8 ms·

Spotify bitrategate: 320kbps premium quality not there yet

89 points by kraymer 15y ago

vizzah 15y ago
well, I guess it can really be only due to bandwidth reasons. It is a lesser known fact, that Spotify (in the same way as Skype), is relying on P2P behind the scenes. Often, the music you listen to is streamed from other users, and so bandwidth load is a very crucial factor. Looks like Spotify can't afford harder load to their servers and they're gradually increasing the requirements. But marketing their whole library as 320kbps is really disappointing. As a premium subscriber, I was under impression that it is what I was getting.
kenthorvath 15y ago
Solution: Everytime a track is requested by a premium member, if it does not exist in 320 then they send FLAC and the client converts it on the fly while playing it and sends it back to Spotify. Do this 3x for every track and verify that the md5 is the same on all three. Then, the most popular songs will be available in 320, and the ones that aren't would never have been accessed in the first place.
- xiaoqmasww 15y ago
  welcometo: http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com The website wholesale for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan,prada,, also including the jeans,shirts,bags,hat and the decorations. All the products are free shipping, and the the price is competitive, and also can accept the paypal payment.,after the payment, can ship within short time. free shippingcompetitive priceany size availableaccept the paypal ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== jordan shoes $32nike shox $32Christan Audigier bikini $23 Ed Hardy Bikini $23Smful short_t-shirt_woman $15ed hardy short_tank_woman $16Sandal $32christian loubo utin $80 Sunglass $15 COACH_Necklace $27handbag $33AF tank woman $17puma slipper woman $30 ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com =====
- davej 15y ago
  This solves the CPU issue but I reckon bandwidth is the real issue. This solution actually increases bandwidth usage and there would need to be a lot more checks than just 3 md5's to prevent abuse.
  - danieldk 15y ago
    Maybe, but this could easily be refined, e.g. by using fingerprinting. Perhaps even the fingerprint of the Flac data (assuming that fingerprinting is much cheaper than lossy compression). However, it would be odd if CPU power is the real bottleneck here. I read the article, but can we actually be sure that licensing is not at fault? Or simply, the lack of proper management? Given how much more revenue iTunes sales would give for the average Premium user, it could be possible that they (RIAA and others) want to keep the incentive to buy iTunes tracks (or the physical album). Not that Spotify would ever admit this, since it would effectively change their status to 'music preview/demo/shareware' provider. The quality plus the 'disappearing tracks' issues, make me think that it is all about preserving buying incentive. At least, that's what it did for me.
    - ulyssestone 15y ago
      Thanks for all the comments. Personally I don't think licensing is the problem. Why would the labels let Spotify stream the new Paul Oakenfold and Beyonce album as exclusive pre-releases and, at the same time, not allow them to offer HQ streaming for those albums? What's the point? To force the audiophile users to buy 320 kbps mp3s or CDs? Many of the premium users don't even know it's not 320 kbps.
      - danieldk 15y ago
        Personally I don't think licensing is the problem. Why would the labels let Spotify stream the new Paul Oakenfold and Beyonce album as exclusive pre-releases and, at the same time, not allow them to offer HQ streaming for those albums? What's the point? The very same reason they pay some television and radio stations to broadcast particular material: to get people to buy the albums. It's a combination of things that make Spotify subpar for many music enthusiasts. The lack of availability of lossless streams, incompleteness of the catalog in 320kbps, missing tracks on many albums, uncertainty about future accessibility of music, etc. When Spotify was introduced in The Netherlands, I absolutely loved it, and was convinced that I'd never need to spend much more on music than 10 Euros per month (imagine what a save this is when you buy at least 4 albums per month). However, given the reasons listed above, I am now mostly using Spotify for music discovery, and still buy albums. It only helped me to make more 'accurate' purchases. As a side effect, I ended my Premium subscription, because the 2.5 hours/week, 5 plays per track is plenty enough for evaluation.
augustl 15y ago
Some of the albums I've been listening to (with HQ enabled) have raised red flags, I've recognized compression artifacts. But I dismissed this as being deliberate, a weird sounding microphone, an effect, or whatever, since the HQ box was checked in Spotify settings. Time to investigate..
tintin 15y ago
Not to start the "320kbs is better" discussion but with my Unlimited account I only heard one or two albums which sounds very compressed (spotify:album:07hc4SjPjogLqwBc7dUCiD for example: Alan Parsons). Most of the time the quality is just very good. I think the standard 160kbs is great imho.
- shawndumas 15y ago
  Agreed. Ogg q5 (approximately 160kbps) is not 160kbps mp3. I can tell 160kbps mp3 from CD very easily, but am unable (headphones, work PC) to tell 160kbps Ogg files from the original CD tracks. Very unscientific I know, but still... That said, if they say Ogg q9 it should be Ogg q9.
  - cageface 15y ago
    If you can reliably A/B test properly encoded 160kbit mp3s you have exceptional hearing and you should lend your services to the lame tuning team ASAP. I'll warn you though, these kinds of claims very very rarely hold up to a rigorous test now.
    - tintin 15y ago
      Well I also can hear the artifacts of a 160kbps Mp3. But I can't when listening to a 190kbps MP3 or 160kbps Ogg. I'm not sure Spotify changed it recently but to me it seems clear not all tracks are in 320kbps: "To be precise, you can stream music at a higher bitrate of up to 320kbps on your computer (not all tracks are currently available in high bitrate)."
      - cageface 15y ago
        Have you done a proper A/B test or is that just your impression from listening? A lot of people go to http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ claiming they can ABX mp3 at 160kbit. Usually they can't.
        15y ago
niklas_a 15y ago
It's not like high bit rate is the only feature of Spotify Premium. It's definitely a good feature but I ordered premium without even knowing about the high bit rate option.
gorm 15y ago
I really don't understand how someone can complain on Spotify. It's a great service with very good sound quality at a decent price.
- enra 15y ago
  Yeah, if you're looking for the best quality, maybe streaming services are not your cup of tea.
  - elliottkember 15y ago
    Or MP3s, for that matter
    - snippyhollow 15y ago
      Spotify streams OGG. While MP3 160kpbs "sucks", OGG 160kps is pretty decent.
      - cageface 15y ago
        MP3 (at last lame mp3) is actually very good at 160kbits.
        lloeki 15y ago
        hence, I think, GP ironic quotes regarding its quality, putting emphasis on the decentness of OGG.
- modokode 15y ago
  It is indeed a decent service, and I guess it was worth the money I've paid for it, but there certainly are a bunch of flaws. I miss a lot of my personal music library in it, for example, (and yes, while you can add them, but I pretty much only use/used spotify at work). To be honest, I didn't even remember to enable the HQ option when I had a paid subscription. I also use it on gnu/linux, where the windows client under wine for me is very sluggish (but only at work, not at home), and the native client still has ways to go. Anyway, I seem to have gotten quite sidetracked, the point I was trying to make is that at least OP is giving them direct feedback and thus an opportunity to improve. While you think it's a great service, surely you can find some ways to improve it? I could, for example, live with a larger cache on the android app so that I can enter a store under ground without the music stopping when the cell service does...
