[dxBrian]

   
Tidal/Spotify offline playback has been discussed many times in this thread, without clear answers. Neither Tidal nor Spotify support offline tracks on remote storage. Therefore it is not possible to use the SDXC card on the Poly for offline storage – you'll need to save offline tracks locally on the phone. The next question is how to play an offline track and send the audio stream to Poly. For iOS, it appears that it might be possible by using Poly as an AirPlay device. For Android it is not so clear, but there are AirPlay emulator apps that might work. All of this has been speculation by thread participants, and Chord has not stepped in with answers.

Thanks, I read through the thread but never saw the part about no support for remote storage.
 
And that puts me and a lot of people out of the Poly.  To me, it is useless if I can't play TIDAL lossless files on the SDXC card.  It would be much easier to leave the Mojo attached to the phone. But I have a Google Nexus 5X, which doesn't have a card slot, so that option doesn't work for me either.  
 
So now I need to decide if I resurrect an old phone (if I can find one), or buy a new one, to plug in to the Mojo,  OR buy a standalone DAP.

 

[Tom Blake]

  Thanks, I read through the thread but never saw the part about no support for remote storage.
 
And that puts me and a lot of people out of the Poly.  To me, it is useless if I can't play TIDAL lossless files on the SDXC card.  It would be much easier to leave the Mojo attached to the phone. But I have a Google Nexus 5X, which doesn't have a card slot, so that option doesn't work for me either.  
 
So now I need to decide if I resurrect an old phone (if I can find one), or buy a new one, to plug in to the Mojo,  OR buy a standalone DAP.

+1!
 
If the Poly can't play offline Tidal content on the SDXC card it is a nonstarter with me. I will just use my FiiO X5-III DAP for half the cost. I can't buy the Poly until this functionality is proven.

 

[rkw]

  And that puts me and a lot of people out of the Poly.  To me, it is useless if I can't play TIDAL lossless files on the SDXC card.  It would be much easier to leave the Mojo attached to the phone.

 
If the Poly can't play offline Tidal content on the SDXC card it is a nonstarter with me. I will just use my FiiO X5-III DAP for half the cost. I can't buy the Poly until this functionality is proven.

 
I suspect that there may be a licensing issue. The music labels probably don't allow Tidal or Spotify to store offline tracks separately from the app. From the music labels' standpoint, if you're going to do that, then they want you to buy the music (as you would for a FiiO DAP). The music industry imposes a lot of licensing rules, and a restriction like this would not be unusual at all.

 

[Tom Blake]

   
I suspect that there may be a licensing issue. The music labels probably don't allow Tidal or Spotify to store offline tracks separately from the app. From the music labels' standpoint, if you're going to do that, then they want you to buy the music (as you would for a FiiO DAP). The music industry imposes a lot of licensing rules, and a restriction like this would not be unusual at all.

True! The FiiO X5-III does run Android though so it can run the native TIDAL app. I have about 100 GB of offline TIDAL content stored on it and the FiiO is authorized as one of the mobile devices on my TIDAL account. Works perfectly. If Poly can play offline TIDAL content stored on my iPhone via AirPlay I could live with that as a workaround. I don't have much space on my iPhone though and would really prefer to store the content on an SDXC card. The FiiO also has the advantage of having 2 SDXC card slots and being half the price of the Poly.

 

[Zojokkeli]

Thanks, I read through the thread but never saw the part about no support for remote storage.

And that puts me and a lot of people out of the Poly.  To me, it is useless if I can't play TIDAL lossless files on the SDXC card.  It would be much easier to leave the Mojo attached to the phone. But I have a Google Nexus 5X, which doesn't have a card slot, so that option doesn't work for me either.  

So now I need to decide if I resurrect an old phone (if I can find one), or buy a new one, to plug in to the Mojo,  OR buy a standalone DAP.

The upcoming Nokia phones are supposed to have pure android, memory cars slots and reasonable price. They are what I'm looking at as a potential replacement for my Nexus 5X.

 

[mathi8vadhanan]

 

  Thanks, I read through the thread but never saw the part about no support for remote storage.
 
And that puts me and a lot of people out of the Poly.  To me, it is useless if I can't play TIDAL lossless files on the SDXC card.  It would be much easier to leave the Mojo attached to the phone. But I have a Google Nexus 5X, which doesn't have a card slot, so that option doesn't work for me either.  
 
So now I need to decide if I resurrect an old phone (if I can find one), or buy a new one, to plug in to the Mojo,  OR buy a standalone DAP.

+1!
 
If the Poly can't play offline Tidal content on the SDXC card it is a nonstarter with me. I will just use my FiiO X5-III DAP for half the cost. I can't buy the Poly until this functionality is proven.

It's not as much as poly can't play offline Tidal,than Tidal will not allow caching of offline content to external mounted storage devices (In this case SDXC on Poly).

 

[audi0nick128]

This is me just speculating, but maybe it will be possible to have a Tidal plug in running on Poly itself.

This would solve all issues IMHO...so fingers crossed... but I am confident that Chord will come up with a neat solution.

Cheers

 

[rkw]

  It's not as much as poly can't play offline Tidal,than Tidal will not allow caching of offline content to external mounted storage devices (In this case SDXC on Poly).

 
As I posted earlier, Tidal and Spotify probably don't have a choice. The music labels probably don't allow it under their licensing agreements.

 

[dxBrian]

I thought up a possible solution if there is a clock/calendar in the POLY, but it would require a some programming by TIDAL/Spotify and a little work by the Poly owner.
 
TIDAL/Spotify would need to put a current date tag with an expiration date 30 days later on the SDXC card when it is installed in a compatible device.  then the user would need to cycle his SDXC cards through the compatible device every 30 days in order to keep playing the file contents.

