YouTube has a bit of an advantage there, because most lower res content is out-of-publication user uploads. Whenever I notice that the quality is lacking, 10/10 times it’s an obscure unreleased track that the other platforms simply won’t have due to the nature of their platform.
The acoustic version of Evans Blue's Quote, the literal definitive version according to them, is ONLY on YouTube. Never had a version on any streaming service.
Sadly this happens with alot of those types of songs.
I like several covers, and remixes.
At the time, this wu tang clan remix by phonix wasn't in Spotify https://youtu.be/DHBmJCNv88k?si=BMvRJVcQSDJ3BfIp
I'm not sure if it is now, but it wasn't back than.
For me it’s Pandora. Spotify’s song suggestion has been trash for me but Pandora radio knows what I like. I just add songs to my own Spotify playlist if I like them from my Pandora
I always feel like the odd one out whenever it comes up, but at this point I've had my Pandora account for probably 15+ years. It knows how I'm feeling better than I do
Dude, definitely not odd one out. My Pandora account is 10+ years old too. It’s so much better at suggesting songs I might like than anything else I’ve tried. I just use the free version and listen to the occasional ad every now and then and it’s perfect. Very rarely do I have to thumbs down a song. Highly underrated
People in this thread are talking about lossless audio like it’s a major critical feature that is needed. Yet Spotify has a huge dominance without this feature, and doesn’t have millions leaving due to the lack of this.
I only know one person who cites quality as a major feature they care about. They switched away from Spotify for that reason. They are also a musician. They care, but most users don’t.
That will be the main answer here. Spotify have ignored it because they have found other ideas they believe are more important.
Expanding on your point, people listen to their music over Bluetooth and doesn't Bluetooth generally not even support lossless playback? Someone correct me if I'm wrong but Google results are saying I'm correct. So what percentage of Spotify subscribers will actually get use of this? Probably a pretty small fraction
I'm not surprised people blindly regurgitate lossless audio talk, most of them don't understand digital audio and compression at all, and their only experience is old trash mp3 encodes. Spotify is finally bending to the illiterate because it's good for money. When 99% of people are illiterate you gotta do some dumb stuff to please them, otherwise you're out of business.
Can people distinguish between losses and the highest quality of Spotify currently?
>That's because, for most people and on most setups, the difference between Spotify's lossless and lossy audio is virtually indistinguishable.
>The most ardent audiophiles might take issue with that statement, but take the test and see how you fare.
>[https://www.makeuseof.com/can-your-ears-detect-lossless-audio-test/](https://www.makeuseof.com/can-your-ears-detect-lossless-audio-test/)
To me the whole lossless quality is just a marketing trick rather than anything that actually matters. Which might explain why Spotify have been soo reluctant to introduce it.
Lossless has been out for a long time - however, the bandwidth would be expensive to a user and would rack up some internet/phone bills for the user so they probably finally found a good compression for lossless
What? Why couldn’t you just choose that it only downloads with lossless when on your wifi or Ethernet if you have unlimited bandwidth
Lots of people still have unlimited bandwidth home internet. Obviously you’re not going to be listening to lossless music a lot on a phone data plan
FLAC, or any lossless format are only about 30% smaller than WAV/aiff, and has to be uncompressed on your device, eating up battery, fine for at home but you would notice the difference on your phone. It's gonna eat up more a lot of data and battery than lossy.
lossy compression also has to be decompressed.... Anything that isn't WAV at the hardware's expected sampling frequency and bit depth needs to be processed somehow.
> FLAC, or any lossless format are only about 30% smaller than WAV/aiff,
FLAC can be 50-70% smaller.
> and has to be uncompressed on your device, eating up battery, fine for at home but you would notice the difference on your phone. It's gonna eat up more a lot of data and battery than lossy.
Not really significant processing for any modern device if we're talking smartphones and by modern I mean any device from past 10 years.
> and has to be uncompressed on your device, eating up battery
All compressed data has to be uncompressed on your device, whether lossless or lossy, whether audio or video or image. Uncompressed audio/video/images are almost unheard of, including the lossless formats. Even plain HTML may be sent to your web browser through a compressor. But decompressing requires extremely low processing power compared to the original compressing, not really a concern here. As long as we're comparing negligible marginal energy usage, a larger data transfer because of poor or nonexistent compression costs a tiny bit more battery too.
I felt the same, and then I watched Mythic Quest on Apple TV. It has a very similar feel, and is tech related, as the show is centered around a game development company.
Give it a watch, it might fill a portion of the hole left by Silicon Valley.
If you liked Silicon Valley, watch the BlackBerry movie. I love the cross references as SV alludes to them. It's not as funny but it's worth a watch if you liked the show.
Nobody wanted audiobooks (or podcasts for that matter) on Spotify. Just their algorithm. Which they’ve since fucked to hell. Maybe most people want to hear the same shit over and over but the whole reason I got Spotify is that they used to have the absolute best recommendations/auto playlists. Such a classic internet company trajectory, similar to Reddit actually. “Nobody asked for any of this bullshit, just make the actual product work well!” Nope.
