Tidal Connect and Apple Lossless for BalenaSound?

has anyone tried to cast from Tidal to a balenaSound streaming node?
The 320 MP3 shouldn’t be a problem, but MQA…the highest resolution they offer at their highest price tier…can Balena handle it if the DAC can?
and with the changes coming shortly to apple music (and presumably AirPlay) to handle Apple’s Lossless Audio codec and Dolby Atmos…we should look at those too please.

Hello there,

balenaSound uses shariport-sync (GitHub - mikebrady/shairport-sync: AirPlay audio player. Shairport Sync adds multi-room capability with Audio Synchronisation) for AirPlay support. If/when that project introduces those changes we can get them merged upstream.

Regarding Tidal support, there is currently an ongoing PR to add support for it here: [WIP]: Tidal connect plugin by shawaj · Pull Request #399 · balenalabs/balena-sound · GitHub, maybe you can try it out.

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I will poke around on github and see if I can help in any way.
HiFiBerry says their DAC+Pro is 32bit-192kHz capable, and a Pi4-8GB shouldn’t hesitate/blink/hiccup at FLAC or Apple’s version before I put it together…
Thanks for the speedy reply!

Awesome! If you have any questions feel free to ping me ((at)tmigone) either here or on GitHub, I’m the main developer for balenaSound so I can probably help :stuck_out_tongue:

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The hifiberry people pointed me to a thread for their OS:

https://support.hifiberry.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360013667717-Tidal-Connect-

Is there anything there that could help bring it to us?

@tmigone is this now a built-in feature or do I have to build it myself?

Hey, sorry for the delay. Yeah Tidal connect is what the PR I linked uses. Development on that is halted due to the original author working on something else but I’ll see if I can get my hands on it in the near future.

Thanks :+1:t2: I would appreciate that - I wouldn’t know where to begin to build a module

Hi there @tmigone ! Do you happen to know more on the current status of this? Many thanks!

Hi @heysoundude! Have you found a way to get tidal connect to work?

I’ll dig deeper into it probably by the new year - I’m not anticipating deploying another balena sound instance until then - for now, airplay serves my purposes.

Now what I’m REALLY wanting to pull off is making balenasound AND algoriddim’s djay app talk to each other through TidalConnect…
I’ve dropped the suggestion on algoriddim’s forums as well.
From them, I’m all good with the functionalities they currently offer…now I just want both balena and them to use TidalConnect for the high resolution audio. My DAC can handle 24bit-192kHz stereo…make the software/wireless handle it too please! especially for those of us for whom latency isn’t an/the issue.

My operational requirements have changed suddenly and I need to get this functioning on a new instance. (HELP! it’s time…lol)
does this apply/work with balenasound, or is there another/better way?

Hey, @heysounddude, it’s been some time with little progress on this front. Come December I expect to have a lot more time to dedicate to balenaSound and this is high up my list. Can’t promise anything but keep an eye out for [WIP]: Tidal connect plugin by shawaj · Pull Request #399 · balenalabs/balena-sound · GitHub

The last link posted in that looks like somebody already has it worked out. Would you take a closer look at that please? (December is next week :+1:t2:)

Hey, I gave the PR a shot but ran into a few errors which i haven’t got the time to sort through just yet. I’ll be working on several balenaSound improvements during the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

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Keep me posted on when you think it should be working.

+1, popular demand, many thanks :slight_smile:

Super interested in this. Any additional progress? Thanks!

Hifiberry OS has a working implementation of Tidal Connect, if you don’t need all the multi room stuff that balena offers.

https://github.com/hifiberry/hifiberry-os

https://github.com/TonyTromp/tidal-connect-docker

I think they’re right up to speed on Apple Lossless too, but that’s shairplay, which I believe balena also relies on.

https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync