Not intending to be alarmist, but wanted to highlight to others as changes are imminent.
A couple of reasons for me to flag I suppose:
1 - Timescale is short so if you haven’t downloaded all purchases, get your skates on just in case!
2 - Some purchases were huge (eg Maria Callas collection) and the old tar format downloads sometimes timed out with larger tar files. People may have incompletely downloaded large collections if done manually as that used to be fiddly (the Qobuz desktop app is ideal for this but you can’t select the format)
3 - Not uncommon for some of us to buy large numbers of titles during their sales, perhaps not downloading all immediately - the standalone downloader app has improved but is still a bit of a faff.
4 - Fragmented download collections on older drives - I saved downloads on a WD NAS to use with the Nova but it became a security risk so no longer use it, and the files there will be incomplete. I have numerous copies of downloads on various hard drives, but again few of these are ‘complete’ either due to space issues or it just being a complete faff (my choice) when changing computers or attached external media.
5 - Different formats/fidelity - originally I used to download both FLAC and ALAC hi-res. Probably never convinced of any major difference on the Nova so now mainly get FLAC. Some may have downloaded hi-res FLAC but would also like another format and maybe lower fidelity for portable devices/car use.
Downloading is the purchaser’s responsibility at the end of the day and I’m thankful Qobuz have warned of changes. I don’t have 100% confidence though that their warning system is perfect, especially when two of us purchased an album but only 1 has had a warning.
Other things:
1 - Hard to know what’s going to disappear on Oct 1st - purchases you might have been considering making from the same artist but hadn’t might be removed from the download/streaming catalogue so if there were any ‘important’ ones might be best to buy now. To me Qobuz has given the best options for hi-res purchases for many years depending on the genres - it may not be possible to obtain hi-res for some titles elsewhere if an artists back-catalogue cannot be purchased on Qobuz.
2 - Still unsure if the items we were warned about will be available to stream in Qobuz in the future or perhaps still available to stream and purchase but due to a slightly different catalogue descriptor the older purchase would no longer match for re-download purposes.
3 - Something else I’d forgotten and probably equally unexciting.
4 - I’m a bit OCD about things like this which might not bother anyone else.
BW
AC
