Tidal Playback - Losing Connection

[rossnagel]

Hi there - I hope this hasn't been discussed and is in the correct forum. But here's my issue with Tidal playback. Last night was one of those moments. I open Tidal, start playing a streaming album, and choose Tidal Connect to connect to the WiiM Ultra. Thirty minutes of uninterrupted glorious music - I did not touch any device connected to Tidal or WiiM. After the album concludes, I pick up my phone to change albums and play something new. Logically, since playback started on Tidal, I would change there. I go to stop the music and the music is suddenly not playing on Tidal. It's playing on the WiiM interface. To stop the music, I had to stop it on the WiiM and then restart Tidal to get it to reconnect with Tidal Connect.

This is most certainly a first-world problem, but it is super annoying and just doesn't make sense. This seems to happen after a prolonged period of noninteraction. In other words, if I routinely skip through a playlist, it stays on Tidal, but if I allow Tidal to play for an extended period, user control moves over to the WiiM but stops on Tidal.

Footnote - I remember this being an issue with my WiiM Pro Plus and switching over to Amazon Music, and the issue was not present. For reasons too lengthy to discuss, I upgraded to the WiiM Ultra and moved over to Tidal to remember why I suddenly switched over to Tidal.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

 

[Burnside]

This seems logical to me to an degree and I think was discussed recently in another post.

When you start a Tidal Connect session, you’re telling Tidal not to play the stream back to your phone, but to direct it to another device I.e. your WiiM and your tidal app then takes on a remote control role. The WiiM app is merely reflecting what’s being played on that WiiM device at that point. You can even turn off your phone running the Tidal app and the stream will continue playing on your WiiM, and will allow the WiiM app to control the stream. After some time, the Tidal app seems to time out its remote control role to perhaps allow you to use the Tidal app offline without interrupting that first stream. I would have thought however that the Tidal app should allow you to re-connect to that first connect stream without rebooting.

I’m sure I’ve seen similar behaviour with Amazon Music.

 

[rossnagel]

Thanks @Burnside
While likely not apples to oranges, I suspect that my desire is for the playback to operate as it does - say - in CarPlay or connected via Bluetooth. Again, not an ideal comp as someone will quickly point out the massive difference and mechanisms of "Connect" and the "move" to the WiiM, but from a UI perspective, this is how I suspect users would expect playback to occur. Is is logical from a Connect perspective, perhaps, but that doesn't mean it's logical from a UI perspective. Anything that summarily moves the playback to another device is not intuitive, most especially since the user is not notified that playback is no longer controlled on the original point of contact/interface.

I will double-check to see if this is a Tidal issue, as I remember it not being an issue on Amazon. If that's the case, it is most certainly a bug that can be fixed. Again, not certain of it "working correctly" on Amazon, but I will investigate.

And, as a point of clarification - I cannot remember if I needed to restart Tidal. I suspect I did that out of habit and not out of necessity.

 

[Burnside]

To be fair, my experience of Amazon Music might well be clouded by having the family subscription which allows up to six streams across one or more accounts, so relinquishing control from one AlexaCast “connect” session to allow you to start another makes more sense there.

 

[Mr Ee]

I've experienced similar a few times, and it seems to be a tidal / network issue.
Sometimes I can just use the cast icon in the tidal app to reconnect to the wiim; sometimes the wiim only shows as a chromecast device, not a connect device, and a restart of the tidal app or the tablet itself makes it work normally again.

I can't say I've noticed any pattern such as your example of skipping tracks vs leaving it to play.