This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I was the biggest fan of Spotify as soon as they started up. I was one of the first people to get early access and was a huge supporter for years.
Buy your music, own your files, never subscribe for something you can buy instead. You're not listening to 12 new albums a year, if you can subscribe, you can pay for the files that will be yours forever. The fact that Spotify has higher quality streaming doesn't change anything.
with flacs on soulseek, who needs music subscriptions?
Lossless music doesn’t matter when it’s all AI generated crap.
Too late. Spotify sucks
Too little, too late.
Drink up me hearties yo ho!
Orinoco Flow by Enya starts playing
Exactly what I thought. I'll keep my Tidal account, thank you very much.
Previously Spotify couldn't develop hifi because they gave hundreds of millions ofl their customers money to that anti vax joe Rogan dick instead. Get bent and die Spotify.
Canceled my sub when that happened and won’t be back.
Fist bump
he’s more than anti vax. he’s an anti-science conspiracy monger, one step short of alex jones.
But not like people are going to notice any difference over a stream if it buffers even slightly.
Most people can't even tell the difference between 192 and 320 kbps, they don't care about lossless over stream. Also screw spotify.
yeah golden ears are very rare. 320 kbps of any codec is fine for me.
For tracks I'm familiar with and play often, I can usually tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps on an MP3. In very rare cases, with the right song and the right earphones, I can discern 192kpbs MP3 from 256kbps. But I definitely can't tell a 256kbps MP3 from FLAC. The Wikipedia arrival on audio transparency says that MP3 becomes transparent on average around 240kbps.
I've recently started using the Opus codec. It is higher quality at lower bitrates than MP3. Opus is considered transparent on average at around 160-192kbps.
Personally, I've been re-encoding all my FLACs to 192kbps OPUS for storing on my smartphone where space is limited.
spotify essentially killed grooveshark no thanks i’m still sour (I worked there)
I loved Grooveshark! Why the service stopped? I always thought it was a license issue.
sued into oblivion and they didn’t want to sell out the business; more like being forced into marriage with your rapist
Fuck you Spotify
This is going to affect my monthly fee, isn’t it?
Incoming Spotify premium plus subscription tier. With lossless audio. And then shortly after some previously premium tier features to go plus. Then ads appear on the premium, I mean basic tier (priced at the old premium price).
Incoming Spotify premium plus subscription tier
That was what they were planning to do, a new premium tier that would have lots of extras but then Apple released lossless audio as part of the standard base tier so Spotify gave up on it
To me I don't really get it, I've had flac audio files in the past and I haven't really found much difference in audio quality above 192k
Just to confirm there is no new tier for this
From today (September 10), Spotify Lossless will be rolling out to Premium users across over 50 regions including the US, UK and Australia. Spotify says the rollout is starting now and will continue though October. You’ll receive a notification alerting you when Lossless is available, but that’s not all.
Surprisingly, Spotify Lossless is free for Premium subscribers – a huge sigh of relief given that previous rumors suggested that lossless audio would come in the form of a paid add-on called ‘Music Pro’.
You have to listen to loud music on good headphones to hear any difference.
Also usually mid range is compressed OK, it's the very highs that get distorted.
Black Mirror's Common People episode would like a word
Well, they were quite literally compiling all the worst behaviours of modern subscription services and applying it to the medical field. I guess the sad thing is that it could really happen one day.
I would say each of the things that they applied has happened on a service somewhere before (just perhaps not all on a single one). It's fiction uncomfortably close to reality.
I absolutely agree. it was a sort of slap in the face, personally. I've been aware of the increasingly awful subscription model take-over of course, but seeing it presented that way and realizing how not-so-far-off that reality may be, finally put some fire behind it for me.
Is this just music, or will conspiracy theorists podcasts and other right wingers be in high res too?
Listen to Bro Jogan's heavy breathing in lossless audio.
BroSMR
Only the ads (now compulsory on the 19.99€/month subscription).
Well that's one thing Apple did right, aside from a terrible algorithm. Spotify will be jacking up the prices in 3,2,1...
why all this fuss about lossless audio? Spotify premium is literally indistinguishable from lossless audio for 99.9% of the population and songs (because not all songs will be lossless or are even mastered in a way that makes a difference). granted if...
you may hear a difference. if you think otherwise, then do a lossy vs lossless blind test and be impressed that you actually cannot hear the difference most of the time (especially without actively looking for the artifacts)
Lossy audio compression algorithms work based on psychoacoustic effects. The average human ear will not detect all the "parts" in a lossless signal - there are things you can drop from the signal because:
So in order to determine exactly which parts of an audio signal could be dropped because we don't hear them anyway, they measured a couple of thousand people's listening profiles.
And they used that "average human profile" to create their algorithm.
This, of course, has a consequence which most people, including you apparently, do not understand:
The better your personal "ear" matches the average psychoacoustic model used by lossy algorithms, the better the signal will sound to you.
In other words, older people, or people with certain deficiencies in their hearing capabilities, will need higher bitrates not to notice the difference. In the 90s, I used to be happy with 192 kbps CBR MP3. But now, being an old fuck, boy, can I hear the difference.
Ironically, I can detect the difference not because my ears are "trained" or "better", I can detect it because my ears are worse than yours!
So the whole bottom line is this: While it may be true that you, personally, do not require lossless to enjoy music to the fullest, other people do. Claiming that lossless isn't needed by 99.9% of the population is horseshit and only demonstrates that you have no clue about how lossy compression works in the first place.
Are you a musician? You can hear whats missing if you know what to listen for.
The fuss is that every time you transcode to a new format you accumulatively lose quality.
So for example if you have an 320kbps mp3, but then that takes too much space so you transcode it to 192 mp3, but then you discover the opus codec is more efficient so you transcode it again, but then you want to make a fan video of the same song, so your video player transcoded it again into video friendly aac.
The quality on your final video is going contain the faults of all the files upstream.
Meanwhile if you edit the video from a lossless source, it will only get encoded once.
So it doesn't matter for streaming, but it matters if you want to download and convert to other formats.
This is a great point, currently I have tens of thousands of mp3's that I wish I could somehow, impossibly upscale to a better codec, but those rare tracks I have in the low VBR mp3 range will never be revived.
You don't need a trained ear for lossless audio to be different for lossy audio.
I agree that the vast majority of people will not be able to distinguish one from another, but the company is the biggest streaming service and they’re behind their competitors in this aspect. They also have been promising this for years and not delivering.
Prob should get on with sorting out the AI stealing people's music and profiles
Pretty sure Spotify approves of it. They don’t care about artists they are there for profit.
Ah, feels good to know I just set up my Navidrome server and have been obtaining my entire music library for personal streaming.
It's funny how many times people on Lemmy have accused Spotify of not paying artists fairly but for some reason there's a large amount of 'I pirate music and pay artists nothing' that goes on around here and no one says a thing
I’d rather steal music than pay a corporation that exploits artists under the guise of legality. As an artist who’s being drained by these platforms, pirate my stuff and throw me a coffee, it’s the same money as the "legal" route, but at least it feels human, not dehumanizing or humiliating.
Who mentioned piracy?
I get the files from bandcamp and quobuz. Unlike movies, you can still legally buy music, and get actual files.
These days I pirate the music, and if I like it I go back and buy the album directly from the band (when possible). If i really like it, I buy concert tix/merch. If it doesn't tickle my fancy, then I don't.
In either case, I don't think the artist is too worried about the pennies lost from my Spotify plays.