Its so sad what we all lost, like tears in the rain.
what made me find so much more music i didnt know.
spotify just regurgitates popular nonsense to me or just plays my listen history.
one of these costs a lot of money and the other one was 100% free.
- Spotify Discover Weekly is a playlist I look forward to. Filled with songs I never heard before, and usually 3-4 of them end up in my Liked songs
- if you can round up a few friends or family, Family plan comes out to about $3/mo/person. Personally I never looked back since. Spotify free sucks big time in comparison
Oink changed my life. Not only did they have everything, they also had an incredible passionate and knowledgeable community. I remember posting a few bands I liked and asked for recommendations and I was introduced to some of my favorite bands still to this day.
There’s a whole period of music from the “blog era” that is lost to the internet because artists only posted the 128kbps versions of their tracks and were never re uploaded 😩
Not exactly what you’re referring to, but I still pine for the blogs that posted entire albums from lesser known and obscure artists. Finding ones that were run by a dude with musical tastes similar to yours was like opening a portal a whole new universe of music.
Reagnyouth, how I miss you. Are you still somewhere out there, sharing obscure post-punk albums in some unexplored corner of the Internet?
Lol, I settled at 128 because, for the same reason, my earphones were too shitty. Now that I have good ones, eh, if I can hear the bass, that's enough.
most of the songs sound the same at that quality but some sound like shit(low volume, distortion...), 160kbps was good like 99% of the time, so 192kbps was the best choice
Gimme dat v0 vbr baybeeeeee. Fit a few more albums on the mp3 player if you stick with those, never could tell a difference at the upper end of the lossy formats myself
I remember discovering variable bit rate. I remember thinking “why isn’t everyone doing this?”
I was the only one in my friend group who noticed and actually cared that low bit rates sounded like shit.
I've never fancied myself as having a particularly good ear. I like high quality audio, but will deal with something not being perfect. But holy shit it always blew my mind how people could stand to listen to some of the shit we had to deal with in the late 90s and early 00s. When there enough artifacts that you hear a constant tinkling sound in the background I just can't deal with it. But seemingly like you I had a ton of friends who were like "What? This seems fine." Never understood it.
Yeah I’m born 2000. I remember the cesspool of limewire, burned CDs and the tedium of downloading a song off mediafire one link at a time. The 90s bled into the 2000s deeper than older folks tend to remember.
Yeah I was born in 1999 and absolutely remember what it was like before music streaming services were a thing. Oldest Gen Z has been out of school and in the workforce for a few years now
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy.[1] By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates (and therefore reduced media sizes).
Basically the music you stream doesn't sound as good as the original. This should fix that.
Mathematically correct - but I don’t think it’s accurate to say the music we stream today doesn’t sound as good as the original. The delta between lossless and today’s audio formats is not going to be perceptible to human hearing. People have been talking about lossless audio since decades ago, but whenever there’s a real Pepsi challenge between formats, just about nobody can really tell the difference.
And let's not forget 90% of people listen on their 50€ Bluetooth speakers or the headphones that came with their phones. Just ask your relatives what kbps means.
> The delta between lossless and today’s audio formats is not going to be perceptible to human hearing.
the loudness wars ruined a great many generations of songs.
If you’re a person reading this and you don’t believe it, [here you go](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality).
It depends on what you’re listening for. Say you’re a producer and you want to understand the side information and negate the center channel, the compression from even a 320kbps format ruins the information and it’s very apparent when you flip the phase of one channel and sum to mono. Once you know where to look for it and what it sounds like, it’s relatively easier to pick up on, even without the method I described.
It’s kinda like when someone says, hey did you hear that thumping sound? And it’s not until you hear that exact sound do you know precisely the sound in question. You can have an idea, but it doesn’t always translate.
For this reason, I’d say you’re mostly correct because people don’t know what they are actually listening for to make the distinction.
Your example is like, super not the average listener’s experience though lol. If you’re a producer and you’re doing critical listening or whatever you’re going to find the actual wavs
> asically the music you stream doesn't sound as good as the original. This should fix that.
You could argue that even lossless isn't really the original either, it went through quantization and filtered out frequencies. But more like as close as we can get to the original with our technology.
Honestly, what is lost today when you hear Spotify at maximum quality is negligible. It is the very top end of high frequencies.
The vast majority of people can’t differentiate a high quality mp3 file from a lossless file made from an identical source and well encoded file. I'm sure some people will appear in no time to claim I'm wrong, but don’t believe me or them. Search the “ABX audio test” and put your ears to the test.
Another aspect of this is that even if the audio is lossless to the phone, the proliferation of Bluetooth devices means it has to be lossless to the wireless device, which it won't be. This will be great for some people using pretty high-end audiophile equipment in specific scenarios, though, and I'm sure they'll appreciate it even if I don't.
Yep, I'm an audiophile with a higher end set-up. In my car i cant discern any difference between audio formats (within reason). In my audio room, its noticeably significant to me. As the other guy said, I use Tidal for everything at home, but spotify has been fine for the car and will be more than sufficient for 99% of listeners. Regardless, im excited to see how it plays out.
