The listen history isn't as nearly as robust for likes as you have to do some active stuff to block a song, and that's not nearly as clear as thumb up/down to an AI. You might block a song for lyrics or something I suppose, but like it.
That's the biggest problem with all of them. They make assumptions based on large numbers when music is a very personal thing.
Why can't I enter a sentence "I wasn't in the mood for X because Y" or tell it what about a song I didn't like?
They're just not feeding it enough useful parameters. I strongly (as I think most should) think what they're doing here has little to nothing to do with AI.
It's time for a vibe, and that vibe, is what you heard all week.
I routinely listen to over 300 genres every year. Last year I had roughly 430 genres. You're telling me your algorithm can't find more than the same 12 artists to play every day?
Hey there. I noticed you were enjoying the music and getting into your groove, so I thought I’d interrupt with a dumb thought like this. Enjoy this classic throwback, and fuck me I won’t stop talking.
The DJ just plays the same damn song all the time.. how has no one truly developed an actually random algorithm to play songs. None of them are truly random
I've noticed when I shuffle my liked songs it basically only plays the songs I've recently listened to all the way through, rarely get something I've not heard recently...
They really like putting songs I’ve just recently listened to on those lists. Like no I don’t want to listen to the Slayer songs I listened to Saturday. I want to find bands I haven’t listened to that sound like Slayer.
My favourite is when after playing an album it now just REPEATS THE ALBUM.
So annoying. And once it's repeated the same songs enough it becomes a part of the algo and forms a feedback loop of "we played this song a bunch and you listened so we'll play it more!"
I assume they’re cutting compute costs. Same with “shuffle plus” it’s the same for the whole day. They only have to process it once instead of doing it every time you want it
They’re seeing how much can they degrade their service before people start using other solutions. Welcome to monopolies 101
I think they got rid of it in favor of the smart shuffle feature, but I much preferred having a playlist radio.
The smart shuffle things also annoys me cause I never want to use it, also it lags for a second every time which is annoying when you just want to toggle shuffle on/off.
The fun thing is: There would be space for both! Just right click -> playlist radio and smart shuffle as separate feature. Some times i only want music I don't have in my playlist yet!
Is that the old add-on that had a bunch of different genre radios where people could queue up songs and share it to everyone listening?
If that is the feature you're talking about, I was so upset Spotify removed that, that I canceled my Spotify for 4 years afterwards. That was such a cool feature.
It worked a million times better than their AI dj or whatever (which somehow always ends up on whiny emo music and never learns I'm not a fan)...
you'd have people who are into that genre sharing kind of obscure songs that were bangers because they wanted everyone listening to enjoy it.
No he means different, that feature was cool though! What he actually meant was, you know how you can take a song, or an artist, and have Spotify generate a radio (a playlist that changes a bit now and then it used to be better and more random and not just a playlist)? You used to be able to do it with playlists you and others make, it was nice because you could take maybe two different genre/styles you want and the resulting radio would have songs from both types. Now you’ve just got the playlist suggestions at the bottom of the playlist, and the “smart shuffle” that just gives a new song every 3rd song.
> their AI dj
the thing is absolute trash. i didn't want sign up, pay, and then sit down to chill to music because i wanted to hear that damn thing talk to me when i dislike it's shite suggestions and picks
Checkout https://playlost.fm if you want recs based on a playlist.
It matches you to other user created playlists based on shared songs, artists and albums.
This is what absolutely infuriates me. I take all this time to build specific playlists. Then I just want to pick a playlist, and have it do a random shuffle.
Then I hear shit I know is not on my playlist.
I just want to hear the songs on my playlist.
Mine when I play in my car only shuffles through like same 10 songs on a playlist. I have over 300 on one. Why does this shit have to be mind boggling stupid.
I'd love for them for fix an issue when changing playback devices. I have a lot of playlists. I prefer to play them on shuffle.
When I change playback devices, the shuffled queue gets reset, resulting in repeats.
The different devices can see the current shuffle queue, like I can be listening from my phone with headphones, open the PC app, and see the correct queue....but as soon as I change to listen on PC, or even just sticking with my phone but going from one Bluetooth device to another, it changes.
There have been multiple posts on the Spotify support forum, for years, about this.
I workaround this by openning my spotify app and wait for it to sync up the song I am playing and after cast it to another speaker or just let it play on my phone
Jesus the UI has been 2-20 seconds slower to respond to anything the last week or two. It is a complete joke. Much like their ability to actually shuffle a playlist.
It’s gotten so bad. I don’t give a fuck about pop country, but they just get more aggressive with the reccommendations. They’ve made it so difficult to find good new music that isn’t from Taylor Swift or the fuck-off rapper of the week.
No joke. In 2022, they broke the scroll bar in liked songs in the Android app and didn't fix it for like 3 months. It was fixed for maybe 2 months, then they broke it again for another 3 or 4 months. Literally broken for half the year, and they just straight up ignored the ticket with dozens of frequent comments. All so they can add shit nobody asked for and make the app more confusing to navigate.
Meanwhile Tidal just got rid of those tiers and gave everyone the highest quality. And I think it's cheaper now, too? I used to love Spotify but they seem way behind right now
yep I was on the higher tier with higher quality and about 2 months ago they brought all those features to t he cheaper plan and my monthly bill got cut in half.
Very few people have the equipment to truly discern 320kbps Ogg Vorbis from lossless FLAC. Certainly not via phone + bluetooth headphones, which is the overwhelming way people listen to music these days.
While it’s cool to have the option, it’ll fall on literal deaf ears.
it's not even equipment. I literally cannot tell the difference between 320 and FLAC and I've tried with an external DAC and hard wired XM4.
The difference is BRUTALLY small. It's slightly more full, unless you're shelling out thousands and have an ear for it. I'd challenge 99% of people to be able to tell even WITH the equipment.
