vibe

vibe

Cross-platform command line Tidal music streaming service client

Motivation

• Audio quality:
  • web-based Tidal clients might suffer from suboptimal audio mixing / resampling in the browsers (see, e.g, this chromecast review);
  • official Windows desktop app might produce choppy sound or adjust volume erratically;
  • headless operation.
• Lightweight on resources:
  • clients for big media projects, e.g., Kodi, require lots of dependencies;
  • web and electron based clients require significant amounts of RAM and CPU time;

Note to the users

vibe is still under development and is subject to dramatic changes without prior notice.

Prerequisites

• ffmpeg
• sox

Regarding MQA

vibe can decode and render MQA streams using mqa's mqadec and mqarender binaries. It is user's responsibility to make sure those are accessible either via PATH (if using --mqa-mode=host flag) or via localhost/mqa container (using either --mqa-mode=podman or --mqa-mode=docker flags).

Installation

go get -u github.com/godsic/vibe

Authentication

vibe supports two authentication methods:

• (default) OAuth2 authentication via a web browser. It requires user to copy-paste code from the address bar back to the input field in the terminal. This is still work-in-progress and might eventually be fully automated with the likes of selenium or chromedp.
• --legacy-login would trigger single factor authentification in case OAuth2 is absolutely not possible. It would likely be disabled by Tidal in the future.

On successful login, vibe saves ~/.vibe/config/session.json file and will reuse it for authomatic login. If one needs to use vibe on a headless machine, then it is advised to perform OAuth2 authentication elsewhere and then copy session.json file to the headless client.

MQA encoded streams can only be accessed via OAuth2 authentication.

Audio quality

The main feature of vibe is absolute loudness normalization to avoid hearing damage.

By taking into account properies of the audio equipment, e.g., output voltages, gains, impedences and sensitivies, vibe can play music at requested absolute SPL (set via --loudness= flag, 75 dbC by default).

vibe resamples audio internally to the sample rate that offers the highest SINAD of the given DAC.

vibe maintains database of audio hardware and prompts users to specify their audio chain on first run. It is very limited at the moment and user contributions to the hardware database are very welcome.

Usage

Play favorite tracks

vibe

Shuffle favorite tracks

vibe --shuffle

Override default playback loudness of 75 dbC

vibe --loudness 85

Bypass PulseAudio on Linux

pasuspender -- vibe

For less common flags see

vibe --help