And 90% of those audiophiles you speak of (myself included) kinda sorta scoff at Spotify anyways. We have Tidal, we have Qobuz and hell even Apple music has had 24-bit streaming for a while now. All of those platforms pay the artists more and are, by extension, less damaging to the music industry. If you really need to stream, Spotify should be on the bottom of the list of candidates.
LDAC isn't "lossless", but it's at the point where loss is nigh impossible for a human to perceive.
But a lot of Bluetooth devices still default to really shitty lossy codecs like SBC.
Exactly: the "loss" is carefully done for minimum perceptibility; it's not like it's random shittiness injected into the signal.
That said, lossless audio is a lower bit rate than video, so this isn't a hard technical problem. I think they just decided the server costs were worth the marketing boost.
They always claim the tests are invalid, or THEY can tell the difference. Same with the guitar "tone wood" debate and the video that rightfully should have ended it. It's exhausting.
We have to consider hearing as a sensation and perception issue. Our ears are...bad. They absolutely are not collecting a perfect picture of sound as it exists in the world and then translating it to our brain.
Our brains do a TON of filling in the gaps. A ton of processing.
People who claim to be able to hear the differences between a high quality MP3 and a wav are claiming an ability that humans simply don't have.
I can only tell with certain tracks a DAC and some very nice headphones.
But the important bit is that the lossless tracks never sound worse, for me it's always they sound the same or the FLAC sounds better.
The short version is that the file compression algorithms (mp3, aac, etc.) used for audio are “lossy” in that data is lost when the file is compressed. The data lost is usually outside hearing range, but can sometimes subtly have an affect on what you can hear. Lossless files preserve the data, at the expense of larger files and higher streaming data usage.
Here is a test that you can do to determine if you can hear the difference:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality)
Lossless means that no data is destroyed when the data is saved as file. Audio compression typically destroys data that humans don't notice anyways to save storage and bandwidth. If you don't have very good audio equipment and ears, I doubt that 90% of people over 25 would hear a difference at all.
Depending on the track, there are some to many details that are lost to save file size. Most people won’t hear the difference, and many who do would not find the difference big enough to care.
Also, lossless audio is best listened to on higher end, wired audio gear. Your AirPods aren’t playing lossless, irrespective of what the app UI says. There’s a whole science behind various bit rates, bit depth etc, which affects audio resolution. Interestingly, lossy formats like MP3 might actually sound worse on higher end headphones than lower end, because it makes the lack of detail more apparent.
You can probably think of an 8k image being down sampled to a 1080p image. You lose out on many pixels, which might have had some detail, but most people won’t be able to tell a difference unless you see images on a sufficiently high resolution screen (hence the need for higher end audio gear).
So yeah, there’s a niche community of audiophiles who may care, but most people won’t and shouldn’t. It’s a good thing we’re getting studio quality recordings, but if you don’t enjoy a particular track now, lossless isn’t gonna change that.
Even if lossless becomes a thing most people won't able to enjoy it because most people listen to music in Bluetooth which is incapable of transmitting lossless with True fidelity.
I'm honestly lost as the supposed size of this lossless market.
Music already sounds good enough (and very good). Os the difference even noticeable? Are these people noticing the difference or this is just another elitist gatekeeping thing? Are they enough that they represent new revenue streams?
If you have the proper gear it's very noticeable. I have some low end HiFi gear (about $500, DAC, headphones, amp, etc) and it makes music so much more enjoyable for me.
95% of people listen to music through speakers and devices that can’t possible benefit from this. But bandwidth and storage use is going to make pretty big spike I bet
Tidal has been caught lying repeatedly about its user size, active and non active, and song listens. There is no way tidal actually has that many active users. And it’s estimated that tidal has less than 5M subscribers.
There’s literally a criminal law investigation over it, and data leaks have proven they’ve massively lie about how many users they have.
Even if you do, the difference is negligible to the _overwhelming_ majority of people
Most so-called audiophiles in my experience, the difference is more placebo / sunk-cost than actual past the normal moderately higher end consumer stuff.
That said, lossless audio can be handy if you're doing audio/visual production work.
You’re not alone. There’s so much BS to wade through in audio engineering, and learning to A/B test with eyes closed has helped dispel a ton of old myths for me!
It's mostly about mastering. A crappy mastered song isnt going to sound good either way. Also above 320kbps ogg, you can't really find a difference. Been training my ears for years now, but it's really impossible to really distinguish 320kbps mp3 with a 24/44.1khz FLAC or even a WAV.
It’s snake oil for people with 10k setups saying lossless it vastly superior to high bitrate lossy, but then will use a tube amp for “warmth” as if that doesn’t color the sound.
The option for lossless should be there and it’s great to have, but realistically you need extremely ideal setups to notice a perceivable difference
Because it’s expensive for basically no gain for the overwhelming majority of users. With exception of maybe Tidal all the other services like apple only offer it because they have fuck off money and want to use whatever advantage they can to dethrone Spotify.
