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An interesting stance he's taking. Spotify, Google Play Music, and Rdio all stream at 320kbps MP3 or OGG, and Apple Music streams at 256kbps AAC (which is appr
by timothya 11y ago
An interesting stance he's taking.
Spotify, Google Play Music, and Rdio all stream at 320kbps MP3 or OGG, and Apple Music streams at 256kbps AAC (which is approximately the same quality as 320kbps MP3). [0][1]
Yet, the vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between 256kbps MP3 and lossless, let alone between 320kbps MP3 and lossless (tested many times, for example: [2]). I'm not sure Neil has much of an argument to make here when it comes to audio quality, particularly for the use case of casual listening.
[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/30/8863315/streaming-music-service-comparison-apple-music http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/30/8863315/streaming-music-se...
[1]: http://www.whathifi.com/news/apple-music-tracks-are-256kbps-aac-files http://www.whathifi.com/news/apple-music-tracks-are-256kbps-...
[2]: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-mp3-bitrate-experiment/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-mp3-bitrate-experimen...
- eridius 11y agoApple Music uses AAC, not MP3, which gets better quality at the same bitrates, so surely 256kbps AAC is indistinguishable from 320kbps MP3.
- timothya 11y agoThanks, I didn't realize that! I've updated my comment to make that point clear.
- GeneralMayhem 11y agoAlso, if you're really that concerned about audio quality, you should be campaigning against earbuds. For many, many people it doesn't matter what quality the recording is, because the limiting factor for fidelity is going to be the hardware it's playing through.
- Oletros 11y agoJust a quick correction, Play music uses OGG Vorbis, not MP3
- sowhatquestion 11y agoHmm, I thought Google Play (and possibly Spotify as well) used OGG. MP3 is a very old format at this point.
- timothya 11y agoGoogle Play Music seems to be streaming with MP3 for me, at least in Chrome on Mac (maybe the native apps are different?). I don't use Spotify so I am unable to test it (I updated my post to note OGG anyhow).
- TD-Linux 11y agoSpotify uses Ogg Vorbis. Google Play uses MP3, which is kind of sad these days because Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Opus would both be much better choices.