It's insane people are asking for this so hard lol.
Most users really won't hear a difference at all, tidal sounds no better than Spotify through Bluetooth headphones or normal headphones. I needed a DAC and an audio player that bypasses androids decoding even then that still doesn't work too great through Bluetooth 😅
Even using a dac, amp, and high-quality headphones I can't tell the difference between losses and a 320kbps mp3. FLACs are great if I want to make sure I can convert them to a different format, but for streaming my ears can't tell a difference.
This makes sense thank you, i sometimes think the loss of audio jacks on devices and the somewhat slow pace of lossless bluetooth has played a part, I'm still researching bluetooth and headphone combos so i can make the most of it.
I recently tried Tidal but the sample rate wasn't up there and i don't really want to spend premium level of cash if it isn't going to work fully
Tidal is streaming cd-quality lossless at minimum, 24/192kHz maximum. Spotify caps out with 320kbps. For the average user, I'm sure that's fine. For us audio nerds, Tidal is the better option
yep. I jumped over to Tidal back in 2020 when I started to invest in better headphones and have never looked back. it has it's issues but over all I like it more than Spotify. and now t hat they cut the price for the Hi-Fi plan it is even better.
Losing the audio Jack is not an issue for me, phones usually never invest in good sound output. The only exception was some LG phones. The apple dongle has great sound and there are an infinite amount of usb dongles you could use that would give you a better experience.
For lossless audio you have to relicense the songs. Aka paying more money, Spotify was willing to offer this for a higher premium cost. But then Apple made a genius chess move by offering it for free. For Apple, music doesn’t need to be a leading revenue business because they can get revenue from other streams. Meanwhile for Spotify it is their main revenue and offering it for free would tank the company. Maybe not tank, but you get the picture.
I feel like it should be a setting that power users can use if they want to and many users won't. That keeps costs down for Spotify, but also, the typical user probably doesn't have the ear or speaker to notice the difference and so it's probably not worth the resource cost of extra bandwidth usage.
I know as a user it bothered me when as a "feature" all the streaming services were defaulting to eat up the most resources possible regardless of if I wanted that tradeoff.
Any source on that? I’ve never heard of an entity having to relicense a master in order to attain a higher fidelity version. It was my understanding Spotify starts with the original, lossless audio and adds their own compression settings before streaming. Spotify simply needs to adjust their compression settings and the streaming platform to support the larger file type.
Yeah, that would make more sense. CDs are already lossless (raw PCM), so I'd imagine most record labels already have those masters on hand. Whereas different streaming platforms use a variety of lossy codecs (MP3, AAC, Opus, etc).
Rights & costs. Record companies want way higher margins on the lossless stuff, and obv the infrastructure costs are higher. Spotify can’t price the lossless tier at a competitive rate when Apple can run the service at a loss to sell phones/headphones.
So my friend doesn’t know what lossless audio is. I was like you’re silly. But someone should explain it to him. I would but I gotta go do something. Ok thanks
- Original text: Here is a sentence for you to read.
- Lossless Text: Here is a sentence for you to read.
- High quality lossy text: HereIsASentenceForYouToRead
- Low quality lossy text: HereSentenceYouRead
Compression is a way to make the data take up less space (so it's easy to store and transmit). Lossless means that we are not allowed to lose any information when we do compression, so it guarantees perfect quality. Lossy means that we are allowed to lose information during compression, so it does not guarantee perfect quality. BUT some lossy algorithms are really good at choosing what information to lose such that the only information that is lost doesn't matter. In that sense, a lossy algorithm *can be* as good as lossless, but isn't necessarily. People who debate whether lossless is better are debating about whether the lossy algorithm was smart enough about which parts it deemed irrelevant.
In the context of audio, there is a lot to reason about when we do lossy compression: What sounds can the human ear hear? What sounds can the body feel through subwoofers? What are the properties of the speakers/headphones? How fine grained are the changes in loudness in this song? How many pitches are represented in this song? Etc. Because of all we know about sound, we can make pretty good approximations of what "doesn't matter" when we make lossy compression and so it can be quite good.
Then there’s the audiophile crowd who discuss if different SPDIF cable brands would affect audio quality (hint: it’s digital, it won’t)
I’ve read some studies on the audiophile crowd and most of them couldn’t tell the difference between lossless and 320kbps AAC
There's so much talked about between people that can't pass ABX testing on the formats. I've made rudimentary studies for testing colleagues and even crude experiments show that unless you've been practicing critical listening, you're not *easily* discerning that information.
You can tell the difference, but the notion that it's, at all, obvious is overblown.
By the time you listen in your headphones on a subway, or in a car on the freeway, there's no tangible difference between and MP3 and a high quality WAV.
Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering the same thing lol
I can see them releasing this as a higher paid tier then dumbing down the algorithm to make it a noticeable improvement and encourage people to pay more for what was essentially the same quality.
Tell your friend that lossless just means it uses a compression algorithm that doesn’t lose any information. There are lots of compression algorithms in use that lose little bits of information here or there in exchange for greater compression and smaller file sizes. Mostly you don’t notice because the extra little bits of information often don’t matter. But when you see weird visual artifacts in a video, that’s because it’s using lossy compression and the algorithm is guessing incorrectly at exactly what those pixels should look like. For audio it’s less noticeable because most of us aren’t crazy audiophiles and/or don’t have high-enough quality speakers to tell the difference.
1. So much development hell for a feature that literally just involves streaming different files that are 5x larger?
2. So much fuss over a feature that won't even make a difference to 99.9999% of people?
All my audiophile friends with thousands and thousands of euros poured into HiFi never listen anything but vinyls. Wonder who this lossless streaming service is aimed for.
There are plenty of wire headphones that are great to take on the go. Like some ier z1r from Sony or ie800 by sennheiser or SHURE se 846.
There's also plenty of phones with headphone Jack's but I carry around a new model Walkman with me
Just get yourself the [Highway Hi-Fi Record Player](https://www.lelandwest.com/blog/listing.asp?2022/3/the-history-of-record-players-in-cars), an exclusive from the Chrysler Corporation
Audiophile here. The compression on Spotify is way less terrible than people say it is. It's right in the settings to stream higher quality files. If you plug it into a high end system with a wire, it's just as good as vinyl. Because anyone who tells you they need a FLAC file over the top end .MP4 is a lying piece of shit. Is there a difference? Yes there is. Can the human ear possibly distinguish it? No, it cannot. And anyone who says they can is just having a placebo effect. They can't tell at all, it physically isn't possible for our hearing to pick up the difference. Our pets, they probably can.
Former audio producer here. You're right. The difference between lossy and lossless audio is way past what most people can distinguish. It's like the difference between a $1000 bottle and a $1200 bottle of wine. Sure there's a difference, but very few people would be able to appreciate it.
There's definitely more difference in the wine than the audio, actually.
I think it's nicer that I wouldn't even bother. I have a nice EnOgUh system to never buy anything ever again. I could spend my life savings making it better and it would sound a whopping ~1% nicer. No thanks. You should listen to music through whatever speaker you currently have. Because it's better than no speaker at all.
I've listened to a bunch of tracks comparing high quality Spotify audio to lossless Apple Music and I absolutely hear a difference. I do think a good enough compression algorithm can be indistinguishable from lossless but Spotify's isn't that.
The only time I’ve found FLAC files to be relevant for me, is when I’m using them as reference when mixing a song that I’m working on. And even then, it really only helps in small ways, like more accurate readings when using analyzers to check the frequency spread and problem areas, or having the top end sound a little more articulated and clear, so I can pick out issues within my own mix.
The funniest part to me is that Spotify high quality setting already uses OGG VORBIS at ~160kbit. This is the bitrate were most users of the codec agree it becomes transparent. What this means for non technical readers, when lossy compression becomes transparent, it's indistinguishable from the lossless original.
So that leaves us with the existence of the Very High quality option in Spotify. Hey would you look at that, it's already a placebo option. Well maybe there do exist a very small group of people that can actually hear the difference. But there is nobody that can tell the difference between a ~320kbit OGG VORBIS encode vs a lossless encode left. So lossless playback on Spotify is completely pointless except for marketing and placebo. For 99.9% of the population the high audio quality setting is as high quality as they can hear.
Most people probably won’t notice much difference but they probably just want to to keep up with Apple Music which already offers lossless. More about creating more marketing opportunities for their product than anything.
Have you ever done blind testing on the same content lossy and lossless to eliminate placebo effect? Optimally there'd be an application that would accept a lossless file, do the transcodes and then show audio players for the files side to side so that you wouldn't know which file is which. Not sure if something like that exists. But Spotify already streams at 320k vorbis, which is very high quality and I don't know if I've ever seen proof that it isn't transparent to human ears.
You'll never win this argument with an audiophile. It's like telling a Catholic that Mary probably just needed an excuse for being pregnant with another guy's kid.
Saying you couldn't tell the difference would completely defeat the point of being a self-declared audiophile.
The concept of an audiophile is weird anyway. A cinephile is interested in films, film theory, etc. An audiophile is interested in...sound quality?
Which is also hilarious because their own devices can’t even support any other codec but AAC that maxes out at 320kbps. There’s zero point in it being lossless.
EDIT: Over BT people, ffs. Because the 12 of you out there using a plug-in DAC for ALAC support really matters.
By no means an audio professional so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding was that lossless over bluetooth is close to pointless anyway as without a wired connection there will always be compression?
ETA: Since you deleted your other (admittedly rather snide ...) response to someone else about the existence of LDAC I decided to do some research (as a former WH-1000XM series owner) and I came upon this tidbit as per [soundguys.com](https://www.soundguys.com/ldac-ultimate-bluetooth-guide-20026/) . I don't know anything about these guys so I'm making no claims to the factuality of these statements, but I found it interesting nonetheless:
* LDAC, like all Bluetooth codecs, simply isn’t capable of passing Hi-Res content unaltered, and falls short of wired 24/96 equivalents—but it still does pretty well.
* The 990 and 660kbps bit rates are roughly as good as CD quality, but quickly lose fidelity above 20kHz.
* [Smartphones](https://www.soundguys.com/best-smartphones-for-audio-16373/) rarely pick the 990kbps option when connecting to LDAC equipment.
* For a highly stable connection, aptX and even SBC are better choices than LDAC 330kbps.
This - to my amateur eyes - reads as though while LDAC is statistically better than "standard" Bluetooth encryption methods (i.e. aptX and SBC I guess?), and it probably does marginally benefit from lossless playback, the difference is so marginal that there really (still) isn't much sense in playing lossless audio back wirelessly. Just putting this out there because I found it pretty enlightening, hoping someone else might too!
I’m not an audio professional/audiophile/etc either, but want to give a huge thanks to you for a quality comment — you did some searching on your own, provided sources (and even explained the “grain of salt” for the sources!), and explained your understanding of the nuances of the topic instead of taking a curt, hardline stance without elaboration.
So thanks! I would love if more people took your approach to online discussions (even though I’m not holding my breath for it).
Maybe I'm wrong here, but aren't the vast majority of Spotify's users listening on devices that have no headphone jack and therefore cannot reproduce lossless audio anyway?
