This Tutorial describes how to use Tidal from within XXHighEnd; It will present some general work flows and best usage scenarios.
Disclaimer :Everybody is strongly advised to use Tidal on a separate partition (a Volume where nothing else resides). Why ?
Well, you will be a kind of forced to use functionalities which have been in XXHighEnd for many years, but which you most probably never used. You will imply deletes of physical files via XXHighEnd and it is not easy to make mistakes and delete files (albums) you rather kept. Besides that, this is human made software and humans make mistakes;
When you have all on a separate Partition (= Volume with its own Drive Letter) all you can destroy accidentally is stuff from Tidal - which is there to be recreated (Tidal itself is your backup).
GeneralThe general procedure in XXHighEnd v2.03 is :
- Search for the Albums of an Artist;
- Optionally look which tracks are contained in the Album and view general data;
- Prepare the Album for Streaming (read : download it);
- Optionally do this for more Albums of the Artist or for more Artists at the same time;
- Play an Album (or tracks of it, or put more than one in the Playlist Area).
Notice that once an Album has been prepared for streaming, in XXHighEnd you won't be able to see the difference with your other albums anywhere, except for this :
See the mouse pointer; this one is from Tidal and the folder structure has a deepest folder of "\Streams" which the other one has not (don't look at the different type of naming which is unrelated).
Before any of this can be done, we must log in to Tidal via XXHighEnd.
Login to TidalLogging in to Tidal needs to happen once only per XXHighEnd install. There will be a question about it automatically when it is required to login. It looks like this :
When you subscribed to Tidal, the above should look familiar to you and you will be able to provide the required data.
Thus, only when XXHighEnd is newly installed, you are asked to log in again.
When something is wrong with the login data, further down the line (during the attempt to use Tidal - see below) you will see this :
Watch out : The Tidal functionality is bonded to the 2.xx License for XXHighEnd; when XXHighEnd is in Demo Mode, the message you see above will always appear when you attempt to use Tidal.
PreparationBefore we can use Tidal from within XXHighEnd, we must appoint space (folders) for where certain data is to be stored.
Above the mouse pointer, you see from top to bottom :
- Intermediate Files Folder
This folder is not new to XXHighEnd, but you may never have used it. Now, we are going to use it to store data which can be scratched at any time. It is for "play ground" - a sand box.
- Streaming Files Folder
Here the files will be stored to play. Create it on a drive where suffcient space is available to store as many Albums as you prepare for playback without deleting others.
Yes, this is cryptical. But reserve 100GB or so.
- Streaming Files Gallery
Use this only when you are used to using Galleries in the first place.
The general idea about this Gallery is this :
When you prepare Albums for playback, but don't play them right away (can be next week etc.) you may loose track of which Albums you actually prepared;
While you can always ask for the physical contents of this folder like any other one it requires an activity (by you) while all can be integrated more seemlessly. For example, when you prepared an Album from Adele (from SkyFall), then later you may look for this album by means of Searching for Adele, from your main Music Gallery (!) Root. However, the Adele album will only be found from there (in there) when it has been obtained in a Gallery "somewhere" (and this Gallery is a sub Gallery of the main Music Root (Gallery).
What thus happens when you filled in a Gallery folder in this field, is that the Prepared Album will be obtained automatically in that Gallery folder.
Lastly notice that this is somewhat related to preparing a dozen albums at the same time and the explicit attention it takes otherwise to put them into a Gallery "somewhere".
When this has been set, we must visit another field in Settings you may have never used :
It is also in the Data Locations section, close to the bottom;
It is a "mask" for how the Albums are going to look like for folder structure. More below you will see by the examples that exactly this, what you see here, is used.
Search for the Albums of an ArtistWhen you are familiar to XXHighEnd and using its Library Area, nothing is more easy than looking for the Albums of an Artist. However, you need to know about this :
This is the Search button at the bottom of the Library Area and when you RightClick it this menu appears. After making a choice it resembles the three different captions on the Search Button you see here :
Now let's assume you chose "TidalTemp" and thus now the rightmost version of the caption appears;
Whatever you do from now on, will appear in the Streaming Files Folder; see above, but aso see below :
See the caption on the Search Button ? And see the bottom field which now shows my Intermediate Files folder ? ... The \Tidal\ you see behind it was automatically added, thinking that in the future more Streaming Services may be supported (and the \Tidal\ part replaces qithe \Qobuz\ to name something).
Well, here you see that "Madness" was put to the Search field and after clicking the Search button, within a second the result as it is available on Tidal appears.
This can not be played yet.
Observe the Tracks of Albums (optional)Side note and
watch out : what you see happening is this paragraph is not related to playing an album; this can only be done per the description of the paragraph
Prepare an Album, way more below.
Suppose we don't trust the latter two visible; what would they be about ?