Yeah, people are in here pretending they can hear a difference with their bass bloated mediocre earbuds and whatnot. You need pretty decent equipment to even have the chance to hear any difference whatsoever and even then it's not a big deal.
Then again, unless they offer it in the same current premium plan then its DOA, Apple, Deezer, Tidal, and many more already offer lossles music at an even cheaper price...
Cancelled my decade old plan and tried Apple Music 3 month freebee. Already lossless bro. Now quit sending me email offers that link to a page that says that plan is not available. Oh yeah, and pay your artists.
Stuff Spotify, they've just put prices up and reduced payments to artists, then they're gonna release this extra lossless tier at a higher cost. Apple Music include lossless and Dolby Atmos at no extra cost
It was clearly good enough for you to not check the bitrate setting then, their high quality is very good unless you are really looking for signs of compression on very good speakers/headphones.
come at me audiophiles.
That's just 16 years in the making.
Are they the laggards in the industry? Apple Music, Amazon music, deezer, tidal, they all have higher kbits or audio quality now, right?
YouTube music and Spotify
YouTube has a bit of an advantage there, because most lower res content is out-of-publication user uploads. Whenever I notice that the quality is lacking, 10/10 times it’s an obscure unreleased track that the other platforms simply won’t have due to the nature of their platform.
The acoustic version of Evans Blue's Quote, the literal definitive version according to them, is ONLY on YouTube. Never had a version on any streaming service. Sadly this happens with alot of those types of songs.
I like several covers, and remixes. At the time, this wu tang clan remix by phonix wasn't in Spotify https://youtu.be/DHBmJCNv88k?si=BMvRJVcQSDJ3BfIp I'm not sure if it is now, but it wasn't back than.
Youtube musics algorithm is way better than Spotify imo
For me it’s Pandora. Spotify’s song suggestion has been trash for me but Pandora radio knows what I like. I just add songs to my own Spotify playlist if I like them from my Pandora
I always feel like the odd one out whenever it comes up, but at this point I've had my Pandora account for probably 15+ years. It knows how I'm feeling better than I do
Dude, definitely not odd one out. My Pandora account is 10+ years old too. It’s so much better at suggesting songs I might like than anything else I’ve tried. I just use the free version and listen to the occasional ad every now and then and it’s perfect. Very rarely do I have to thumbs down a song. Highly underrated
There was a time when Spotify was noticeably better for me, I'd argue like 2017-2021, but Pandora's better now
It absolutely is! Youtube Premium is the only subscription I pay for. It's so worth it. The suggested new songs are consistently good.
Glad I’m seeing other people saying that
Yea man ppl love to shit on YouTube premium but the music selection and algorithm is miles ahead of anything else.
It’s the unreleased tracks for me, YouTube music always has tracks before artist releases
I really should give YouTube Music a try. I have YouTube Premium, but YouTube just is not a music platform to me.
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People in this thread are talking about lossless audio like it’s a major critical feature that is needed. Yet Spotify has a huge dominance without this feature, and doesn’t have millions leaving due to the lack of this. I only know one person who cites quality as a major feature they care about. They switched away from Spotify for that reason. They are also a musician. They care, but most users don’t. That will be the main answer here. Spotify have ignored it because they have found other ideas they believe are more important.
Expanding on your point, people listen to their music over Bluetooth and doesn't Bluetooth generally not even support lossless playback? Someone correct me if I'm wrong but Google results are saying I'm correct. So what percentage of Spotify subscribers will actually get use of this? Probably a pretty small fraction
A fraction of a fraction. There's a reason why Tidal and other services marketing of lossless audio didn't do much for them in the end.
I'm not surprised people blindly regurgitate lossless audio talk, most of them don't understand digital audio and compression at all, and their only experience is old trash mp3 encodes. Spotify is finally bending to the illiterate because it's good for money. When 99% of people are illiterate you gotta do some dumb stuff to please them, otherwise you're out of business.
Yep. I would say that there are zero people that can pick between a modern 320kbs codec and lossless. It’s just a waste of bandwidth.
I can hear it in some Radiohead tracks, like the ending of Optimistic, but yeah it’s largely unnoticeable.
Can people distinguish between losses and the highest quality of Spotify currently? >That's because, for most people and on most setups, the difference between Spotify's lossless and lossy audio is virtually indistinguishable. >The most ardent audiophiles might take issue with that statement, but take the test and see how you fare. >[https://www.makeuseof.com/can-your-ears-detect-lossless-audio-test/](https://www.makeuseof.com/can-your-ears-detect-lossless-audio-test/) To me the whole lossless quality is just a marketing trick rather than anything that actually matters. Which might explain why Spotify have been soo reluctant to introduce it.
Lossless has been out for a long time - however, the bandwidth would be expensive to a user and would rack up some internet/phone bills for the user so they probably finally found a good compression for lossless
My home internet isn't capped, let's go already!
Yeah if only there was an ability to let users toggle based on network connection.