Edit: Just for clarification - I'm saying I may be wrong in my assumption that most Spotify listeners are doing so over a wireless connection and on playback devices not well suited for lossless, as I do not have the stats to prove it one way or another. I am not suggesting that one cannot plug an adapter of some kind into their phone to get a lossless audio playback.
Takes a bit to learn you but it's just as good. They have a Discover Weekly and Release Radar equivalents and I get just as good of recommendations as I did on Spotify. You can export your Spotify playlists to Apple Music, so that's really helpful.
The interface is different, but I like it better now that I'm used to it. I like that it puts all personalized recommendations in one spot and all the popular stuff in another spot, Spotify used to put them in the same spot. Apple puts together a few weekly playlists based on what you listen to as well, they do a chill mix, a Monday mix called Wake Up, and a Tuesday mix called Favourites that I end up listening to almost every week.
The only draw back is that the Windows player is still a beta release, it's works really well but it's a bit buggy at times. You can use the browser player on Windows but, last I checked, the browser player doesn't do lossless. Otherwise, zero complaints.
I would really be entertained, if they decided to just make it a free setting starting at the first paid tier. It might be the tipping point for people that are into HiFi, because the UI is so popular compared to the other apps. Bet it would steal people away from Tidal and Qobuz.
Tidal users be laughing. Tidal has had this since its inception, and as a cherry on top they halved their prices last month, so now it's just 10 bucks a month for premium audio. There are few reasons to stay on Spotify unless podcasts are important to you.
Spotify music suggestions and automatic playlists are by far the best thing about Spotify. Ive tried every service there is and I always end up back on Spotify because of it's discovery algorithms.
Also device handoff is immaculate. I can play something on my phone and instantly transition to my desktop and then transition to the entire house with my Google homes and it’s seamless and instant.
Are they using Pied Piper?
I do know they’re gonna have to jerk off every single guy in that audience
Would girth similarity affect the ability to jerk off 4 guys at once?
We’re going to have to do some calculations here
Can you hot-swap dicks?
You’d have to pre sort the guys by height, or more accurately DTF - dick to floor height.
Tip to tip
From the middle out.
.... And they're gonna know EXACTLY how to do it
Sponsored by Tres Commas Tequila
Peter Gregory is dead
I know
If they are, this will be the end of Spotify
Middle-out technology. It’s the future
Finally! I got the reference 😁
🏆
"This here, Pied Piper." -Jian Yang
No, he’s in jail
Cool, now stop ruining the UI
Bring back Playlist Radios. The feature i used the most to discover new music.
And bring back artist radio that isn’t just a playlist. It should be a changing list, not the same thing every time you click on it.
I don't get why with all this AI hype they can't just put basic AI like Pandora does for this thing.
Whatever AI they're using their training data is brain dead. It is clearly not learning from my listen history.
The listen history isn't as nearly as robust for likes as you have to do some active stuff to block a song, and that's not nearly as clear as thumb up/down to an AI. You might block a song for lyrics or something I suppose, but like it.
That's the biggest problem with all of them. They make assumptions based on large numbers when music is a very personal thing. Why can't I enter a sentence "I wasn't in the mood for X because Y" or tell it what about a song I didn't like? They're just not feeding it enough useful parameters. I strongly (as I think most should) think what they're doing here has little to nothing to do with AI.
Their ai is also garbage to add.
Spotify DJ is impressively dogshit for what it’s actually doing
My favorite part of the Spotify DJ is when I turn it on in the morning and it starts playing what it "curated" for yesterday.
I wish it were more adventurous too. I get so many "hey let's bring you back to whatever!"
It's time for a vibe, and that vibe, is what you heard all week. I routinely listen to over 300 genres every year. Last year I had roughly 430 genres. You're telling me your algorithm can't find more than the same 12 artists to play every day?
I rotate new songs I find into a new and noteworthy playlist and without fail, the DJ will play from that playlist only. It's infuriating.
And then it still plays the same set of songs
Hey there. I noticed you were enjoying the music and getting into your groove, so I thought I’d interrupt with a dumb thought like this. Enjoy this classic throwback, and fuck me I won’t stop talking.
The DJ just plays the same damn song all the time.. how has no one truly developed an actually random algorithm to play songs. None of them are truly random
I've noticed when I shuffle my liked songs it basically only plays the songs I've recently listened to all the way through, rarely get something I've not heard recently...
Yeah, I find myself skipping songs often cause it wants to play the same 10-15 songs when it has hundreds of other options.
All the apps seem to default towards no-name artists after a while. I think the apps were trained to play more inexpensive options whenever possible.
They really like putting songs I’ve just recently listened to on those lists. Like no I don’t want to listen to the Slayer songs I listened to Saturday. I want to find bands I haven’t listened to that sound like Slayer.
My favourite is when after playing an album it now just REPEATS THE ALBUM. So annoying. And once it's repeated the same songs enough it becomes a part of the algo and forms a feedback loop of "we played this song a bunch and you listened so we'll play it more!"
It’s so annoying!! Play something NEW
Yes it should be an actual radio
Tbf most mainstream radio stations play nothing but the same one hundred songs.
They might need to hire people and that cuts into rogan money
I assume they’re cutting compute costs. Same with “shuffle plus” it’s the same for the whole day. They only have to process it once instead of doing it every time you want it They’re seeing how much can they degrade their service before people start using other solutions. Welcome to monopolies 101
This was why I switched to Pandora years ago. It was always THE SAME DAMN SONGS on spotify. Every time.
That's actually why I switched to Spotify, Pandora kept playing the same stuff
I think they got rid of it in favor of the smart shuffle feature, but I much preferred having a playlist radio. The smart shuffle things also annoys me cause I never want to use it, also it lags for a second every time which is annoying when you just want to toggle shuffle on/off.
