Spotify is finally launching support for lossless music streaming

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.

he’s more than anti vax. he’s an anti-science conspiracy monger, one step short of alex jones.
Canceled my sub when that happened and won’t be back.
- Fist bump

Too late. Spotify sucks

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).
- Black Mirror's Common People episode would like a word

Fuck you Spotify

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
Oh wow! I used to use grooveshark as a kid but my mom thought it was a piracy site and didn't let me use it on her laptop. Haven't thought about that site in a while, thanks for your work!
- It was at least in part a piracy site. Everything was uploaded by users. It was a piracy site in the same sense that early music content on YouTube was. It was mostly users uploading in the early years. This is why there was a massive lawsuit against YouTube back then. And why we got content ID, etc.
  This also often meant the audio compression was random, and sometimes terrible. On grooveshark and YouTube. And on YouTube the native bitrates were terrible 2006-2010 or so.
  Your mom was right. But she was probally wrong about it spreading malware.
- it was literally the same exact business model as youtube. the big four labels were suing youtube at the same time for the same reason as grooveshark. then google bought youtube and they “settled” - grooveshark got sued into oblivion and took a dear friend from me (suicide)

Is this just music, or will conspiracy theorists podcasts and other right wingers be in high res too?

Only the ads (now compulsory on the 19.99€/month subscription).

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 have the right hardware
you have the ear trained to hear compression
you picked a song that has audible compression artifacts however small they may be
you are in a quiet room
you are actively looking for compression artifacts

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)

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.
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:
Human ears are most sensitive around the frequency of human speech, but less at others
If there is a loud signal, a much more silent one very close will be masked if it occurs within a couple of milliseconds around the loud one
There are other more subtle aspects of the human ear you can use to detect signals we just won't notice.
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.
You don't need a trained ear for lossless audio to be different for lossy audio.
- do a blind test between ogg 320kbps which Spotify premium uses and FLAC and tell me your score then
  my point is, if you're not working on that audio, there is no audible difference between two
Are you a musician? You can hear whats missing if you know what to listen for.
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.
everyone listening to audio on a modern phone will be using bluetooth anyway. lossless is jist a money grab.
even my local flac files are indistinguishable from standard quality streamed media over bluetooth
- don't say it too loud the nerds on here will be angry at you (you're already getting down voted for no reason)
I don't get it either. I'm pretty sure it's just marketing bullshit and many people are falling for it. Same with bluetooth headphones and codecs. I wouldn't be surprised if the difference between LDAC and AAC on an average bluetooth headset wouldn't even be scientifically measurable.

Well that's one thing Apple did right, aside from a terrible algorithm. Spotify will be jacking up the prices in 3,2,1...

Lossless music doesn’t matter when it’s all AI generated crap.

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.

You're not listening to 12 new albums a year
Uhm…
- Yeah, I'm adding about 500 songs to my spotify library every year. If I paid 1€ for every single one it would be more than 10x the cost of the 3€ per month for a Spotify Family slot
Spotify these days just acts like a great repository for pirating music with Spotify to MP3 websites, that's all it does for me XD

I think Spotify is missing the point. People who care about Hi-Fi, care about the music, which means they care about the artists, which means they likely care about the treatment of those artists.

In my eyes the only real value Spotify adds is their discovery features.

Is that really a unique feature the discovery feature when you can access so many websites and services with similar features? What makes it stand out?
- I’d even argue the contrary. Granted, I’m not subscribed to them so I only have the free tier available but I don’t think the discovery algorithm differs between the tiers. After a while the algorithm is basically stuck in a loop repeating the same tracks over and over. It’s what made me cancel right after the free trial ended. Way better to find new music on RED’s top 10 or last.fm

with flacs on soulseek, who needs music subscriptions?

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.

Oh cool, now they've finally caught up to my Navidrome server

That's nice. I have been streaming lossless for myself for what, two decades now? I see no reason to pay spotify for anything.

Ah, feels good to know I just set up my Navidrome server and have been obtaining my entire music library for personal streaming.

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 article 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.

Lol I got a. MP3 player and I can literally just play anything I want and if I want I can make it lossless, I thought Spotify already had this and I'm kinda surprised it's so behind the times.

I love my MP3 player, I make my own music so the fact I can just put said music on my MP3 player so easily is the best, also admittedly I have never used Spotify ever, never got the appeal when it's hard to find music you like on there with there limited selection