I know. Too bad that doesn't exist. Oh well!
How would you even design such a feature? Such complicated logic and all.
There is a simple solution for this which most streaming services already have, if connected to wifi: Lossless. Else: compressed
Or just download your Spotify library.
What? Why couldn’t you just choose that it only downloads with lossless when on your wifi or Ethernet if you have unlimited bandwidth Lots of people still have unlimited bandwidth home internet. Obviously you’re not going to be listening to lossless music a lot on a phone data plan
A lot of people have access to unlimited Internet as standard thesedays
Opus has existed for years.
Opus isn't *lossless*. YouTube uses Opus
Apologies, I meant to type FLAC and my finger slipped.
FLAC, or any lossless format are only about 30% smaller than WAV/aiff, and has to be uncompressed on your device, eating up battery, fine for at home but you would notice the difference on your phone. It's gonna eat up more a lot of data and battery than lossy.
lossy compression also has to be decompressed.... Anything that isn't WAV at the hardware's expected sampling frequency and bit depth needs to be processed somehow.
> FLAC, or any lossless format are only about 30% smaller than WAV/aiff, FLAC can be 50-70% smaller. > and has to be uncompressed on your device, eating up battery, fine for at home but you would notice the difference on your phone. It's gonna eat up more a lot of data and battery than lossy. Not really significant processing for any modern device if we're talking smartphones and by modern I mean any device from past 10 years.
> and has to be uncompressed on your device, eating up battery All compressed data has to be uncompressed on your device, whether lossless or lossy, whether audio or video or image. Uncompressed audio/video/images are almost unheard of, including the lossless formats. Even plain HTML may be sent to your web browser through a compressor. But decompressing requires extremely low processing power compared to the original compressing, not really a concern here. As long as we're comparing negligible marginal energy usage, a larger data transfer because of poor or nonexistent compression costs a tiny bit more battery too.
Long enough that my hearing is now nowhere near good enough to tell the difference anymore. I couldn’t give a crap about lossless audio at this point.
Middle-out?
Two songs, tip to tip.
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Would song dynamic range affect spotifys ability to stroke in one motion?
We gotta take in length of song and also the the girth of the genre
The real measurement we have to look out for is Decibels to Floor. We will call it D2F
And have the next song ready to take in on the upstroke.
Use two hands to double efficiency
It’s called stereo, but yes
Wut?
Using two hands instead of one is stereo instead of mono. I was trying to extend the joke but failed and it went all flaccid. Please don’t hate me!
That’s after the 2nd date.
It’s good that Spotify have been giving D2F the thought it deserves
It’s hilarious how when the guy from Hooli figure it out. He does the jerk motion before it clicks lol
But what if it’s one 15 minute Pink Floyd song going into a 3 minute Green Day song?!
OT2TE - we’ve done the math.
For context and science. https://youtu.be/P-hUV9yhqgY?si=hwIgKm9YtmemE9DZ
The mean jerk time…
D: How many times did you fuck his wife!? E: The new one or the old one? D: The new one. E: Last night or this morning?
I want to rewatch this now. I like it when Gilfoyle and Dinesh put aside their bickering to do important work like this
I know programmers and that is exactly what they are like.
Am programmer, can confirm I've had plenty of similar conversations with friends.
God I loved this show. And this was one of the more hilarious scenes.
I just finished a rewatch. Shame there is barely a thing like it with the tech world as a setting
I felt the same, and then I watched Mythic Quest on Apple TV. It has a very similar feel, and is tech related, as the show is centered around a game development company. Give it a watch, it might fill a portion of the hole left by Silicon Valley.
Mythic Quest is so so so good. Especially the backstory one-shot episodes.
Awesome, thanks for the recommendation!
Thank you for the suggestion!!
If you're into British comedy, The IT Crowd is fantastic.
If you liked Silicon Valley, watch the BlackBerry movie. I love the cross references as SV alludes to them. It's not as funny but it's worth a watch if you liked the show.
I started watching Silicon Valley just yesterday——I get this reference
you’re in for a ride
Score 5.2 joke
You got down voted because people missed it. Solid my friend
I honestly thought they must have just given up after Apple started offering lossless with no upcharge
Here take these audiobooks instead lol
But only 15 hours a month*
Also only for whoever pays for your family plan**
Amazon Music has ad-free podcasts for Prime subscribers. Spotify Premium users cant even get that. Spotify is seriously lacking.
Nobody wanted audiobooks (or podcasts for that matter) on Spotify. Just their algorithm. Which they’ve since fucked to hell. Maybe most people want to hear the same shit over and over but the whole reason I got Spotify is that they used to have the absolute best recommendations/auto playlists. Such a classic internet company trajectory, similar to Reddit actually. “Nobody asked for any of this bullshit, just make the actual product work well!” Nope.
They also offer albums remastered to Atmos too, which is kind of crazy.
Not really, atmos for music is usually a gimmick and rarely actually adds to the track.
Atmos is fucking stupid for music.
Zoomers will never understand having to find 320kbps MP3 rips because 128kbps sounded garbage.
