A new version of High Tide, an unofficial TIDAL music streaming app for Linux built with GTK4/libdwaita, is out.
Hight Tide 1.6.0 plumbs in support more features found in the paid streaming service’s official clients, including the ability to block artists and tracks for appearing in playlists or auto-play queues, with a new preferences panel to see and manage your blocks.
TIDAL recently added an option to block AI music wholesale. There’s no user-facing setting for that in High Tide, but one is in the works and should land in a future update.
Play buttons are now shown on covers on the main page, mirroring the official clients. These buttons mean you can start playing an album or playlist from the home page directly, without needing to click through and then hit play.
At long last – edit playlists
Playlists can now be created and editing through High Tide. Previous versions of the player did allow new tracks to be added to existing playlists, but it wasn’t possible to create, edit or delete them, nor remove tracks. Good to see this land.
You’ll now see chips next to album titles indicating when an album is explicit, offers Dolby Atmos, Hi-Res or Lossless. In Settings, there’s also an option to always play the ‘clean’ version of an album/track, where available.
New album credits (rear) and My Activity pages (front)
A new My Activity page has been added. This shows the most played artists of each month (separate from the monthly most-played playlists TIDAL itself creates). And you can now view album info and track credits pages too.
Other highlights in High Tide 1.6.0:
- Now playing highlight in album rows uses system accent colour
- See all shows whole collection, not just the first 1000 items
- Favourites can be sorted by Recently Added
- Option to keep the computer awake during music playback
Plenty of bug fixes are onboard, including playback issues when resuming after a long pause, saved tracks not playing offline and, on occasion, the the wrong song showing after switching albums.
High Tide is on Flathub
As this is not a standalone music player, High Tide is only useful if you subscribe to TIDAL (as I do, albeit via a family plan that gives me access for free). TIDAL does not offer a free, ad-supported plan.
TIDAL doesn’t provide an official Linux desktop app, thought the official web app works in most browsers (for which an unofficial desktop wrapper exists). But nothing beats a solid, native desktop player.
Though unofficial and not endorsed by TIDAL itself, High Tide uses Tidal APIs and proper browser-based authentication. It’s free, open-source software written in Python with a GTK4/libadwaita UI.
Get High Tide on Flathub.
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