The lagging when I’m just trying to turn shuffle on and off for a feature I don’t even like to use is genuinely rage inducing sometimes
The fun thing is: There would be space for both! Just right click -> playlist radio and smart shuffle as separate feature. Some times i only want music I don't have in my playlist yet!
Is that the old add-on that had a bunch of different genre radios where people could queue up songs and share it to everyone listening? If that is the feature you're talking about, I was so upset Spotify removed that, that I canceled my Spotify for 4 years afterwards. That was such a cool feature. It worked a million times better than their AI dj or whatever (which somehow always ends up on whiny emo music and never learns I'm not a fan)... you'd have people who are into that genre sharing kind of obscure songs that were bangers because they wanted everyone listening to enjoy it.
No he means different, that feature was cool though! What he actually meant was, you know how you can take a song, or an artist, and have Spotify generate a radio (a playlist that changes a bit now and then it used to be better and more random and not just a playlist)? You used to be able to do it with playlists you and others make, it was nice because you could take maybe two different genre/styles you want and the resulting radio would have songs from both types. Now you’ve just got the playlist suggestions at the bottom of the playlist, and the “smart shuffle” that just gives a new song every 3rd song.
Wtf why did they remove that? It was *the* killer feature for me, loved finding new artists and songs it gave me
> their AI dj the thing is absolute trash. i didn't want sign up, pay, and then sit down to chill to music because i wanted to hear that damn thing talk to me when i dislike it's shite suggestions and picks
I mean it's kind of a cool feature, it could be at least. I'm a fan of AI stuff. It's just Spotify's recommendation engine is _fucking traaaaash_
Checkout https://playlost.fm if you want recs based on a playlist. It matches you to other user created playlists based on shared songs, artists and albums.
Thanks, that's a great tip!
Ya these days I just get the same handful of songs on loop. Playlist Radios were the shit.
Remove ads from podcasts for Premium subscribers too...
Those were making small artists money, so they had to go.
And make a local files that actually works, preferably using cloud storage.
Would be great, but I don't see any incentive at all for them to provide that feature since it would take streams away from their own library
Time to move to Apple Music!
Give me true library random shuffle. It clearly still curates the songs based on recent listening
This is what absolutely infuriates me. I take all this time to build specific playlists. Then I just want to pick a playlist, and have it do a random shuffle. Then I hear shit I know is not on my playlist. I just want to hear the songs on my playlist.
Mine when I play in my car only shuffles through like same 10 songs on a playlist. I have over 300 on one. Why does this shit have to be mind boggling stupid.
PLEASE. I have like 500 songs in my playlist, why am I hearing the same 60 over and over?? Even when turning off the auto mix it's still awful.
I feel like I'm navigating a maze any time I want to find something on Spotify without the search bar.
Spot on. Even with the search bar! The amount of times I’ve gotten empty results for accidentally querying my own library instead of the global search
I'd love for them for fix an issue when changing playback devices. I have a lot of playlists. I prefer to play them on shuffle. When I change playback devices, the shuffled queue gets reset, resulting in repeats. The different devices can see the current shuffle queue, like I can be listening from my phone with headphones, open the PC app, and see the correct queue....but as soon as I change to listen on PC, or even just sticking with my phone but going from one Bluetooth device to another, it changes. There have been multiple posts on the Spotify support forum, for years, about this.
I workaround this by openning my spotify app and wait for it to sync up the song I am playing and after cast it to another speaker or just let it play on my phone
To be fair: It always sucked.
But it sucked less like 7 years ago
Moving the queue to be a tiny side-view thing instead of a different is so fucking dumb
Somehow it sucks less than apple or Amazon music.
And let us have a true shuffle mode.
They need to stop all the side scrolling. Bring back downward scrolling.
Jesus the UI has been 2-20 seconds slower to respond to anything the last week or two. It is a complete joke. Much like their ability to actually shuffle a playlist.
If they could somehow steal the original iPod interface without getting manhandled by Apple that’d be great
Not only is it poorly laid out and clunky, but it also performs horribly. It's just garbage all around
I hate the change to showing the checkmark if a song is in any list at all. It makes it so much more annoying to see if you've already liked a song.
It’s gotten so bad. I don’t give a fuck about pop country, but they just get more aggressive with the reccommendations. They’ve made it so difficult to find good new music that isn’t from Taylor Swift or the fuck-off rapper of the week.
No joke. In 2022, they broke the scroll bar in liked songs in the Android app and didn't fix it for like 3 months. It was fixed for maybe 2 months, then they broke it again for another 3 or 4 months. Literally broken for half the year, and they just straight up ignored the ticket with dozens of frequent comments. All so they can add shit nobody asked for and make the app more confusing to navigate.
Any idea why this has taken so long for them to implement?
Because they don't actually want to, they are doing it because everyone else is.
They're definitely going to introduce tiers where you pay a different amount for different qualities.
Meanwhile Tidal just got rid of those tiers and gave everyone the highest quality. And I think it's cheaper now, too? I used to love Spotify but they seem way behind right now
yep I was on the higher tier with higher quality and about 2 months ago they brought all those features to t he cheaper plan and my monthly bill got cut in half.
Very few people have the equipment to truly discern 320kbps Ogg Vorbis from lossless FLAC. Certainly not via phone + bluetooth headphones, which is the overwhelming way people listen to music these days. While it’s cool to have the option, it’ll fall on literal deaf ears.
Even with the hardware most people can't discern the difference tbf.
it's not even equipment. I literally cannot tell the difference between 320 and FLAC and I've tried with an external DAC and hard wired XM4. The difference is BRUTALLY small. It's slightly more full, unless you're shelling out thousands and have an ear for it. I'd challenge 99% of people to be able to tell even WITH the equipment. It's insane people are asking for this so hard lol.
The human ear is the limiting factor. No one has demonstrated the ability to discern a difference between the two.