I selected them both, and after Clear(ing the Playlist Area) I click Load. This now shows in the Playlist Area :
And I say : never mind these;
Side note :
Again watch out : It looks like if we now can play above tracks, but this is not the case yet because we did not "Prepare" the Streams of it. When we attempt this anyway, this will be thrown at us :
Continuing ... Back in the Library Area I select them both again :
with the notice that now they have green borders because the Track Meta Data has been downloaded and ...
Richtclick brings me the Menu and you can see the followed path to delete those Albums from my sand box.
Now
watch out please :
A function like this "delete" function, never refreshes the Library Area instantly. Look :
I already deleted them, but they are still there.
To see the actual result in the Tidal sand box, I must re-Search, which I attempt in the above picture, and while (always) this message pops up I now answer to search "Internally or otherwise the two just deleted Albums will right away be back again. So I press No there.
Now the two show really gone.
Meanwhile you may revisit above pictures and look in the left hand side of them, where you will see the Embedded Explorer also showing what's on disk (you could look via Normal Explorer as well, if needed).
Download Coverart (optional)When a Search is applied like we just did above, fairly small pictures are downloaded - sufficiently large to show you what it is about. However, you may like to see a more detailed picture, or ... you may even like to download a picture for the album you already own but don't have (scanned) a picture from. Now let's see :
First I enlarged the picture size in the Library Area, which is totally unrelated biut will show (you) the size of the Coverart as how it is currently (which is 160x160 pixels).
The larger black borders show that the picture itself just is not larger than you see it.
The first one I select and apply RightClick to it, and follow the menu as you see it. I click the Get Coverart option;
When that's done it shows like this :
Now we could act9vate the "Show Data" at the bottom (see at the mouse pointer) to that the data stored to the Album (folder) shows in the right panel :
where I selected the Front.jpg file and applied RightClick.
Side note : nothing new here and only showing how the Tidal result integrates with the existing XXHighEnd functionality. Do notice though that the Front.jpg is the same file name you would name your Front Coverart. So that is ready to use now, or ... copy to that album you already owned.
This one also has a normalized size for Front Coverart :
Prepare an Album for PlaybackNotice : Without this step we can not play the album yet.
Right click on an Album like we did before, but now choose the Prepare Streams choice :
Looks easy enough. However, in this very example, this is the result :
The borders have become yellow of this Album (which is a single), there's a file in the folder now named TidalAlbumErr.tst and its content tells about a Format Error (btw no need to look in such a file because it will always show what you see here).
What happened here is a quirk from Tidal : It told in advance that it would be a CD quality Album, but it really is not;
Sadly we can only learn this when we attempt to Prepare it for Streaming.
So we are going to try others.
First though, I am going to investigate what I all have from Madness.
What I do is RightClick the Search Button and choose Local; Automatically this appears from my Main Gallery Root (actually is it the Music Root as denoted in Settings (Data Locations) :
Seen it ? then I again RightClick the Search Button and hop back to the sand box area; now again automatically shows what I had in there previously.
Let's continue :
So I selected these as my final choice for Preparation. Sadly, I see soon 3 Yellow borders pop up and the next Album showing Purple borders. Aha, that's Preparing in good fashion.
Note : The last one, Green, shows that its Track Meta Data has been downloaded, which always happens first at Preparing.
Also watch the two yellow activity leds in the top border of the XXHighEnd screen; it means that Preparation is in progress (the circle mouse pointer shows this too). When the Preparation process has finished, the leds will be off and the mouse pointer will have returned to normal.
When an Album has been fully prepared, it looks like this :
So with Red borders (this is a bit hard to see because the Red borders are thin).
Meanwhile the next one automatically went Purple, meaning that it will be fine (in the end).
Summarized :
All what is normally Red-bordered is completely Prepared for Playback. Do notice that the Prepare Streams option (obviously) also downloads the Track Meta Data (which you can perform as a separate option, as we have seen) and that this also downloads the larger usable Front Coverart (also available as a separate option - we've seen that too).
Btw, there is only Front Coverart available in Tidal.
PlayC'mon. You know how to do that; if you only pick a Red bordered Item from the Library Area.
Purple can be chosen too, but it will load only those tracks to the Playlist Area which have been Prepared.
Intermezzo about the Streaming Files area (folder).All what you have seen above, counts 100% the same for the normal (not- sand box) Streaming Files area. The difference is how you like to deal with it all, meaning that the normal Streaming Files area more meant to be a "Prepared" area, ready all over for Playback. If you look back at the Madness madness than you see that in the end you're left witgh 2 albums to play, and the remainder "destroyed". You wanted more, but it did not happen.
But where does that leave us ?
Make a neat Streaming Files FolderSo we could Prepare two albums in the sand box (Temporary) area;
Well, then let's move those to the Streaming Files area. That is, we can try them for Playback first (they will play all right but we may not like them), but let's skip that part.
Right click all we want to move to the Streaming Files area and choose what you see here :
It will be at this stage that the Album(s) are obtained in the Streaming Files Gallery.
I change the Search Button to normal Tidal :
Et voliá.
Or if I empty the Search field :
we can see that our two Madnesses are in the midst of more Prepared Albums.
That's it !