cageface 15y ago
In controlled listening tests most people have trouble distinguishing mp3 at 128-160 VBR kbits from the uncompressed original. 320 kbits is just a waste of bandwidth but people just assume more is better.
- rythie 15y ago
  Not the point, they shouldn't be telling people it's 320 kbits when it's not.
  - cageface 15y ago
    Perhaps not the central point but certainly relevant if people are up in arms about a non-feature.
- Shenglong 15y ago
  That depends on what you're listening to. For all my progressive/power metal, 128 just sounds terrible and empty. I'm not very well versed in the terminology, so I don't know how better to describe it. On the contrary, 320 sounds full. My two cents.
  - cageface 15y ago
    People make a lot of those kinds of qualitative statements about sound quality, but when they actually do a rigorous A/B test they usually can't tell the difference. I've done quite a bit of A/B testing on metal at ~128 kbits and it's very difficult to spot differences on most tracks. Modern lossy audio encoders are very, very good.
    - Shenglong 15y ago
      Maybe it's a technology difference, but that's the general feel I have across most tracks I've listened to. I'm not A/B testing specifically, but I was complaining about 128 kbit tracks and asking why they sounded empty, even before I knew about bit rates. Systematic Chaos, on 320 for example, sounds amazing. I'll do some specific testing before I say anything else. :)
ulyssestone 15y ago
I think the ever-ongoing war between audiophiles and "nobody can tell 128/192/256/whatever kbps lossy files from CD" supporters is irreverent here. I am not suggesting Spotify to give us a better quality that maybe doesn't mean too much for some other users, I am asking them why they didn't deliver the goods they promised more than two years ago.
- drv 15y ago
  You probably mean "irrelevant".
s04p 15y ago
what about rdio? Does anyone know?
robert-boehnke 15y ago
From Spotify's perspective, there is a low incentive to offer unpopular songs as 320kbps streams. If there is only a small number of peers in the network that have the high Bitrate stream (paying users with HQ enabled on desktop clients and with interest in unpopular song X), they benefits of the peer to peer networking are less likely to pay off. However, that does not explain why they don't offer HQ for some of their more prestigious releases, though I wouldn't be surprised if the labels hand them 'shitty' 192kbps mp3s every now and then. Interesting read about some of their p2p architecture (PDF): http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.pdf http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.p... EDIT: After looking at the spreadsheet, I’d wager that there is a correlation between lower popularity of tracks and being 160 kbps only. The only track out of the last 40 is Michael Jackson's This is It, and a quick look up in the Spotify client gives most of them a very low 'popularity' measure. I mean, really? http://open.spotify.com/track/7kBDTeWty0z1MXjcH9twph http://open.spotify.com/track/7kBDTeWty0z1MXjcH9twph
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
pornel 15y ago
Spotify uses Vorbis for streaming and Vorbis' 320kbit is not the same as MP3's 320kbit. In fact, MP3 has quality problems (sample/frequency resolution limit per block) that cannot be fixed at any bitrate. Moreover, re-encoding one lossless format to another (edit: not what article suggests) would further degrade quality. You'd get desired bandwidth, but not the quality. It's a shame that bandwidth became synonymous with quality and MP3's upper limit is taken as "highest quality". 320kbit (and lossless!) WAVE sounds like a phone line! OTOH it's quite possible that Vorbis at lower bitrate has higher quality than MP3's maximum.