 

[GoSUV]

John, (or anyone who could answer me)
 
Does the Poly support the iPod Touch, the 6th gen (latest) where it is expected to use AirPlay over wifi, since it does not have LTE/3G capabilities? Is this going to work outside where I won't have my home or office wifi available?
 
Thanks in advance.

 

[Mojo ideas]

It's not as much as poly can't play offline Tidal,than Tidal will not allow caching of offline content to external mounted storage devices (In this case SDXC on Poly).

As you many of you know I'm John F from Chord regarding the last few postings I've had to take a view from others in our team as frankly I didn't know though we are taking further advise from our advanced software writers so the answer we can give is that as far as we can currently tell.
On the iPhone version of Tidal it is not possible to choose where you store the music so it will always be stored on the internal memory on the phone.

On Android phones it seems it is possible to store the music on a memory card in the phone but you have to make sure Tidal / spotify are linked to the SD card.

As far as I am aware it is not possible to store Tidal or spotify music on a remote storage device like Poly then play. I don't think the apps have the ability to access music from anywhere other than local storage inside the phone.

Certainly as far as I can see on the iPhone it is not possible but on Android phones it might be possible if Our Writers can write the code to share access to the SD card and then find a way to get Tidal/spotify to access it. I don't believe it is a trivial task though unfortunately.

We also believe there may be a licensing and music rights management issue that stops music being shared around different storage devices so you can't take a memory card from one
device and play it in another.

However we would have expected Poly users our customers to keep this tidal music on their phones and then stream it directly to Poly using Airplay or Google Cast. This would not infringe any rights issues

I'm sorry that I hadnt been able to give the news some of you wanted to hear Further to these issues we will try to find out more but as far as I can see at the moment the answer is no it is not possible to hold stored tidal music directly on Poly though it can be easily played through Poly

 

[RobinTim]

As you many of you know I'm John F from Chord regarding the last few postings I've had to take a view from others in our team as frankly I didn't know though we are taking further advise from our advanced software writers so the answer we can give is that as far as we can currently tell.
On the iPhone version of Tidal it is not possible to choose where you store the music so it will always be stored on the internal memory on the phone.

On Android phones it seems it is possible to store the music on a memory card in the phone but you have to make sure Tidal / spotify are linked to the SD card.

As far as I am aware it is not possible to store Tidal or spotify music on a remote storage device like Poly then play. I don't think the apps have the ability to access music from anywhere other than local storage inside the phone.

Certainly as far as I can see on the iPhone it is not possible but on Android phones it might be possible if Our Writers can write the code to share access to the SD card and then find a way to get Tidal/spotify to access it. I don't believe it is a trivial task though unfortunately.

We also believe there may be a licensing and music rights management issue that stops music being shared around different storage devices so you can't take a memory card from one
device and play it in another.

However we would have expected Poly users our customers to keep this tidal music on their phones and then stream it directly to Poly using Airplay or Google Cast. This would not infringe any rights issues

I'm sorry that I hadnt been able to give the news some of you wanted to hear Further to these issues we will try to find out more but as far as I can see at the moment the answer is no it is not possible to hold stored tidal music directly on Poly though it can be easily played through Poly

 
Oh, ok. Thanks for the honest update. I think I will personally then look into getting a portable music player rather then the poly. But it sucks to be missing out on the Mojo Magic while traveling -.-

 

[Peter Hyatt]

I know its not a perfect plan but here is ours:
 
We intend to continue with Tidal but to load up the SD card for offline playing via Poly.  We'll let Poly stream Tidal when we are home, but use Poly's SD card on the road.  
 
Meanwhile we continue to build up the iTunes library, ripping CDs, in preparation for Poly's SD card.   

 

[ryanfu]

After reading some of the latest posts, I have a couple of thoughts.  I don't mean any disrespect, and I truly believe 'to each his own.'
 
As a rule, I don't expect to do whatever I want with DRM protected music.  When you sign up for a Tidal subscription, you are told outright that download content can only be accessed through the apps.  This has nothing to do with Chord, and really nothing to do with Tidal--its the terms of Tidal's licensing agreements with music providers.  I think that Mr. Hyatt has the best and only 'solution.'  It is possible, but I seriously doubt that there is anything Chord could do to make cached content from Tidal available on the poly's SD card without violating both Tidal's terms, and the law.  Even so, they could yet pull a rabbit from a hat.
 
Tidal and Mojo as a pair only work to a point anyway.  Of course the Mojo will work great with Tidal's Redbook audio; but if you wish to listen to MQA audio, then you need a different DAC.  Basically, the Mojo can't make the best of Tidal no matter what transport you use for it.  I know I am about to light the flame of ire in many audiophiles, but if Redbook is the best you can hope for anyway, why not just use AptX, Airplay, or Google Cast to stream downloaded Tidal content to the Poly?
 
I will confess that I have been a long-time Qobuz user, occasionally testing Tidal and always coming back to Qobuz.  Now that Tidal seems to have committed to MQA as its hi-res streaming option, I am definitely sticking with Qobuz who is opting for PCM hi-res streaming.  I don't necessarily have anything against MQA as an audio format, but knowing that as it is proprietary, there just won't be a proliferation of DACs that can play it back.

 

[paulgc]

Looks like July now   http://www.chordelectronics.co.uk/poly-wireless-streamingsd-module-launch-update/ 
 
"...The software development work has, inevitably, added some unavoidable production delays as we increase the scope of the device and we are now expecting production to begin (fully) in July. We want to thank you for your patience while we make Poly an even more compelling device in the run up to its summer launch."
 

UPDATE: Just canceled my preorder (prepaid) but will reorder when it is actually seen in the wild.