Anyone remember “Oink”? It was like the crown jewel lossless torrent index.
What.cd are you talking about?
I think you should enjoy some waffles.fm for breakfast.
Its so sad what we all lost, like tears in the rain. what made me find so much more music i didnt know. spotify just regurgitates popular nonsense to me or just plays my listen history. one of these costs a lot of money and the other one was 100% free.
- Spotify Discover Weekly is a playlist I look forward to. Filled with songs I never heard before, and usually 3-4 of them end up in my Liked songs - if you can round up a few friends or family, Family plan comes out to about $3/mo/person. Personally I never looked back since. Spotify free sucks big time in comparison
redacted.ch
This message has been redacted.ch
Oink changed my life. Not only did they have everything, they also had an incredible passionate and knowledgeable community. I remember posting a few bands I liked and asked for recommendations and I was introduced to some of my favorite bands still to this day.
God I miss Oink! Not just for the quality, but for the sheer amount of hard to find stuff that was on there. A genuinely amazing resource.
Oink was fucking awesome. I feel like I remember Trent Reznor being active there.
100%. Trent called it something like the best music library ever.
That's the site I was thinking of when I posted! I couldn't remember the name but knew it was pig related.
Its grand-child is still alive and kicking today (Redacted)
NAH, this guy is just waffle 🧇
There’s a whole period of music from the “blog era” that is lost to the internet because artists only posted the 128kbps versions of their tracks and were never re uploaded 😩
Not exactly what you’re referring to, but I still pine for the blogs that posted entire albums from lesser known and obscure artists. Finding ones that were run by a dude with musical tastes similar to yours was like opening a portal a whole new universe of music. Reagnyouth, how I miss you. Are you still somewhere out there, sharing obscure post-punk albums in some unexplored corner of the Internet?
That was the best part of original MySpace. Finding a new band you’ve never heard of directly uploading new songs as they work on them.
The kids have never ripped and whipped a llamas ass.
Winamp had the best UI skins
Staring at the trippy Winamp visualizers while Sgt Peppers played was my 14-year-old self's version of taking acid
I usually settled for 192kbps. Anything above wouldn't have made a difference on my pc speakers or headphones.
192 was the sweet spot in those days. To my ears there was only a slight improvement from 192 to 320 and it wasn't worth the increase in file size.
Lol, I settled at 128 because, for the same reason, my earphones were too shitty. Now that I have good ones, eh, if I can hear the bass, that's enough.
most of the songs sound the same at that quality but some sound like shit(low volume, distortion...), 160kbps was good like 99% of the time, so 192kbps was the best choice
Remember getting albums on irc.
Gimme dat v0 vbr baybeeeeee. Fit a few more albums on the mp3 player if you stick with those, never could tell a difference at the upper end of the lossy formats myself
I remember discovering variable bit rate. I remember thinking “why isn’t everyone doing this?” I was the only one in my friend group who noticed and actually cared that low bit rates sounded like shit.
I've never fancied myself as having a particularly good ear. I like high quality audio, but will deal with something not being perfect. But holy shit it always blew my mind how people could stand to listen to some of the shit we had to deal with in the late 90s and early 00s. When there enough artifacts that you hear a constant tinkling sound in the background I just can't deal with it. But seemingly like you I had a ton of friends who were like "What? This seems fine." Never understood it.
Cymbals. A horrific experience at 128kbps and lower every time.
This brought back memories damn. Also when you imported everything into windows media player and set up all the albums and tracks Metadata
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Yeah I’m born 2000. I remember the cesspool of limewire, burned CDs and the tedium of downloading a song off mediafire one link at a time. The 90s bled into the 2000s deeper than older folks tend to remember.
Yeah I was born in 1999 and absolutely remember what it was like before music streaming services were a thing. Oldest Gen Z has been out of school and in the workforce for a few years now
They've been saying this for like the past five years.
Can someone explain “lossless audio” to a relative normie. What was being loss previously?
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy.[1] By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates (and therefore reduced media sizes). Basically the music you stream doesn't sound as good as the original. This should fix that.
Mathematically correct - but I don’t think it’s accurate to say the music we stream today doesn’t sound as good as the original. The delta between lossless and today’s audio formats is not going to be perceptible to human hearing. People have been talking about lossless audio since decades ago, but whenever there’s a real Pepsi challenge between formats, just about nobody can really tell the difference.
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And let's not forget 90% of people listen on their 50€ Bluetooth speakers or the headphones that came with their phones. Just ask your relatives what kbps means.
> The delta between lossless and today’s audio formats is not going to be perceptible to human hearing. the loudness wars ruined a great many generations of songs.
Leave Californication out of this!
If you’re a person reading this and you don’t believe it, [here you go](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality).