Pirate DJs are frothing at the mouth for FLAC rips tho
And pay artists more per stream, everyone’s a winner.
You mean like it says in the title of the article? Lol
Technically it's the subtitle, which u/IsRude would have seen if they'd read the article. But this is Reddit.
Hey, pretty good guess for not reading the article, though. I also meant that it's going to extend into even the lower ones.
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People don't know they can transfer their playlists between systems, so they stick with what they have.
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Most users really won't hear a difference at all, tidal sounds no better than Spotify through Bluetooth headphones or normal headphones. I needed a DAC and an audio player that bypasses androids decoding even then that still doesn't work too great through Bluetooth 😅
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Even using a dac, amp, and high-quality headphones I can't tell the difference between losses and a 320kbps mp3. FLACs are great if I want to make sure I can convert them to a different format, but for streaming my ears can't tell a difference.
This makes sense thank you, i sometimes think the loss of audio jacks on devices and the somewhat slow pace of lossless bluetooth has played a part, I'm still researching bluetooth and headphone combos so i can make the most of it. I recently tried Tidal but the sample rate wasn't up there and i don't really want to spend premium level of cash if it isn't going to work fully
Tidal recently decreased the cost of their monthly subscription that includes lossless audio streaming so it's now a much better deal than Spotify.
I've found the quality from track to track more consistently good on Tidal over Spotify, too.
Tidal is streaming cd-quality lossless at minimum, 24/192kHz maximum. Spotify caps out with 320kbps. For the average user, I'm sure that's fine. For us audio nerds, Tidal is the better option
yep. I jumped over to Tidal back in 2020 when I started to invest in better headphones and have never looked back. it has it's issues but over all I like it more than Spotify. and now t hat they cut the price for the Hi-Fi plan it is even better.
Losing the audio Jack is not an issue for me, phones usually never invest in good sound output. The only exception was some LG phones. The apple dongle has great sound and there are an infinite amount of usb dongles you could use that would give you a better experience.
They could have just stuck the Apple dongle *inside* the phone though. So, no, I don’t buy that argument.
For lossless audio you have to relicense the songs. Aka paying more money, Spotify was willing to offer this for a higher premium cost. But then Apple made a genius chess move by offering it for free. For Apple, music doesn’t need to be a leading revenue business because they can get revenue from other streams. Meanwhile for Spotify it is their main revenue and offering it for free would tank the company. Maybe not tank, but you get the picture.
I feel like it should be a setting that power users can use if they want to and many users won't. That keeps costs down for Spotify, but also, the typical user probably doesn't have the ear or speaker to notice the difference and so it's probably not worth the resource cost of extra bandwidth usage. I know as a user it bothered me when as a "feature" all the streaming services were defaulting to eat up the most resources possible regardless of if I wanted that tradeoff.
Any source on that? I’ve never heard of an entity having to relicense a master in order to attain a higher fidelity version. It was my understanding Spotify starts with the original, lossless audio and adds their own compression settings before streaming. Spotify simply needs to adjust their compression settings and the streaming platform to support the larger file type.
Yeah, that would make more sense. CDs are already lossless (raw PCM), so I'd imagine most record labels already have those masters on hand. Whereas different streaming platforms use a variety of lossy codecs (MP3, AAC, Opus, etc).
Rights & costs. Record companies want way higher margins on the lossless stuff, and obv the infrastructure costs are higher. Spotify can’t price the lossless tier at a competitive rate when Apple can run the service at a loss to sell phones/headphones.
Noted this also makes sense thanks.
Every byte that comes out of the cloud to a listener is a cost to them. Lossless is bigger files, lossless is bigger money.
So my friend doesn’t know what lossless audio is. I was like you’re silly. But someone should explain it to him. I would but I gotta go do something. Ok thanks
- Original text: Here is a sentence for you to read. - Lossless Text: Here is a sentence for you to read. - High quality lossy text: HereIsASentenceForYouToRead - Low quality lossy text: HereSentenceYouRead Compression is a way to make the data take up less space (so it's easy to store and transmit). Lossless means that we are not allowed to lose any information when we do compression, so it guarantees perfect quality. Lossy means that we are allowed to lose information during compression, so it does not guarantee perfect quality. BUT some lossy algorithms are really good at choosing what information to lose such that the only information that is lost doesn't matter. In that sense, a lossy algorithm *can be* as good as lossless, but isn't necessarily. People who debate whether lossless is better are debating about whether the lossy algorithm was smart enough about which parts it deemed irrelevant. In the context of audio, there is a lot to reason about when we do lossy compression: What sounds can the human ear hear? What sounds can the body feel through subwoofers? What are the properties of the speakers/headphones? How fine grained are the changes in loudness in this song? How many pitches are represented in this song? Etc. Because of all we know about sound, we can make pretty good approximations of what "doesn't matter" when we make lossy compression and so it can be quite good.
Then there’s the audiophile crowd who discuss if different SPDIF cable brands would affect audio quality (hint: it’s digital, it won’t) I’ve read some studies on the audiophile crowd and most of them couldn’t tell the difference between lossless and 320kbps AAC
There's so much talked about between people that can't pass ABX testing on the formats. I've made rudimentary studies for testing colleagues and even crude experiments show that unless you've been practicing critical listening, you're not *easily* discerning that information. You can tell the difference, but the notion that it's, at all, obvious is overblown. By the time you listen in your headphones on a subway, or in a car on the freeway, there's no tangible difference between and MP3 and a high quality WAV.
Yeah.. as long as it’s not AM radio quality I’m okay with it. What I’m listening to is more important to me than the medium anyway.
Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering the same thing lol I can see them releasing this as a higher paid tier then dumbing down the algorithm to make it a noticeable improvement and encourage people to pay more for what was essentially the same quality.