- dirtbag 15y ago
  I believe you are referring to lossy formats, as re-encoding one lossless format to another will not degrade quality. Re-encoding the lossless format to 320kbit Vorbis is what he's requesting which will ensure minimum quality degradation while still reducing the file size.
aw3c2 15y ago
"Give us the snakeoil you advertised no matter if it is actually 'better'"
nateberkopec 15y ago
It should definitely tell you something that he had to check file sizes to determine if the song was 320 kbps. Spotify knows most users just don't care - so they don't really care either.
- ulyssestone 15y ago
  So... You are suggesting me to write this entire report based on "from what I heard, about 70% of the 100 tracks I auditioned are probably not at 320 kbps"?...
  - nateberkopec 15y ago
    Well, it would have been interesting. There is, of course, quite a bit of controversy over what bitrates a normal person can distinguish. You make it sound like Spotify is being unreasonable, but I think they're being completely reasonable - if people can't hear the difference, why should they devote a large amount of their operational capacity towards making sure all their library is 320kbps? I'm guessing Spotify would need to receive the 320kbps version from the label for it to be legal/work with their licensing. Can you imagine working with record labels? These are the guys that brought you the RIAA...working with them must be like pulling teeth. And doing all that work for almost no appreciation from your users (who can't tell the difference?). If the listening experience is the same, your perception of the end product is the same - does it really matter? I mean, bad on Spotify for false advertising and everything, but I wouldn't chalk up their behavior as being a big deal. I understand that for someone with good taste in music, like yourself, this matters. But for 90% of Spotify's users, I'll bet it doesn't.
    - ulyssestone 15y ago
      Yes I understand, actually I know quiet a bit about how dinosaur like RIAA/IFPI make their lives:P But as I quoted in my article, Spotify staff admitted that they got music in lossless from labels, and have the rights to convert and stream them in HQ. To be frankly I know how this will end: most users don't care and the story sinks into nowhere. For my own interest I don't even want to do this, @Spotify tweeted about my blog about eight times since last year, and I'd assume it won't happen again after this post. The US launch tripled the traffic of my site, a post like this will only bore the new visitors away. I did this because I believe it's the right thing to do, and I still have faith in Spotify. That's all.
rms 15y ago
I'm impressed by Spotify. 20 hours of the same sort of unlimited free music as what.cd and waffles.fm. 50 million Spotify users in the first year seems like a possibly not that unrealistic prediction for them to make. Perhaps Spotify motivates the record companies to launch and relentlessly promote their own Hulu for music. I don't think the record companies can react that quickly though. Maybe a few Swedish entrepreneurs just took quietly over (or become the prime influencers of) the US record industry. @Daniel Ek: I'll sign up for the $9.95/month plan when you have 95% of your music available at ~192 kb/s OGG. I just want the slightly more bandwidth that ensures I can't tell it apart from CD and it isn't much more bandwidth. Actually, what I really want is one of those menus where you got to choose your own encoding like allofmp3.com had. Edit: Actually, these ads are really annoying. I guess I have to sign up. Damn you, compelling product.

