IFi Zen Stream with Qobuz

I like Qobuz better than Tidal primarily because, although they both have similar number of songs (90 millions), the Qobuz has more newer productions. For example, Qobuz has the albums of Beady Belle, the female singer I like, after 2020 but lacks the prior albums that Tidal only has. With the mid-level suscription, you get higher resolution of music up to 24/192 while Tidal entiled you up to CD quality only.

In terms of mconnect vs Audirvana, I was advised that, technically, the quality of streaming using Audirvana or mconnect is the same. The sound quality of streaming mainly depends on the quality of the (dedicated) streamer, the usb/spdif interface quality and/or internet network. iFi ZS has purified spdif and ANC on usb which suppress jitters and sounds quite nicely if not surpassing the streamers many times of its price.

As such, there is no obvious reasons using the paid Audirvana while one can be well served by the free or one time minimal charge mconnect player. At least for me ...

Following up on other options to stream Qobuz on my Ifi Zen Stream besides using M-connect. 

I have the M-Connect Player app and, while I've gotten pretty used to it, the user experience is just sub par.  It seems that Ifi x Qobuz are getting closer to working together and maybe in the future we will see some sort of "connect" feature. 

Are there any better 3rd party apps beyond M-connect that people have had success with in using with their Zen Stream?

Thanks

Jplay is the way to go. Much better user experience and sound quality than Mconnect. 14 days free trial periode, then $50 a year.

App website

Trying out JPlay now. So far it’s seems to be a pretty slick app. Search is definitely better than M-connect.

Not sure about sound quality yet.

The user experience, however, is very nice. Search yields lots of options which you can filter and further refine. I’m testing it with Qobuz now and when navigating to an artists albums, they are still displayed in a strange order, i.e. not by year, not alphabetically...but I think that is they way Qobuz orders them. I don’t love that.

The info and credits on a record are much more available and user friendly than on Qobuz via M-Connect.

I did have one weird thing happen.

Navigating to the new issue "Fragments" by Bod Dylan, I can’t play the tracks (see pic)

A red banner saying "Track is not available for stream" shows up ...However the record plays find in M-Connect.

Please report back on the sound quality of JPlay relative to mConnect.  Thx.