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Spotify Is Testing a Lossless Subscription Tier For $15 to $20 Per Month (techcrunch.com)
Spotify is seemingly preparing to launch a lossless audio version of its streaming service. The offering, which is currently called Spotify Hi-Fi, will offer lossless CD-quality audio to users -- similar to what Tidal offers in its Hi-Fi service. From a report: For an extra $5 to $10, you could get all the features in Spotify Premium as well as lossless high fidelity streaming. There could also be a couple of new features. What is lossless quality anyway? Currently, if you go into Spotify's settings and choose the highest quality, Spotify serves you 320kbps audio files. It's very high quality, but it's not perfect -- in other words, it's a compromise. This way, files are still quite small and load quickly. Lossless files are perfect copies of the songs on an audio CD. They are then compressed, but without any quality loss.
If you think your can hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless on a 44.1/16 track, you deserve to pay the extra $10 a month.
If you can *actually* hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless on a 44.1/16 track, and complain about it, you shouldn't want to listen to 44.1/16 music in the first place.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I suppose they have to think of something.
Math.
This weblog is for perl programmers, I don't know where you were trying to be.
Pointing out that "CD audio quality" is, in fact, not really "lossless"...
Of course, unless Spotify can get their hands on the original studio tapes (unlikely) or exotic limited edition releases, they're not going to able to make gonzobyte flac files available anyway, so perhaps a moot point.
Bearing in mind their target audiences are likely to be listening on crap Beats cans or buds, there's probably little point in this anyway, apart from bragging rights.
The difference between Flac and 256kbps MP3 is far less than you imagine. Roughly speaking 134gb Flac is around 33gb MP3 at 256kbps, and thats around 400 albums.
...between 128k and 192k files. I can't tell the difference between anything much above 192k and 320k. I have a vintage Marantz amplifier and decent speakers, and even with classical I can't tell any difference between a CD and 320kbps. So more power to Spotify if they can convince people they are audiophiles and require lossless compression, which (protip) is already digitally sampled at 44.1khz anyway.
12:50 - press return.
https://www.mattmontag.com/mus...
That is actually worse than compression artifacts, which by far most people cannot hear anyway.
I have a a Yamaha Aventage AVR, Anthem MCA 325 power amp and Dynaudio DM3/7 speakers, some pretty high end audio kit and it's in an acoustically treated room, and I don't think this would be worth it. I can sometimes notice a very subtle difference between a 320k mp3 and flac, but only if the recording is very good, and a recording that good is very rare today. For the few artists that I really enjoy who actually record and master their music well I'd just buy the CD.
Anybody who's pirating "lossless" (CD-quality) copies either doesn't know what he's doing or has an unusual set of ears. Your average Joe (me included) won't hear the difference - A 320kbps .mp3 will be indistinguishable from the original .wav. Most pirates pirate .mp3s.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Lossless is great for storage to preserve fidelity, but it's just overload for actual casting. You want the source of your transcode to be lossless, but the actual output can be 'good enough' for the use-case.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
They can't even get basic UI stuff down after all these years. Why they think I'd give them any money for a service missing such basic interactivity is beyond me.
https://community.spotify.com/...
Having dipped my toe in the shallow end of high-end audio, I can attest that judging the relative quality of recordings and equipment and cables requires a lot of close A-B comparisons and is fraught with conflicting opinions. The merits of one element can be obscured by other elements in the system, leading to a very different conclusion than if those interfering elements had been replaced with higher-quality ones.
Sometimes hearing the difference between types of recordings will depend entirely on the source material.
I will admit that I *never* thought that cable upgrades could make much of a difference, until I got some fairly serious kit (ARC, Manley, Magnepan, etc.) then swapped out cheap cables and borrowed some spendy ones. True, the difference was hardly night and day, but, if you were looking for it, you could reliably and repeatedly hear it.
The real question becomes; Can you justify the difference in cost? While I might be able to hear the difference between an mp3 and some lossless format, if I have to consistently pay more for the lossless service (and pay more for the gear that is capable of making those differences accessible), am I getting X dollars worth of value?
Be honest with yourself, don't rely on others to provide you with an opinion. Relax and listen. If you hear a difference and it gives you pleasure, then you have your answer.
...the point of lossless files is that they can be converted.
And lossy ones are just locked in their final form forever?
...you can have a lower quality file for the cellphone...
You can mix a .mp3 down to whatever bitrate you feel is appropriate. Downloading a 320 kpbs mp3, inflating to a wav, then compressing again to a lower bitrate won't be exactly the same result as compressing to the lower bitrate from the original wav, but it'll be close enough not to make an audible difference.
...even though it might nominally be a 160kbps VBR if it's coming from a lossy file, you're probably not getting all the information you would normally get.
There's no probably about it. You do lose information. The point of mp3 compression is that you selectively ignore the information that isn't as important as the rest.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.