CloudPlayer vs TIDAL
When comparing CloudPlayer vs TIDAL, the Slant community recommends TIDAL for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for Android?” TIDAL is ranked 17th while CloudPlayer is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose TIDAL is:
The Tidal music streaming service has a maximum streaming quality of 1,411Kbps bit rate with FLAC-formatted lossless files. This is quite an upgrade compared to most music streaming services, which go at about 320Kbps bit rate.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Elegant interface
The app has a clean material design UI that doesn't get in the way. It focuses on album art to make it vibrant and throws in small touches throughout that highlight the attention to detail. For example, the color of the name of the artist and title of the album matches the color of album art, etc.
Pro Supports lossless .flac playback.
Pro Supports a custom lock screen.
Pro AllPlay and Chromecast support
Premium version of the app allows you to cast to AllPlay and Chromecast devices.
Pro Protects you from accidentally using cellular data
The app has a setting that when turned on will prevent it from using cellular data so you can rest assured that you won't accidentally rack up a phone bill even if your Wi-Fi drops out.
Pro 10 band EQ
Premium version of the app has a 10 band EQ with 17 presets and PreAmp.
Pro Android Wear support
Pro Can sync playlists across devices
Pro Android Auto support
Pro Amazing quality
The Tidal music streaming service has a maximum streaming quality of 1,411Kbps bit rate with FLAC-formatted lossless files. This is quite an upgrade compared to most music streaming services, which go at about 320Kbps bit rate.
Pro Pays artists more
As of March 2018, TIDAL pays the artists 2/3 more than Apple Music and 3 times more than Spotify, for an equivalent catalog and subscription price. (40M songs on TIDAL and Apple Music vs. 30M on Spotify, $9.99/mo for all 3). Napster is the only service that pays the artists more than TIDAL.
Pro Discounted student subscription
Tidal offers a 50% discount on monthly subscriptions for students with a valid university email account.
Pro Awsome desktop app
Pro Built-in audio search
The Tidal music streaming service mobile app has a built-in audio search, similar to Shazaam and Soundhound.
Pro Military/veteran discount a BIG plus
Pro Get one-month free Hi-Fi (FLAC, 24-bit music)
Almost all if not most songs are 24-bit FLAC files, "Master" is an ever higher quality
Cons
Con No gapless playback
Con No crossfade
Con Cloud storage streaming is a premium feature
The killer feature of CloudPlayer is not available in the free version of the app.
Con Initial indexing can take some time
First time you start the app and connect it to you cloud storage account it will index all local and online music, pull metadata, album art, etc. At a rate of about 2-3 seconds per song the process can easily take a good while.
Con Songs may take some time to load
the Tidal music streaming service may take up to 10 seconds of buffering to load and play a song, sometimes even stopping a song mid-way to buffer.
Con No free tier
The Tidal music streaming service has no free tier available. Only a 7-day trial. While the trial is helpful for learning what the service has to offer, it may not allow for a complete picture due to the time limit.