High Tide, a GTK4/libadawaita app for music streaming service Tidal, has been updated with a bunch of fixes and minor new features.
It’s also seen a major version bump, jumping from v0.1.8 to v1.0.0. Given the amount of churn between those two versions, such a leap seems fitting.
App responsiveness has been improved in High Tide v1.0 through a variety of cache tweaks, reworked page loading, and assorted code cleanups, unused function removals, improvements to some of the widget APIs that are used to fetch content.
The net result of all of that work isn’t obvious at a glance, but it should be something you’ll feel in usage, especially on startup, when making use of the Explore page, paging through in-app carousels, and moving in and out of albums and playlists (those are now cached)
There are changes you may hear though, as High Tide v1.0.0 now applies track replay gain if album gain is missing, and a fallback replay gain has been added. This should help prevent startling spikes in volume when one track is louder than another.
Long-awaited support for gapless playback is now available, but it is currently disabled if using the Pipewire audio sink (which got added in the last update) due to a bug. Set audio to ‘Automatic’ to try out gapless playback, if you want to.
Beyond that, this update adds support for home page shortcuts, fixes bugs, and benefits from a flurry of smaller changes ranging from string and translations tweaks to underlying API bumps, and so on.
Worth using? If you’re a Tidal subscriber (or as I am, part of a family plan so get access for free), High Tide is without peers.
Sure, the official Tidal web app works in most browsers (and an unofficial web app wrapper for Linux exists), but nothing beats a first-class native experience, with tight desktop integration. It also uses official Tidal APIs and proper browser-based authentication.
High Tide is free, open-source software but it does require a Tidal account to use.
You can get High Tide on Flathub.