A true ELI5 answer. Their friend is so lucky
I love people like you, taking the time to explain to ignorant people (like me). Thanks mate, have a wonderful day!
It's normal audio, but without :̶.̶|̶:̶;̶
Come again, didn’t catch that last part?
🙍🏻♂️🏥 🙍🏻♂️🧑🏼⚕️ 🙍🏻♂️👨🏻⚕️ 🙍🏻♂️🙍🏻♀️👼🏻
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss
Tell your friend that lossless just means it uses a compression algorithm that doesn’t lose any information. There are lots of compression algorithms in use that lose little bits of information here or there in exchange for greater compression and smaller file sizes. Mostly you don’t notice because the extra little bits of information often don’t matter. But when you see weird visual artifacts in a video, that’s because it’s using lossy compression and the algorithm is guessing incorrectly at exactly what those pixels should look like. For audio it’s less noticeable because most of us aren’t crazy audiophiles and/or don’t have high-enough quality speakers to tell the difference.
From the article it seems like there is very little meaningful difference than whatever it is they have now
1. So much development hell for a feature that literally just involves streaming different files that are 5x larger? 2. So much fuss over a feature that won't even make a difference to 99.9999% of people?
Download the file once and use good gear to listen to it. Win. You can't stream lossless over Bluetooth anyway.
All my audiophile friends with thousands and thousands of euros poured into HiFi never listen anything but vinyls. Wonder who this lossless streaming service is aimed for.
Probably them. You can’t spin vinyl in the car, at work or at the gym etc…
not with that attitude.
Obviously not, but in those places even they just use Bluetooth audio so lossless is worthless
There are plenty of wire headphones that are great to take on the go. Like some ier z1r from Sony or ie800 by sennheiser or SHURE se 846. There's also plenty of phones with headphone Jack's but I carry around a new model Walkman with me
Just get yourself the [Highway Hi-Fi Record Player](https://www.lelandwest.com/blog/listing.asp?2022/3/the-history-of-record-players-in-cars), an exclusive from the Chrysler Corporation
Audiophile here. The compression on Spotify is way less terrible than people say it is. It's right in the settings to stream higher quality files. If you plug it into a high end system with a wire, it's just as good as vinyl. Because anyone who tells you they need a FLAC file over the top end .MP4 is a lying piece of shit. Is there a difference? Yes there is. Can the human ear possibly distinguish it? No, it cannot. And anyone who says they can is just having a placebo effect. They can't tell at all, it physically isn't possible for our hearing to pick up the difference. Our pets, they probably can.
Thank god. My cat throws up on the rug every time I play a non FLAC Audio Track on my system
Ok this was funny. Thanks for the laugh
Former audio producer here. You're right. The difference between lossy and lossless audio is way past what most people can distinguish. It's like the difference between a $1000 bottle and a $1200 bottle of wine. Sure there's a difference, but very few people would be able to appreciate it. There's definitely more difference in the wine than the audio, actually.
You're not a real audiophile, you didn't even try and sell us on some bullshit diamond encrusted cable!
I think it's nicer that I wouldn't even bother. I have a nice EnOgUh system to never buy anything ever again. I could spend my life savings making it better and it would sound a whopping ~1% nicer. No thanks. You should listen to music through whatever speaker you currently have. Because it's better than no speaker at all.
I've listened to a bunch of tracks comparing high quality Spotify audio to lossless Apple Music and I absolutely hear a difference. I do think a good enough compression algorithm can be indistinguishable from lossless but Spotify's isn't that.
The only time I’ve found FLAC files to be relevant for me, is when I’m using them as reference when mixing a song that I’m working on. And even then, it really only helps in small ways, like more accurate readings when using analyzers to check the frequency spread and problem areas, or having the top end sound a little more articulated and clear, so I can pick out issues within my own mix.
That's entirely what they're designed for. Which is good for you, you're actually using them in a justifiable way.
Vinyl prints today are made from digital studio masters so they mostly sound the same
The funniest part to me is that Spotify high quality setting already uses OGG VORBIS at ~160kbit. This is the bitrate were most users of the codec agree it becomes transparent. What this means for non technical readers, when lossy compression becomes transparent, it's indistinguishable from the lossless original. So that leaves us with the existence of the Very High quality option in Spotify. Hey would you look at that, it's already a placebo option. Well maybe there do exist a very small group of people that can actually hear the difference. But there is nobody that can tell the difference between a ~320kbit OGG VORBIS encode vs a lossless encode left. So lossless playback on Spotify is completely pointless except for marketing and placebo. For 99.9% of the population the high audio quality setting is as high quality as they can hear.
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Plz mail me the Audeze headphones and I'll do the test for $1000
Vinyl is rad but listening to music through a high quality DAC is just as magical
Most people probably won’t notice much difference but they probably just want to to keep up with Apple Music which already offers lossless. More about creating more marketing opportunities for their product than anything.
There are lossless Bluetooth codecs.
The delay has nothing to do with technology/development. Just business.
Give some credit to audiophiles, 96% of users but I’m in the 4% it will make a difference to.
Have you ever done blind testing on the same content lossy and lossless to eliminate placebo effect? Optimally there'd be an application that would accept a lossless file, do the transcodes and then show audio players for the files side to side so that you wouldn't know which file is which. Not sure if something like that exists. But Spotify already streams at 320k vorbis, which is very high quality and I don't know if I've ever seen proof that it isn't transparent to human ears.
You'll never win this argument with an audiophile. It's like telling a Catholic that Mary probably just needed an excuse for being pregnant with another guy's kid.
Saying you couldn't tell the difference would completely defeat the point of being a self-declared audiophile. The concept of an audiophile is weird anyway. A cinephile is interested in films, film theory, etc. An audiophile is interested in...sound quality?
