Spotify HiFi is a Lossless Streaming Tier Coming Later this Year (theverge.com) 71
An anonymous reader share a report: Spotify is going hi-fi. Well, "HiFi." It's taken longer than competitors like Tidal and Amazon Music, but today, the leading subscription music service announced a new lossless streaming tier that will allow listeners to get the most from their digital music library. The news came at the company's Spotify "Stream On" virtual event. Spotify HiFi will be available later this year and "will deliver music in CD-quality, lossless audio format to your device and Spotify Connect-enabled speakers, which means fans will be able to experience more depth and clarity while enjoying their favorite tracks." Spotify has done small tests of higher-quality streaming in the past, but now it's going to launch the feature more widely -- with the caveat that it'll be available only "in select markets." Pricing is yet to be announced. Higher-quality streaming has apparently been among the top requests from its customers; as it stands today, Spotify tops out at 320kbps audio.
Higher quality album rips?! (Score:2)
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Spotify tracks are already watermarked with a unique mark that is tied to your account. There's no reason to believe they won't continue to be.
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if it's lossless wouldn't it be easy to remove the watermark?
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No
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if it's lossless wouldn't it be easy to remove the watermark?
If you got the original as well, very easy. But then if you had the original, you would just keep the original instead of removing the water mark.
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So the watermark has resulted in loss of the original content?
Re: Higher quality album rips?! (Score:2)
We used to just read the raw PCM data (essentially numbers that set the next position ofnm the speaker cone).
So all metadata would be lost anyway, and anything would have to be steganographically be put in-band. Aka defeating the purpose of lossless audio. This existed for CDs. And it sounded crap, compared tot the clean original.
And in any case, there ia no relation between a tracing ID and a person. Nobody would register with a real name and real data. Any computer you ever see the USB or network port of
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I'm thinking they would watermark your id into the PCM. While not truly lossless you could, say, use 1 least-significant bit every 128 samples to set the id without causing a human-discernable audio change.
If any of your friends distribute the music publicly on file download sites or torrents, they detect your account id and close it. You likely have a paid Spotify account to access lossless music, so they have the name on your credit card and may blacklist your card for future accounts or worst case bring
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"If any of your friends distribute the music publicly on file download sites or torrents, they detect your account id and close it. You likely have a paid Spotify account to access lossless music, so they have the name on your credit card and may blacklist your card for future accounts or worst case bring some sort of legal action."
Sure, but it isn't like that name is going to be YOUR name.
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They could inject some audio packets into the lossless file with frequencies higher than 25kHz. A bit like steganography. I'm sure they've got the resources and time needed to download a torrent and scan the files for them. Though any decent uploader would just run the file through ffmpeg to remove it. Or you could, to make sure.
Or they could wrap the lossless file in a container, like M4P. Easier to do, but makes the file proprietary for the 10s it will take for someone to post an extraction program so you
Starting the ripper on 3... 2... 1... (Score:2)
The only reason to ever connect to a Content Mafia server.
Oh wait, there is no new music coming out that's worth listening to that isn't by independent artists tat make it freely available, unless you're a masochist or retarded!
Re:Starting the ripper on 3... 2... 1... (Score:4, Informative)
It might be lossless, but i'd be surprised if it's bit perfect from CD as they put a digital watermark on their music as far as I remember.
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Sounds like you've not heard a good stereo then. Decent CD and vinyl reproduction are give or take identical. That's why both standards have their advocates.
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Sounds like you've not heard a good stereo then. Decent CD and vinyl reproduction are give or take identical. That's why both standards have their advocates.
It's the other way around: both standards have their advocates because their experiences with reproduction qualities have been so varied!!!
Sure, blame the stereo system! I commented separately how part of my experience/sentiment is at a modern recording studio in NYC -- so it's not simply based on consumer equipment purchases; rather, based on professional sound engineers' own investments. Dramatically less bias in this way.
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I really don't know why anybody likes vinyl. CD is objectively better in any measureable way. I guess some people like the sound of pops and hiss from dust and other surface imperfections as well as the lack of dynamic range. Personally I'll take a well mastered CD anyday over vinyl. Even a 320 kbps MP3 file sounds better than vinyl.
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I really don't know why anybody likes vinyl. CD is objectively better in any measureable way. I guess some people like the sound of pops and hiss from dust and other surface imperfections as well as the lack of dynamic range. Personally I'll take a well mastered CD anyday over vinyl. Even a 320 kbps MP3 file sounds better than vinyl.
To be fair, you'd most likely take any well-mastered media over any hack job media -- unless you're arguing a CRAPPY CD master is superior to an expertly-mastered Vinyl? If that's the case, then your other arguments may lose credibility.
The benefit of digital standards is they're easier to scale as technology advances, so these objective measurements are inherently biased in their favor. The ultimate challenge is identifying an analog recording medium which is capable of matching those same "objective"
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There are a few that still charge for it. But yeah, many people just put it out there for free now. There's also old music, a lot of which is worth discovering, but not in your collection yet.