89 points by kraymer 15y ago

well, I guess it can really be only due to bandwidth reasons. It is a lesser known fact, that Spotify (in the same way as Skype), is relying on P2P behind the scenes. Often, the music you listen to is streamed from other users, and so bandwidth load is a very crucial factor. Looks like Spotify can't afford harder load to their servers and they're gradually increasing the requirements. But marketing their whole library as 320kbps is really disappointing. As a premium subscriber, I was under impression that it is what I was getting.

kenthorvath 15y ago

Solution: Everytime a track is requested by a premium member, if it does not exist in 320 then they send FLAC and the client converts it on the fly while playing it and sends it back to Spotify. Do this 3x for every track and verify that the md5 is the same on all three. Then, the most popular songs will be available in 320, and the ones that aren't would never have been accessed in the first place.

xiaoqmasww 15y ago
welcometo: http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com The website wholesale for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan,prada,, also including the jeans,shirts,bags,hat and the decorations. All the products are free shipping, and the the price is competitive, and also can accept the paypal payment.,after the payment, can ship within short time. free shippingcompetitive priceany size availableaccept the paypal ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== jordan shoes $32nike shox $32Christan Audigier bikini $23 Ed Hardy Bikini $23Smful short_t-shirt_woman $15ed hardy short_tank_woman $16Sandal $32christian loubo utin $80 Sunglass $15 COACH_Necklace $27handbag $33AF tank woman $17puma slipper woman $30 ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com ===== ===== http://www.fullmalls.com http://www.fullmalls.com =====
davej 15y ago
This solves the CPU issue but I reckon bandwidth is the real issue. This solution actually increases bandwidth usage and there would need to be a lot more checks than just 3 md5's to prevent abuse.
- danieldk 15y ago
  Maybe, but this could easily be refined, e.g. by using fingerprinting. Perhaps even the fingerprint of the Flac data (assuming that fingerprinting is much cheaper than lossy compression). However, it would be odd if CPU power is the real bottleneck here. I read the article, but can we actually be sure that licensing is not at fault? Or simply, the lack of proper management? Given how much more revenue iTunes sales would give for the average Premium user, it could be possible that they (RIAA and others) want to keep the incentive to buy iTunes tracks (or the physical album). Not that Spotify would ever admit this, since it would effectively change their status to 'music preview/demo/shareware' provider. The quality plus the 'disappearing tracks' issues, make me think that it is all about preserving buying incentive. At least, that's what it did for me.
  - ulyssestone 15y ago
    Thanks for all the comments. Personally I don't think licensing is the problem. Why would the labels let Spotify stream the new Paul Oakenfold and Beyonce album as exclusive pre-releases and, at the same time, not allow them to offer HQ streaming for those albums? What's the point? To force the audiophile users to buy 320 kbps mp3s or CDs? Many of the premium users don't even know it's not 320 kbps.
    - danieldk 15y ago
      Personally I don't think licensing is the problem. Why would the labels let Spotify stream the new Paul Oakenfold and Beyonce album as exclusive pre-releases and, at the same time, not allow them to offer HQ streaming for those albums? What's the point? The very same reason they pay some television and radio stations to broadcast particular material: to get people to buy the albums. It's a combination of things that make Spotify subpar for many music enthusiasts. The lack of availability of lossless streams, incompleteness of the catalog in 320kbps, missing tracks on many albums, uncertainty about future accessibility of music, etc. When Spotify was introduced in The Netherlands, I absolutely loved it, and was convinced that I'd never need to spend much more on music than 10 Euros per month (imagine what a save this is when you buy at least 4 albums per month). However, given the reasons listed above, I am now mostly using Spotify for music discovery, and still buy albums. It only helped me to make more 'accurate' purchases. As a side effect, I ended my Premium subscription, because the 2.5 hours/week, 5 plays per track is plenty enough for evaluation.

augustl 15y ago

Some of the albums I've been listening to (with HQ enabled) have raised red flags, I've recognized compression artifacts. But I dismissed this as being deliberate, a weird sounding microphone, an effect, or whatever, since the HQ box was checked in Spotify settings. Time to investigate..

tintin 15y ago

Not to start the "320kbs is better" discussion but with my Unlimited account I only heard one or two albums which sounds very compressed (spotify:album:07hc4SjPjogLqwBc7dUCiD for example: Alan Parsons). Most of the time the quality is just very good. I think the standard 160kbs is great imho.

shawndumas 15y ago
Agreed. Ogg q5 (approximately 160kbps) is not 160kbps mp3. I can tell 160kbps mp3 from CD very easily, but am unable (headphones, work PC) to tell 160kbps Ogg files from the original CD tracks. Very unscientific I know, but still... That said, if they say Ogg q9 it should be Ogg q9.
- cageface 15y ago
  If you can reliably A/B test properly encoded 160kbit mp3s you have exceptional hearing and you should lend your services to the lame tuning team ASAP. I'll warn you though, these kinds of claims very very rarely hold up to a rigorous test now.
  - tintin 15y ago
    Well I also can hear the artifacts of a 160kbps Mp3. But I can't when listening to a 190kbps MP3 or 160kbps Ogg. I'm not sure Spotify changed it recently but to me it seems clear not all tracks are in 320kbps: "To be precise, you can stream music at a higher bitrate of up to 320kbps on your computer (not all tracks are currently available in high bitrate)."
    - cageface 15y ago
      Have you done a proper A/B test or is that just your impression from listening? A lot of people go to http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ claiming they can ABX mp3 at 160kbit. Usually they can't.
      - 15y ago

niklas_a 15y ago

It's not like high bit rate is the only feature of Spotify Premium. It's definitely a good feature but I ordered premium without even knowing about the high bit rate option.