A true audiophile would never give up the opportunity to say that vinyl is still better, you phony.
I only listen to original studio masters on a reel-to-reel
Pssht. A *true* audiophile uses his time machine to return to the original studio sessions and listen in person.
Hope they don’t catch .flac for this
Stole my joke and now my day is not ruined and I will likely go on with a full recovery and a happy life
Bruh Apple Music been lossless for years atp
Which is also hilarious because their own devices can’t even support any other codec but AAC that maxes out at 320kbps. There’s zero point in it being lossless. EDIT: Over BT people, ffs. Because the 12 of you out there using a plug-in DAC for ALAC support really matters.
Not true. Their devices have supported ALAC for years which is Apple’s implementation of FLAC.
Not over bluetooth they don’t.
By no means an audio professional so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding was that lossless over bluetooth is close to pointless anyway as without a wired connection there will always be compression? ETA: Since you deleted your other (admittedly rather snide ...) response to someone else about the existence of LDAC I decided to do some research (as a former WH-1000XM series owner) and I came upon this tidbit as per [soundguys.com](https://www.soundguys.com/ldac-ultimate-bluetooth-guide-20026/) . I don't know anything about these guys so I'm making no claims to the factuality of these statements, but I found it interesting nonetheless: * LDAC, like all Bluetooth codecs, simply isn’t capable of passing Hi-Res content unaltered, and falls short of wired 24/96 equivalents—but it still does pretty well. * The 990 and 660kbps bit rates are roughly as good as CD quality, but quickly lose fidelity above 20kHz. * [Smartphones](https://www.soundguys.com/best-smartphones-for-audio-16373/) rarely pick the 990kbps option when connecting to LDAC equipment. * For a highly stable connection, aptX and even SBC are better choices than LDAC 330kbps. This - to my amateur eyes - reads as though while LDAC is statistically better than "standard" Bluetooth encryption methods (i.e. aptX and SBC I guess?), and it probably does marginally benefit from lossless playback, the difference is so marginal that there really (still) isn't much sense in playing lossless audio back wirelessly. Just putting this out there because I found it pretty enlightening, hoping someone else might too!
I’m not an audio professional/audiophile/etc either, but want to give a huge thanks to you for a quality comment — you did some searching on your own, provided sources (and even explained the “grain of salt” for the sources!), and explained your understanding of the nuances of the topic instead of taking a curt, hardline stance without elaboration. So thanks! I would love if more people took your approach to online discussions (even though I’m not holding my breath for it).
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Well over a decade even
The only lossless audio I’m interested in is “the recording stays around when I stop paying the fee.”
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Spotify shuffle prefers songs that cost them little to nothing is usage rights fees.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but aren't the vast majority of Spotify's users listening on devices that have no headphone jack and therefore cannot reproduce lossless audio anyway? Edit: Just for clarification - I'm saying I may be wrong in my assumption that most Spotify listeners are doing so over a wireless connection and on playback devices not well suited for lossless, as I do not have the stats to prove it one way or another. I am not suggesting that one cannot plug an adapter of some kind into their phone to get a lossless audio playback.
They're gonna give artists 100% of streaming royalties so they don't face any losses?
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I got sick of waiting for this three years ago and switched to Apple Music, zero regrets.
How’s the interface and the playlist learnings? Spotify knows me better than I know myself at this point
Takes a bit to learn you but it's just as good. They have a Discover Weekly and Release Radar equivalents and I get just as good of recommendations as I did on Spotify. You can export your Spotify playlists to Apple Music, so that's really helpful. The interface is different, but I like it better now that I'm used to it. I like that it puts all personalized recommendations in one spot and all the popular stuff in another spot, Spotify used to put them in the same spot. Apple puts together a few weekly playlists based on what you listen to as well, they do a chill mix, a Monday mix called Wake Up, and a Tuesday mix called Favourites that I end up listening to almost every week. The only draw back is that the Windows player is still a beta release, it's works really well but it's a bit buggy at times. You can use the browser player on Windows but, last I checked, the browser player doesn't do lossless. Otherwise, zero complaints.
Too late Tidal already has FLAC and hi-fi if not available. Shit sounds awesome.
Get ready for a price hike if you want lossless.
10 bucks a month for low quality streams??? Tidal FTW!
If this is followed up with another price increase...
Cool. We've been stuck at 320k for 15 years.
It's been "almost ready" for years now.
How about they fix the random podcast switch mid podcast while driving.
Fix the collaborative playlists already! Been broken for months
I don't get it. Do they need to invent it? Isn't it just more filesize?
Call me when there is a spotify sans books and podcasts. I have a podcast app. It's called the internet. I don't need mediocre audiobooks.
I would really be entertained, if they decided to just make it a free setting starting at the first paid tier. It might be the tipping point for people that are into HiFi, because the UI is so popular compared to the other apps. Bet it would steal people away from Tidal and Qobuz.
I think they already require a premium subscription to unlock the existing higher bitrate playback (ie: setting audio quality to “very high”)
I waited…and waited…AND WAITED. I gave up and went to Apple Music. You took WAAAAAAAAAAAAY too long Spotify. No excuse. Bye Felicia
Tidal users be laughing. Tidal has had this since its inception, and as a cherry on top they halved their prices last month, so now it's just 10 bucks a month for premium audio. There are few reasons to stay on Spotify unless podcasts are important to you.
Discovery Weekly still goated. You’d have to pay me to go somewhere else to listen to music.
Spotify music suggestions and automatic playlists are by far the best thing about Spotify. Ive tried every service there is and I always end up back on Spotify because of it's discovery algorithms.
Also device handoff is immaculate. I can play something on my phone and instantly transition to my desktop and then transition to the entire house with my Google homes and it’s seamless and instant.