Spotify code suggests HiFi tier is coming with lossless audio for $20 / month

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884577/spotify-supremium-lossless-audio-tier-code

by mfiguiere • 3 years ago

30 40 3 years ago

siffland• 3 years ago

My kids laugh at me because I still buy CDs and rip them and some bandcamp. I rip to flac, not for some audiophile reason, but because I can rip a single file for the album with metadata included and space is cheap.

I never have to worry about an internet connection or if an artist drops from a platform.

Our_Benefactors• 3 years ago

I would buy more CD if they were available but many artists don’t even press them.

digitalsushi• 3 years ago

My best friend learned how the shell works because of bandcamp.

He spent one summer ripping about 400 CDs he owned.

He was ripping them into a directory called .junk. He moved each into the parent directory when it was complete.

And the final command of his project was 'rm -rf . junk'.

eutropia• 3 years ago

The final command of his first project, you mean - because surely then he started over?

_the_inflator• 3 years ago

400 times 10-20 USD = 4000-8000 USD.

Divided by 20 amounts to 16-33 years. Roughly.

That’s why I don’t bother about CDs anymore. I used to carry them around privately on a NAT Server many years ago, copying them to my iPod.

happymellon• 3 years ago

Tab to complete is something that everyone eventually discovers is more than just a shortcut.

It's a proofreader too.

soupbowl• 3 years ago

I do the same but per track flac and stream my music with navidrome. When I am out of the house I VPN in and stream my music at work or while driving.

willcipriano• 3 years ago

I do the same but run it though Picard[0] before adding to Plex.

[0]https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

kderbyma2• 3 years ago

also there is a FOSS platform.....Navidrome

satvikpendem• 3 years ago

Can people really tell the difference in day-to-day usage, ie not sitting at your desk in complete silence with your thousand dollar audiophile over-the-ear headphones? I mean, I have such a setup too but it doesn't bother me much to listen to merely "high" quality Spotify if I were to walk around outside, as I wouldn't be able to tell the difference there.

LispSporks22• 3 years ago

Can people really tell the difference

No, and neither can the audiophiles. Well, except those using oxygen free gold plated Ethernet cables.

EverForever• 3 years ago

I can and I don't have gold-plated cables nor am I part of an audiophile community. The people who say you can't are worse than the audiophiles themselves, who I didn't even know before all the whining that there is no one in the world who can hear the difference. One guy had an audio test site and I did the one on my Chromebook with the Chromebook speakers and got 100%. I can definitely hear the difference between a real flac and mp3. The quality is not necessarily better but the highs go higher with flac. MP3s don't go that high, they're clipped and you can hear that. That's how you can, I can tell with songs. In addition, when I play the same song over bluetooth with my iPhone (Spotify, highest quality) and Walkman A55 (Flac) over a 300€ sound system, even my father can hear the difference and he is 53 and worked his whole life in a factory. The statistics on the subject that I have read (from discussion links because I was perplex people said no one can hear a difference) clearly said that most people don’t hear the difference, but that there are indeed people who can tell the difference!

thelastparadise2• 3 years ago

Just like no one could possibly perceive over 60 FPS, right?

I call BS.

kderbyma2• 3 years ago

yes...but only after 500-1000 dollars and a decent preamp and dac

spondylosaurus• 3 years ago

Even sitting in complete silence with my (couple-hundred) dollar over-the-ear headphones, the High Quality streaming audio still sounds pretty damn good to me.

One interesting counterpoint is that I have several albums that sound far better on vinyl than on any streaming platform, but that's a matter of audio mixing rather than audio quality—whoever keeps doing "digital remasters" that have no low end whatsoever, you're killing me!

dehrmann• 3 years ago

Yeah, vinyl was mixed differently because of limitations of the physical media, especially around high frequencies, low frequencies, stereo not being perfect, and "resolution" getting worse towards the center because of CAV.

ebb_earl_co3• 3 years ago

I pay for Tidal’s highest tier because you can get a fairly high number of albums in Dolby Atmos which sounds great at home and even the AirPods Pro will do their spatial audio thing with 5.1-channel tracks. It’s not surprising that I can hear a difference in this situation, I suppose.

wilg2• 3 years ago

FWIW Apple Music also has the Atmos versions of things

Pet_Ant• 3 years ago

What albums are well mixed for Atmos?

I had a 5.1 mix of The Black Album and it felt like a gimmick and it wasn’t actually leveraged artistically.

I definitely have heard stereo mixes with thought given to the channels. Jagged Little Pill being one of them.

doublepg23• 3 years ago

Might be a Pascals wager of sorts but if I'm spending so much $$ on audio equipment why wouldn't I want to remove compression from the equation?

daedalus_j• 3 years ago

If you play music on a half decent car stereo, or home sound system, yes, you can 100% tell the difference. Spotify "high" sounds absolutely flat compared to a lossless rip of the same track. (and doesn't have anywhere near the bass)

On earbuds? No.

danpalmer• 3 years ago

I do hope not. I enjoy the lossless audio on Apple Music and don’t really want my subscription price to double if they see Spotify charging a higher price for it.

SkyPuncher• 3 years ago

Spotify seems to be doing everything they can to get in the way of listening to music.

I’m getting very tired of popup screens at the most annoying of times.

lnxg33k1• 3 years ago

Precise precise the reason I stopped using spotify, I wish enough people would send the message that our time is not theirs, and they absolutely must not take the whole screen hostage for their crap

Woshiwuja• 3 years ago

Unless you got a good sound system this doesnt even matter, wonder what the market share for this is

4oo4• 3 years ago

So this means that royalty rates for lossless streaming will be double the royalty rates for lossy streaming, right? (/s)

Since mastering for Spotify is usually optimized for earbuds and cheap speakers (i.e. more compressed) instead of a decent set of speakers/headphones that try to give as much soundstage/detail as possible, this is likely going to just be a huge waste of bandwidth.

Spotify code suggests HiFi tier is coming with lossless audio for $20 / month

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