not optimistic that will eventually happen although I've tried to restart as part of the exiting and relogging in process on occasion. Also tried uninstalling and installing twice. All log in information was saved but I did reenter both the username and password information to no avail.
2018-01-30, 18:23
(2018-01-28, 19:19)Horsey Wrote: On Kodi 16.1 as a Tidal hifi full $20 monthly subscriber, I've had zero luck to log in as anything other than a trial user on a Amazon Firestick.Hello Horsey,
On the version prior to Tidal2 version 2.0 beta16, at least I was able to finally log in but never use lossless.
I've tried everything I can think of and there's not a Tidal log to view that I can see.
On Tidal2, there's only one place I see to enter the Username, Password, Country, and Subscription type.
(Have no idea what a Unique Client Key is and that's blank. After dozens of attempts logging in and out and exiting Kodi and restarting, I even tried putting the password in there too.)
Sadly, I'm out of ideas and like the earlier version on Firestick, just gave up and then one day recently; Tidal just started to load. Then I learned about Tidal2 beta16, I'm not optimistic that will eventually happen although I've tried to restart as part of the exiting and relogging in process on occasion. Also tried uninstalling and installing twice. All log in information was saved but I did reenter both the username and password information to no avail.
Do you still have the line "Login (Trial-Mode is active !)" in the main menu of the TIDAL2 Addon ?
Then the Addon can't create a Login-Session-ID with your addon/username.
Please reset the Addon-Settings "Username", "Password", "Country for Local Media" and "Unique Client Key" to blank values.
And set "Subscription Type" to "Hifi" and the Option "Music Quality" to "High (320 kBit/s)" for the first test.
The Setting "Use HTTP instead of HLS Steaming (max. 720p)" should be disabled.
If you're able to look into the Kodi Logfile you can Enable Debug-Loggin in the Addon-Settings.
If you then select "Login (Trial-Mode is active !)" in the main menu, the Addon asks you for Username, Password and Subsscription Type.
Please type in your data and look what happens then.
If this doesn't work, look into the Kodi Logfile for error messages.
If you logged in successfully the last line in the main menu should show "Logout".
Then you can try to play some streams.
If you can play music you can switch the Music Quality back to "Lossless". Then the Addon has to relogin again for Lossless Playback !
I hope this resolves your problems.
arneson
Thank you; I'm in on Tidal2 and able to use Lossless on my high end system now! It sounds amazing.
Went to the repository and added log file tool. Saw I was getting log in authorization errors. So reset the password on my laptop. Then when back to the Firestick and back into Tidal2, clicked on the "trial login," prompted to enter username, password, Tidal type account (HiFi) and good to go!
Saw on another thread on Tidal2 Beta 8, that when you set to FLAC/MQA 24-Bit (Master Audio), you said to log out and then back in to make that setting engage as it requires a new session ID. So did that and man, it's terrific.
Thanks again very kindly for your help and for this Kodi software for Tidal!!
Went to the repository and added log file tool. Saw I was getting log in authorization errors. So reset the password on my laptop. Then when back to the Firestick and back into Tidal2, clicked on the "trial login," prompted to enter username, password, Tidal type account (HiFi) and good to go!
Saw on another thread on Tidal2 Beta 8, that when you set to FLAC/MQA 24-Bit (Master Audio), you said to log out and then back in to make that setting engage as it requires a new session ID. So did that and man, it's terrific.
Thanks again very kindly for your help and for this Kodi software for Tidal!!
2018-03-02, 14:12
Hi, I also have a problem logging in to Tidal2. I have a paid account on TIDAL, but it is not HIFI / PREMIUM, only standard. This option can not be found when logging in. I will add that I am from Poland.
Clearing settings did not help.
Clearing settings did not help.
2018-03-02, 16:31
(2018-03-02, 14:12)arras Wrote: Hi, I also have a problem logging in to Tidal2. I have a paid account on TIDAL, but it is not HIFI / PREMIUM, only standard. This option can not be found when logging in. I will add that I am from Poland.Hi arras,
Clearing settings did not help.
the "Standard" account should be the "Premium" account which allows only 320 kbps AAC. Please select the Subscription Type "Premium" and Music Quality "High (320 kBit/s)".
The Music Streaming Option is optional. You can try RTMP mode if no other setting works.
arneson
