About Tidal Connect and Mosaic

When I use Mosaic to connect to Tidal, the playback is very unsmooth, it always stops after a few seconds, and it is almost impossible to play normally, while QOBUZ is normal, and the strange thing is that when I use Tidal Connect, the playback is smooth, everything is normal, I observed that the server I connected to Tidal is Sweden. Could it be the result of different server request addresses sent by Mosaic and Tidal connect? My DCS bridge has set the DNS to 8.8.8.8, can someone with technology tell me why, I want to use Mosaic to play Tidal, thank you

When you use Mosaic to access Tidal (or Qobuz), your album browsing actually flows through Airable. When you select a particular album, Airable tells Mosaic/Network Bridge which Tidal cache server to directly go to using a FQDN. So, if your Network Bridge is pointing to the “wrong” DNS Server, things are not going to work very well.

When you use Tidal Connect on the other hand, the Tidal App is already automatically pointing your system to an appropriate geolocation that’s nearest to you (because of Tidal’s regional licensing restrictions). So, all album playbacks will be from appropriate geolocation cache servers.

Bottomline, don’t set your Network Bridge’s DNS to Google DNS - it may not return an appropriate geolocation streaming server/cache address - instead, use your ISP’s default DNS Server address.

Thank you very much Anup, actually I don’t have Tidal and Qobuz servers in China, I also realized that changing DCS bridge DNS to Google didn’t bring any change, I have changed back to get ISP DNS automatically, but Mosaic plays Tidal It’s still not smooth, QOBUZ is relatively much better, and occasionally stops, but Tidal can hardly listen normally. When I switch to Tidal connect, everything is normal. How can I know which nearest Tidal server I should connect to? to modify the proper DNS, thanks again

Tidal now uses two cache server suppliers; AWS CloudFront, and Fastly. Qobuz only uses AWS CloudFront cache servers.

AWS CloudFront has presence in China. My guess is your Tidal App correctly points to one of those local China caches. Tidal themselves don’t need to have any presence in China. Likewise for Qobuz.

However, Fastly does not have any cache servers in China, the nearest is in Hong Kong. My guess is Airable is pointing Mosaic/Network Bridge to one of those Fastly cache servers, and your ISP’s bandwidth outside of China is probably poor.

Unfortunately, neither we users nor dCS, has any control over where Airable points Mosaic/Network Bridge to. I’m not sure there’s a simple solution to your problem. :thinking:

Thanks for Anup’s enthusiastic help. In my opinion, Tidal connect reflects its value. It can automatically connect to the nearest server. For this function, the experience is much better than Mosaic. I hope DCS can be used in the next version of the firmware. Like Tidal connect, it can automatically identify the nearest server instead of connecting to a fixed server, resulting in unsmooth playback

Hi,

I do understand your frustration if TIDAL isn’t working via the Mosaic app but - just for clarification - the servers that are used are dynamically allocated across the globe, we do not have any hard coded servers for TIDAL set either in Mosaic or in our streamers themselves, that would simply not work at all for a device that is sold globally (or even for a device that is only sold in a single territory as servers change very frequently).

We do have a lot (in the order of thousands) of units out there in China and Hong Kong and we aren’t seeing any similar issues being reported back from there over the last six months (I just had a quick check and only went back six months as I’m on a fairly slow VPN connection to the office at the moment) so it must be an isolated instance where the server being allocated to us is just getting poor bandwidth via your ISP and hopefully that will resolve (DNS pun intended) itself.

Best Regards

Phil

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