The Spotify rival touts better sound quality and bigger royalty cheques for artists, but it doesn’t provide a desktop Tidal music app for Linux.
There is an official web player, as well as official Tidal apps for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS.
But Linux users have no dedicated app they can download, install and stream music to.
Enter Tidal CLI Client.
Tidal CLI is a Tidal App for Linux
Tidal CLI Client is (as you will have guessed by now) a command-line Tidal app for Linux. It lets you connect to and stream music from Tidal direct to your Linux desktop.
Using the tool you can search through the 48.5 million tracks available on Tidal and quickly stream or queue albums and songs to play.
If you’ve been looking for a way to play Tidal hifi music on Linux without the need to use an additional music player app like Tomahawk or MPD, this is as good as it gets right now.
Once logged in you can search for songs by track name or browse tracks by a specific artist. You can use your arrow keys to skip through search results (and hit enter to play something right away). Hit the ‘n’ key on a selected track to add to your playback queue.
The app is terminal based but it does what it needs to, namely let you listen to Tidal on Linux.
Drawbacks
Unlike Spotify there’s no free Tidal tier. A Tidal subscription costs $9.99/month for standard (lossy) AAC audio, and $19.99 for high-fidelity (lossless) audio.
The Tidal CLI Client is not the easiest app to install (it failed for me) but as I do not have a Tidal account to test this app with anyway, I haven’t looked into why it failed.
I imagine that those of you more proficient with NPM won’t have too much issue getting it up and running (just make sure you have MPV installed before hand).
For more details check out Tidal CLI Client on Github.