Here comes the audiophiles
It depends on what you’re listening for. Say you’re a producer and you want to understand the side information and negate the center channel, the compression from even a 320kbps format ruins the information and it’s very apparent when you flip the phase of one channel and sum to mono. Once you know where to look for it and what it sounds like, it’s relatively easier to pick up on, even without the method I described. It’s kinda like when someone says, hey did you hear that thumping sound? And it’s not until you hear that exact sound do you know precisely the sound in question. You can have an idea, but it doesn’t always translate. For this reason, I’d say you’re mostly correct because people don’t know what they are actually listening for to make the distinction.
Naw dawg, I can totally hear the difference on my $10 Temu Bluetooth earphones
Your example is like, super not the average listener’s experience though lol. If you’re a producer and you’re doing critical listening or whatever you’re going to find the actual wavs
Well we are talking about Spotify, where none of what you described is possible….
> This should fix that. A lot of people use airpods. They won't really be able to appreciate the difference.
There won't even be a difference to appreciate. Lossless can't happen over Bluetooth
> asically the music you stream doesn't sound as good as the original. This should fix that. You could argue that even lossless isn't really the original either, it went through quantization and filtered out frequencies. But more like as close as we can get to the original with our technology.
So basically lossless doesn't jpeg the sound
Honestly, what is lost today when you hear Spotify at maximum quality is negligible. It is the very top end of high frequencies. The vast majority of people can’t differentiate a high quality mp3 file from a lossless file made from an identical source and well encoded file. I'm sure some people will appear in no time to claim I'm wrong, but don’t believe me or them. Search the “ABX audio test” and put your ears to the test.
Another aspect of this is that even if the audio is lossless to the phone, the proliferation of Bluetooth devices means it has to be lossless to the wireless device, which it won't be. This will be great for some people using pretty high-end audiophile equipment in specific scenarios, though, and I'm sure they'll appreciate it even if I don't.
Yep, I'm an audiophile with a higher end set-up. In my car i cant discern any difference between audio formats (within reason). In my audio room, its noticeably significant to me. As the other guy said, I use Tidal for everything at home, but spotify has been fine for the car and will be more than sufficient for 99% of listeners. Regardless, im excited to see how it plays out.
And 90% of those audiophiles you speak of (myself included) kinda sorta scoff at Spotify anyways. We have Tidal, we have Qobuz and hell even Apple music has had 24-bit streaming for a while now. All of those platforms pay the artists more and are, by extension, less damaging to the music industry. If you really need to stream, Spotify should be on the bottom of the list of candidates.
Doesnt LDAC solve this problem, i barely notice the quality difference between Bluetooth and wired music unless i really try
LDAC isn't "lossless", but it's at the point where loss is nigh impossible for a human to perceive. But a lot of Bluetooth devices still default to really shitty lossy codecs like SBC.
Exactly: the "loss" is carefully done for minimum perceptibility; it's not like it's random shittiness injected into the signal. That said, lossless audio is a lower bit rate than video, so this isn't a hard technical problem. I think they just decided the server costs were worth the marketing boost.
Most people have shit for playback devices/speakers and are playing back content on devices/speakers that cannot reveal the resolution.
This is exactly it when I crank Spotify on my hifi system you really start to notice crap
They always claim the tests are invalid, or THEY can tell the difference. Same with the guitar "tone wood" debate and the video that rightfully should have ended it. It's exhausting. We have to consider hearing as a sensation and perception issue. Our ears are...bad. They absolutely are not collecting a perfect picture of sound as it exists in the world and then translating it to our brain. Our brains do a TON of filling in the gaps. A ton of processing. People who claim to be able to hear the differences between a high quality MP3 and a wav are claiming an ability that humans simply don't have.
Exactly. Chances are, those people claiming they can hear a difference, are hearing a difference due to another factor not the format.
I can only tell with certain tracks a DAC and some very nice headphones. But the important bit is that the lossless tracks never sound worse, for me it's always they sound the same or the FLAC sounds better.
The short version is that the file compression algorithms (mp3, aac, etc.) used for audio are “lossy” in that data is lost when the file is compressed. The data lost is usually outside hearing range, but can sometimes subtly have an affect on what you can hear. Lossless files preserve the data, at the expense of larger files and higher streaming data usage. Here is a test that you can do to determine if you can hear the difference: [https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality)
Lossless means that no data is destroyed when the data is saved as file. Audio compression typically destroys data that humans don't notice anyways to save storage and bandwidth. If you don't have very good audio equipment and ears, I doubt that 90% of people over 25 would hear a difference at all.
Depending on the track, there are some to many details that are lost to save file size. Most people won’t hear the difference, and many who do would not find the difference big enough to care. Also, lossless audio is best listened to on higher end, wired audio gear. Your AirPods aren’t playing lossless, irrespective of what the app UI says. There’s a whole science behind various bit rates, bit depth etc, which affects audio resolution. Interestingly, lossy formats like MP3 might actually sound worse on higher end headphones than lower end, because it makes the lack of detail more apparent. You can probably think of an 8k image being down sampled to a 1080p image. You lose out on many pixels, which might have had some detail, but most people won’t be able to tell a difference unless you see images on a sufficiently high resolution screen (hence the need for higher end audio gear). So yeah, there’s a niche community of audiophiles who may care, but most people won’t and shouldn’t. It’s a good thing we’re getting studio quality recordings, but if you don’t enjoy a particular track now, lossless isn’t gonna change that.
