I'm getting extremely pissed off with the load times while trying to play music from the SD Card (offline use).

Each new album or song stored makes load time longer and longer. Now takes in the order to 8 to 10 minutes to start playing something. I've got a 512Gb card with read speeds of 180mbps/s (18MBps) on a DAP (ZX-707).

Those longer in the scene, how would you rate Apple Music over Tidal on HiRes audio? ALAC vs FLACs or MQA flacs from Tidal?

Load times from SD are same painful slow? Or Apple did it right?

Thx!

-- EDIT

Thank you all

Wrote to Tidal support and this is what they said:

"Thank you for your patience while we investigated the issue you’re experiencing with SD cards.

Our initial research indicates that this issue is correlated with hardware performance. If an SD card or device is not performant enough, this will cause the direct service provider (DSP) to underperform. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence across many DSPs, including TIDAL.

Because this issue can occur on nearly any device or SD card, we don't have preferred devices or SD cards we can confidently recommend. We suggest storing downloaded content on your device's internal storage as a workaround solution. Our engineering team is committed to learning what solutions are available to help improve this experience.

We appreciate your understanding."

So.. some facts, I wrote them back (worded slightly different):

• The SD Card is top notch, no issues there definitely (benchmarked)

• The DAP's (ZX-707) chipset and SD reader indeed is slower than the benchmark on my computer's SD reader, but averages 18.8MB/s (bytes, not bits) on the DAP, which is enough to read a song in less than a second or a 1 minute FLAC 24bit/196Khz (42Mb) in around 2 secs..

• ZERO issues with Apple Music (testing now) or Spotify or Loading HUGE DSDs from the SD almost instantly.

I'll cancel my subscription if their tech support answers me more B.S., because to me that indicates lack of transparency and honesty... of course also not a clear timeline to fix or at least address it (since it's known from 2019) and only them and Qobuz are known to have this issue (buggy or badly designed DRM).

-- EDIT 2:

As expected, vague answers... so cancelling it (Trial period was ongoing, so I'm not going sign for it)

So far excellent performance with Apple, over 7000 offline songs and behaving perfectly ✌️