Deezer Review – High Resolution Audio
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Deezer
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Deezer – Deezer Free: Free ad-supported MP3 – Deezer Premium (CD/Lossless FLAC): £11.99/month or £107.91/year, 30 day free trial – Deezer Premium Family £17.99/month
Product Description: Deezer is a CD Quality, Lossless FLAC streaming service with 16 million active users, available in 185+ countries with 73 million tracks, 32,000 radio channels and 100 million playlists.
Overall
4.4
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Audio quality
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Content
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Music discovery
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Features
Summary
CD Quality Lossless FLAC streamer with extensive catalogue and good support for gaming and mobile devices. Novel approach to music discovery.
Pros
Deezer Free service
Premium plan is now lossless
Deezer Flow for music discovery
Extensive device support
Cons
No HiRes content
History
Deezer was launched in Paris in 2007 and claims 16 million active users with 7 million paid subscribers. The streaming service is available in 185+ countries and in 2015 launched its CD Quality streaming service originally branded as Deezer Elite but now incorporated into its Deezer Premium subscription plan.
Deezer Flow was introduced in 2014 offering users a unique blend of favourite tracks with recommendations inserted into playlists to encourage music discovery and enhance the user experience.
There is strong support for In Car Entertainment (ICE) systems and gaming systems such as the XboxOne as well as HiFi systems, smart TVs, smart speakers and wearables. Apps for iOS, Android, PCs and web players are also available.
In January 2019 it launched its Radio by Deezer app but this functionality has been incorporated into the main Deezer app and offers 32,000 radio stations. These are only available in 8 countries (see below).
In common with other mainstream streaming services such as Spotify, Deezer has recently partnered with five new podcast partners to increase its podcasting content. A recent addition was the US’s NPR network.
In November 2021, Deezer simplified its subscription offerings down to two – Deezer Free and Deezer Premium. It incorporated its CD Quality Deezer HiFi plan into Deezer Premium for £11.99 – an increase of £2/month on its old Premium subscription rate but a £3/month reduction for Deezer HiFi subscribers. Deezer Premium now has all the features of Deezer HiFi as part of its offering.
Services
Standard Plans
Deezer Free Free
Ad supported (No Offline Mode), Shuffle Play
Low Quality streaming 128kbps MP3
Deezer Premium
£11.99/month 1 month free trial
Deezer Premium Annual
£107.91 – a 25% discount on £143.88 (£8.99/month when paid annually)
Family Plan – includes up to 6 family members
Deezer Family £17.99/month 1 month free trial
There does not appear to be an annual discount available on a Deezer Family plan.
Student Plan
Deezer Student
£5.99/month 1 month free trial
Deezer Premium account with a 50% discount. Available to students aged 18-25 years in most countries but not all.
Availability
Deezer is available in 185+ countries – a complete list can be found here.
Audio Quality
Deezer Free – 128kpbs MP3
Deezer Premium – 44.1kHz/16bit CD Quality FLAC
Deezer also supports Sony’s new immersive audio format, 360 Reality Audio, and has produced an app which supports the 360 RA catalogue. Available in both iOS and Android versions you will need to have Deezer Premium subscription. The ability to cast this immersive format to Sony speakers was added in July 2021. A Deezer sessions 360 sampler playlist is available here.
Content
Music
73 million tracks in all genres (Pop, Rock, Classical, Jazz, World, Soundtracks etc)
Radio
With over 32,000+ radio stations to browse, users in Brazil, France, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the US can enjoy music radio and talk radio.
Podcasts
Deezer Podcasts are available to stream worldwide but downloaded episodes of podcasts are only available to paid subscribers in Austria, Brazil, Colombia, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK. This feature is not available in the US.
In 2015 Deezer said it had over 40,000 podcasts available and in June 2021 it partnered with NPR to stream its podcasts worldwide.
To coincide with International Podcast Day 2021 on the 30th September Deezer reported a huge 61% increase in audio content streams in the last year with a 40% growth of podcast active users in the same time period.
There is a Deezer originals section in the Podcasts tab which has bespoke content you won’t find anywhere else.
Audiobooks
Audiobooks on Deezer are primarily available to users in Germany, Netherlands and Austria. There is a dedicated Audiobooks by Deezer app available for iOS and Android users in Germany only. A recent addition to the app has been a smart book recognition feature which simplifies the search for an audiobook by simply photographing the book cover and ‘BookCatcher’ will start to find the book for you.
Music Discovery
Deezer’s unique selling point is Deezer Flow. This combines your favourite music with recommendations based on your streaming history to reacquaint you with tracks you may have forgotten and introduce you to new artists and tracks. Flow needs to understand your taste to provide you better recommendations; it will appear on your Music tab as soon as you’ve reached 15 favourites
Deezer introduced Flow Tabs which take features from Spotify (curated artist playlists) and Pandora (custom radio channels) and combines it with its unique Flow algorithm to provide a new way for users to discover custom content.
The usual search and playlist functions are available on all platforms.
Features
Deezer is well served for both desktop and mobile apps with Windows 10, Mac and Web players, apps for Android and iOS. HiFi kit is well supported with CD Quality available on SONOS, Bang and Olufsen, Yamaha MusicCast and MOON by Simaudio equipment. Smart Speakers such as Amazon Echo, Google Home and Samsung’s wireless range are also supported. A full list of supported devices can be found here.
Deezer can also be controlled by voice assistants on a wide range of smart speakers, TVs and sound bars. Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Assistant are supported.
There are also integrations to a wide range of in car systems which support MirrorLink, Android Auto, CarPlay and Clarion as well as manufacturer specific systems from Mini, BMW, Jeep Renegade and Fiat 500X. You can also access the Deezer player inside the Waze app.
Deezer on Chromecast
Deezer also supports all the main manufacturers of smart TVs such as the latest range of Samsung Smart TVs as well as Facebook Portal, Chromecast and Android TV. It recently added the ability to display ‘Super Size’ lyrics on Chromecast enabled TVs.
During 2018, Deezer added Unlimited Music for the Xbox One and Xbox One X allowing users to both stream music with and without game play.
Smart watches and wearables have been added to Deezer’s list of supported devices and have enabled Flow to Fitbit devices, Apple Watch, Garmin and Google’s Wear OS devices.
Offline listening is available on Deezer Premium but not for Deezer Free.
Sharing to social media is well supported with integrations to Facebook, Instagram Snapchat, and Twitter amongst others.
Playing and sharing lyrics on Deezer
With Deezer, you can play songs with lyrics on virtually all supported devices. The most recent addition to the list being the Xbox range of consoles. The lyrics tool also allows mobile users to share lyrics to Instagram Stories.
Deezer SongCatcher
The streamer also offers an audio recognition tool which enables users to quickly identify new songs that are playing within hearing range of their mobile devices. This feature called SongCatcher is now available on the Deezer mobile app for Android 6+ or iOS 7.11 or higher.
How to use SongCatcher
Follow these steps to locate and use the feature to help you identify the song that’s playing.
- Open the Deezer app
- Go to Search
- Select the SongCatcher button
- SongCatcher will begin listening to the song to identify it
- When it’s successful, it will display the song and artist
- Save the song to your favourite tracks or playlists
