Qobuz and Mac 22 Jun 2025, 12:00 pm

Back in March I offered Latest Music (feat. Qobuz), describing all the ways I listen to music (Tl;dr: YouTube Music, Plex, Qobuz, record player). I stand by my opinions there but wanted to write more on two subjects: First Qobuz, because it suddenly got a lot better. And a recommendation, for people with fancy A/V setups, that you include a cheap Mac Mini.

Qobuz

That other piece had a list of the reasons to use Qobuz, but times have changed, so let’s revise it:

1. It pays artists more per stream than any other service, by a wide margin.

2. It seems to have as much music as anyone else.

3. It’s album-oriented, and I appreciate artists curating their own music.

4. Classical music is a first-class citizen.

5. It’s actively curated; they highlight new music regularly, and pick a “record of the week”. To get a feel, check out Qobuz Magazine; you don’t have to be a subscriber.

6. It gives evidence of being built by people who love music.

7. They’re obsessive about sound quality, which is great, but only makes a difference if you’re listening through quality speakers.

8. A few weeks ago, the mobile app quality switched from adequate to excellent.

That app

I want to side-trip a bit here, starting with a question. How long has it been since an app you use has added a feature that was genuinely excellent and let you do stuff you couldn’t before and didn’t get in your way and created no suspicion that it was strip-mining your life for profit? I’m here to tell you that this can still happen, and it’s a crushing criticism of my profession that it so rarely does.

I’m talking about Qobuz Connect. I believe there are other music apps that can do this sort of stuff, but it feels like magic to me.

It’s like this. I listen to music at home on an audiophile system with big speakers, in our car, and on our boat. The only app I touch is the Qobuz Android app. The only time it’s actually receiving and playing the music itself is in the car, with the help of Android Auto. In the other scenarios it’s talking to Qobuz running on a Mac, which actually fetches the music and routes it to the audio system. Usually it figures out what player I want it to control automatically, although there’ve been a couple times when I drove away in the car and it got confused about where to send the music. Generally, it works great.

The app’s music experience is rich and involving.

It has New Releases and curated playlists and a personalized stream for me and a competent search function for those times I absolutely must listen to Deep Purple or Hania Rani or whoever.

I get a chatty not-too-long email from Qobuz every Friday, plugging a few of the week’s new releases, with sideways and backward looks too. (This week: A Brian Wilson stream.) The app has so much stuff, especially among the themed streams, that I sometimes get lost. But somehow it’s not irritating; what’s on the screen remains musically interesting and you can always hit the app’s Home button.

Qobuz has its own musical tastes that guide its curation. They’re not always compatible with mine — my tolerance for EDM and mainstream Hip-hop remains low. And I wish they were stronger on Americana. But the intersection is broad enough to provide plenty of enjoyable new-artist experiences. Let me share one with you: Kwashibu Area Band, from Ghana.

Oh, one complaint: Qobuz was eating my Pixel’s battery. So I poked around online and it’s a known problem; you have to use the Android preferences to stop it from running in the background. Huh? What was it doing in the background anyhow?! But it seems to work fine even when it’s not doing it.

A Mac, you say?

The music you’re listening to is going to be stored on disk, or incoming from a streaming service. Maybe you want to serve some of the stored music out to listen to it in the car or wherever. There are a variety of audio products in the “Streamer” category that do some of these things in various combinations. A lot of them make fanciful claims about the technology inside and are thus expensive, you can easily spend thousands.

But any reasonably modern computer can do all these things and more, plus it also can drive a big-screen display, plus it will probably run the software behind whatever next year’s New Audio Hotness is.

At this point the harder-core geeks will adopt a superior tone of voice to say “I do all that stuff with FreeBSD and a bunch of open-source packages running on a potato!”

More power to ’em. But I recommend a basic Apple Silicon based Mac Mini, M1 is fine, which you can get for like $300 used on eBay. And if you own a lot of music and video you can plug in a 5T USB drive for a few more peanuts. This will run Plex and Qobuz and almost any other imaginable streaming software. Plus you can plug it into your home-theater screen and it has a modern Web browser so you can also play anything from anywhere on the Web.

I’ve been doing this for a while but I had one big gripe. When I wanted to stream music from the Mac, I needed to use a keyboard and mouse, so I keep one of each, Bluetooth-flavored, nearby. But since I got Qobuz running that’s become a very rare occurrence.

You’re forgetting something

Oh, and yeah, there’s the record player. Playing it requires essentially no software at all, isn’t that great?

Long Links 21 Jun 2025, 12:00 pm