gorm 15y ago

I really don't understand how someone can complain on Spotify. It's a great service with very good sound quality at a decent price.

enra 15y ago
Yeah, if you're looking for the best quality, maybe streaming services are not your cup of tea.
- elliottkember 15y ago
  Or MP3s, for that matter
  - snippyhollow 15y ago
    Spotify streams OGG. While MP3 160kpbs "sucks", OGG 160kps is pretty decent.
    - cageface 15y ago
      MP3 (at last lame mp3) is actually very good at 160kbits.
      - lloeki 15y ago
        hence, I think, GP ironic quotes regarding its quality, putting emphasis on the decentness of OGG.
modokode 15y ago
It is indeed a decent service, and I guess it was worth the money I've paid for it, but there certainly are a bunch of flaws. I miss a lot of my personal music library in it, for example, (and yes, while you can add them, but I pretty much only use/used spotify at work). To be honest, I didn't even remember to enable the HQ option when I had a paid subscription. I also use it on gnu/linux, where the windows client under wine for me is very sluggish (but only at work, not at home), and the native client still has ways to go. Anyway, I seem to have gotten quite sidetracked, the point I was trying to make is that at least OP is giving them direct feedback and thus an opportunity to improve. While you think it's a great service, surely you can find some ways to improve it? I could, for example, live with a larger cache on the android app so that I can enter a store under ground without the music stopping when the cell service does...

cageface 15y ago

In controlled listening tests most people have trouble distinguishing mp3 at 128-160 VBR kbits from the uncompressed original. 320 kbits is just a waste of bandwidth but people just assume more is better.

rythie 15y ago
Not the point, they shouldn't be telling people it's 320 kbits when it's not.
- cageface 15y ago
  Perhaps not the central point but certainly relevant if people are up in arms about a non-feature.
Shenglong 15y ago
That depends on what you're listening to. For all my progressive/power metal, 128 just sounds terrible and empty. I'm not very well versed in the terminology, so I don't know how better to describe it. On the contrary, 320 sounds full. My two cents.
- cageface 15y ago
  People make a lot of those kinds of qualitative statements about sound quality, but when they actually do a rigorous A/B test they usually can't tell the difference. I've done quite a bit of A/B testing on metal at ~128 kbits and it's very difficult to spot differences on most tracks. Modern lossy audio encoders are very, very good.
  - Shenglong 15y ago
    Maybe it's a technology difference, but that's the general feel I have across most tracks I've listened to. I'm not A/B testing specifically, but I was complaining about 128 kbit tracks and asking why they sounded empty, even before I knew about bit rates. Systematic Chaos, on 320 for example, sounds amazing. I'll do some specific testing before I say anything else. :)

ulyssestone 15y ago

I think the ever-ongoing war between audiophiles and "nobody can tell 128/192/256/whatever kbps lossy files from CD" supporters is irreverent here. I am not suggesting Spotify to give us a better quality that maybe doesn't mean too much for some other users, I am asking them why they didn't deliver the goods they promised more than two years ago.

drv 15y ago
You probably mean "irrelevant".

s04p 15y ago

what about rdio? Does anyone know?

robert-boehnke 15y ago

From Spotify's perspective, there is a low incentive to offer unpopular songs as 320kbps streams. If there is only a small number of peers in the network that have the high Bitrate stream (paying users with HQ enabled on desktop clients and with interest in unpopular song X), they benefits of the peer to peer networking are less likely to pay off. However, that does not explain why they don't offer HQ for some of their more prestigious releases, though I wouldn't be surprised if the labels hand them 'shitty' 192kbps mp3s every now and then. Interesting read about some of their p2p architecture (PDF): http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.pdf http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.p... EDIT: After looking at the spreadsheet, I’d wager that there is a correlation between lower popularity of tracks and being 160 kbps only. The only track out of the last 40 is Michael Jackson's This is It, and a quick look up in the Spotify client gives most of them a very low 'popularity' measure. I mean, really? http://open.spotify.com/track/7kBDTeWty0z1MXjcH9twph http://open.spotify.com/track/7kBDTeWty0z1MXjcH9twph