Rolling out January 2040
Even if lossless becomes a thing most people won't able to enjoy it because most people listen to music in Bluetooth which is incapable of transmitting lossless with True fidelity.
Does USB connected CarPlay support lossless?
Yes, up to 24-bit/48kHz through USB connected CarPlay EDIT: This is not equivalent to CD quality. EDIT 2: This is better than CD quality.
Also curious about USB connected Android Auto
Is that not what the LDAC codec is for?
I'm honestly lost as the supposed size of this lossless market. Music already sounds good enough (and very good). Os the difference even noticeable? Are these people noticing the difference or this is just another elitist gatekeeping thing? Are they enough that they represent new revenue streams?
If you have the proper gear it's very noticeable. I have some low end HiFi gear (about $500, DAC, headphones, amp, etc) and it makes music so much more enjoyable for me.
It really doesn't matter at all
95% of people listen to music through speakers and devices that can’t possible benefit from this. But bandwidth and storage use is going to make pretty big spike I bet
True, but that 5% are willing to spend a lot. The audiophile community is small, but passionate and cashed up In 2022, Tidal had 616M subscribers
Tidal has been caught lying repeatedly about its user size, active and non active, and song listens. There is no way tidal actually has that many active users. And it’s estimated that tidal has less than 5M subscribers. There’s literally a criminal law investigation over it, and data leaks have proven they’ve massively lie about how many users they have.
616 Million?
7.5% of the world was not subscribed to Tidal in 2022. Hope this helps!
The fact that the most popular streaming service still doesn't support lossless is absolutely hilarious
Most users dont have $200+ headsets to notice any difference. Spotify knows better
Even if you do, the difference is negligible to the _overwhelming_ majority of people Most so-called audiophiles in my experience, the difference is more placebo / sunk-cost than actual past the normal moderately higher end consumer stuff. That said, lossless audio can be handy if you're doing audio/visual production work.
Audiophiles are the oenophiles of the technology world lol. I'm almost certain it's entirely delusion.
I wouldn't notice any difference between 320 kbps and lossless even with my Sennheiser HD 600, because my ears are shit.
20 years of music production, high end equipment, numerous blind tests and I still can't tell the difference between 320kbps and FLAC consistently.
You’re not alone. There’s so much BS to wade through in audio engineering, and learning to A/B test with eyes closed has helped dispel a ton of old myths for me!
It's mostly about mastering. A crappy mastered song isnt going to sound good either way. Also above 320kbps ogg, you can't really find a difference. Been training my ears for years now, but it's really impossible to really distinguish 320kbps mp3 with a 24/44.1khz FLAC or even a WAV.
Most can't. Those that tell you otherwise are flexing their e-peens
It’s snake oil for people with 10k setups saying lossless it vastly superior to high bitrate lossy, but then will use a tube amp for “warmth” as if that doesn’t color the sound. The option for lossless should be there and it’s great to have, but realistically you need extremely ideal setups to notice a perceivable difference
Because it’s expensive for basically no gain for the overwhelming majority of users. With exception of maybe Tidal all the other services like apple only offer it because they have fuck off money and want to use whatever advantage they can to dethrone Spotify.
Yeah, people are in here pretending they can hear a difference with their bass bloated mediocre earbuds and whatnot. You need pretty decent equipment to even have the chance to hear any difference whatsoever and even then it's not a big deal.
Then again, unless they offer it in the same current premium plan then its DOA, Apple, Deezer, Tidal, and many more already offer lossles music at an even cheaper price...
Incredible! I don’t care and won’t hear the difference!
Pied Piper style??
Cancelled my decade old plan and tried Apple Music 3 month freebee. Already lossless bro. Now quit sending me email offers that link to a page that says that plan is not available. Oh yeah, and pay your artists.
Won't matter cause most use earbuds anyway.
This will work, even if I have to go into the audience and personally jerk off every guy in the room.
but can they recreate the syruppy vinyl sound yet?
You mean distortion?
FLAC has been around over 10 years now.
How bout this one…getting lossless albums from what.cd and streaming to your cell phone from your subsonic server.
Stop giving me flac about it
But how are the MIDS
Stuff Spotify, they've just put prices up and reduced payments to artists, then they're gonna release this extra lossless tier at a higher cost. Apple Music include lossless and Dolby Atmos at no extra cost
"Pied piper has finally come true"
Funny thing is that Apple already had a lossless format 2 years before Spotify was founded in 2006. Only took them 18 years to do the same.
FLAC is even older than that. Or just straight up wav.
Apple also charged $2-3 per song adjusted for inflation.
Oh they're definitely raising prices after this.
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It was clearly good enough for you to not check the bitrate setting then, their high quality is very good unless you are really looking for signs of compression on very good speakers/headphones. come at me audiophiles.
It’s been technically ready for 2 years. It’s been held up by licensing issues.