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

pornel 15y ago

Spotify uses Vorbis for streaming and Vorbis' 320kbit is not the same as MP3's 320kbit. In fact, MP3 has quality problems (sample/frequency resolution limit per block) that cannot be fixed at any bitrate. Moreover, re-encoding one lossless format to another (edit: not what article suggests) would further degrade quality. You'd get desired bandwidth, but not the quality. It's a shame that bandwidth became synonymous with quality and MP3's upper limit is taken as "highest quality". 320kbit (and lossless!) WAVE sounds like a phone line! OTOH it's quite possible that Vorbis at lower bitrate has higher quality than MP3's maximum.

dirtbag 15y ago
I believe you are referring to lossy formats, as re-encoding one lossless format to another will not degrade quality. Re-encoding the lossless format to 320kbit Vorbis is what he's requesting which will ensure minimum quality degradation while still reducing the file size.

aw3c2 15y ago

"Give us the snakeoil you advertised no matter if it is actually 'better'"

nateberkopec 15y ago

It should definitely tell you something that he had to check file sizes to determine if the song was 320 kbps. Spotify knows most users just don't care - so they don't really care either.

ulyssestone 15y ago
So... You are suggesting me to write this entire report based on "from what I heard, about 70% of the 100 tracks I auditioned are probably not at 320 kbps"?...
- nateberkopec 15y ago
  Well, it would have been interesting. There is, of course, quite a bit of controversy over what bitrates a normal person can distinguish. You make it sound like Spotify is being unreasonable, but I think they're being completely reasonable - if people can't hear the difference, why should they devote a large amount of their operational capacity towards making sure all their library is 320kbps? I'm guessing Spotify would need to receive the 320kbps version from the label for it to be legal/work with their licensing. Can you imagine working with record labels? These are the guys that brought you the RIAA...working with them must be like pulling teeth. And doing all that work for almost no appreciation from your users (who can't tell the difference?). If the listening experience is the same, your perception of the end product is the same - does it really matter? I mean, bad on Spotify for false advertising and everything, but I wouldn't chalk up their behavior as being a big deal. I understand that for someone with good taste in music, like yourself, this matters. But for 90% of Spotify's users, I'll bet it doesn't.
  - ulyssestone 15y ago
    Yes I understand, actually I know quiet a bit about how dinosaur like RIAA/IFPI make their lives:P But as I quoted in my article, Spotify staff admitted that they got music in lossless from labels, and have the rights to convert and stream them in HQ. To be frankly I know how this will end: most users don't care and the story sinks into nowhere. For my own interest I don't even want to do this, @Spotify tweeted about my blog about eight times since last year, and I'd assume it won't happen again after this post. The US launch tripled the traffic of my site, a post like this will only bore the new visitors away. I did this because I believe it's the right thing to do, and I still have faith in Spotify. That's all.

rms 15y ago

I'm impressed by Spotify. 20 hours of the same sort of unlimited free music as what.cd and waffles.fm. 50 million Spotify users in the first year seems like a possibly not that unrealistic prediction for them to make. Perhaps Spotify motivates the record companies to launch and relentlessly promote their own Hulu for music. I don't think the record companies can react that quickly though. Maybe a few Swedish entrepreneurs just took quietly over (or become the prime influencers of) the US record industry. @Daniel Ek: I'll sign up for the $9.95/month plan when you have 95% of your music available at ~192 kb/s OGG. I just want the slightly more bandwidth that ensures I can't tell it apart from CD and it isn't much more bandwidth. Actually, what I really want is one of those menus where you got to choose your own encoding like allofmp3.com had. Edit: Actually, these ads are really annoying. I guess I have to sign up. Damn you, compelling product.