Not Lossless (Score:2, Informative)
I hate to go full audiophile nut here, but any time you convert an analog audio signal to digital, there are losses. I mean, I like Fourier, Nyquist, Whittaker, etc. too .. but we are limited by our bit depth, leaving aside low pass filters. It's simple physics. CD quality samples at 44 kHz using a bit depth of 16. Ok mathematical purity aside, we can do better to reconstruct the signal so even the best audiophiles can't tell the difference. We should sample at 48 kHz using a bit depth of 18. If you listen
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Also, from the Verge article: "Tidal offers what it calls “Tidal Masters” that can even exceed high-resolution 96 kHz / 24 bit audio. Smaller services like Qobuz have also sought to appeal to audiophiles with lossless streaming."
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Which is complete BS.
Unless you specifically digitally recorded the music at 24/96 (and most studios only do 24/48) you aren't gettgin 24/96 quality - it's been upsampled somewhere. Most of the music you find on Tidal, Qobuz, etc are upsampled - they don't have provenanc
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Sorry, but you are talking utter tosh. For a delivery format for consumption of audio, 44.1/16 is just about perfect, which is why we're still using it nearly 40 years later. If you want to go on about reconstruction filters and stuff like that, well that's very interesting, but things transitioned to oversampled delta/sigma strategies 30 years ago, and the filters can be as close to sinc() as you care given todays compute, so it's not an issue.
If you want to argue about higher bit depths and sample rates w
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Re:Not Lossless (Score:5, Informative)
44.1/16 is adequate, but there's for me there's an easily perceptible difference going to 24 bit.
No there isn't. Don't talk crap.
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As I said, 44.1/16 is adequate. It sounds very good when well mastered.
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Just because you can't hear it doesn't mean I can't.
It doesn't mean you can't but it's not remotely likely that you can. There has been a lot of work with double blind tests with humans, and this puts you outside the range. You might be mildly superhuman, but unless you've had a proper test in an audio lab, it's not especially likely.
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44.1/16 is adequate, but there's for me there's an easily perceptible difference going to 24 bit.
Have you proven this in a double-blind test?
If so, let's see the data.
If not, then STFU.
By the way, hundreds of "audiophiles" have tried
this test, while nobody has ever passed it
using any kind of equipment.
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And then there's the loudness war that happened with CDs to the point that vinyl could be better quality because the CD producers had degraded the sound so much. So even if the source is CD audio that's no guarantee of good quality sound. The biggest piss-take is 'remastered' CDs that are worse quality than the originals.
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Yes, my hi-fi purest ears are very upset by the loss of pops, crackle, rumble, wow and flutter and harmonics only my dog can hear that are so perfectly preserved by analogue reproduction.
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Anytime you aren't listening to the original source there are going to be losses. Wax cylinders were analog but didn't sound that good. 78s made of shellac also don't sound that great, especially after they have been played 200 times. A CD will sound better than any record out there assuming they are both mastered properly.
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difference. Instead of a so called "lossless" signal sampled with a bit depth of 16 with a 44kHz sampling rate using a shit low pass filter. We could sample at 96 kHz/18bits and compress it .. that would produce a better signal reconstruction
You must be reading a textbook from the 80s if you think we can't for all intents and purposes perfectly reconstruct the signal in question. Mind you do you specifically use a "shit" low pass filter (likely also found in that book)?
Here's a hint: if your only concern is the low pass filter you can solve that completely independent of the sampling rate. Ever wonder why a modern DAC* plays back 44kHz 16bit measurably perfectly despite the "shit" filter having cut-off frequency in the hundreds of kHz? Try read
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The moment a microphone is used, you're already at a loss from the actual sound. This is so pointless, just listen and enjoy the music already. DBT has consistently shown no one can really tell a difference between decently encoded stuff anyway.
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This reminds me of the debates about audio quality when CDs were first introduced -- how CDs lacked "richness" and "depth" (acoustically, not technically) as compared to vinyl recordings, especially for live recordings. The warm lushness of sound playing off vinyl were (are) always more rich than any CD reproduction I've ever heard... and this sentiment holds true as much today as during my youngest years.
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The vinyl sound quality can be recreated digitally and I've heard quite a few modern records that reproduce it for effect, but it's only ever do
Re: I dislike the term "Lossless" (Score:2)
> I suspect that's a sediment that holds just as true!
Typo or joke.. I can't tell, but either way it's funny.
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Did CDs lack anything, or were you just conditioned to prefer the "lushness of sound" that vinyl produces by comparison? I'm sure there are plenty of people who disliked that taste of the treated city water when compared with the "lushness of minerals" that the country well water they grew up drinking provided. I suspect that's a sediment that holds just as true!
When I first learned to play musical instruments (piano, flute, and acoustic guitar, all before I was 10 yrs old) I always had a sense of warmth from the reverberations of the sounds within the echo of the space. When listening to vinyl from the 70's (my dad's collection) I often felt similar warmth of sound which never replicated in digitally-remastered CDs (like Beethoven or Mozart philharmonic performances from Columbia House subscriptions). I felt the audio medium was distinguishable when radio statio
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Recorded orchestras in any format will never sound "live" because it's coming from a point source - your loudspeakers - and not from dozens of instruments arranged in a hall.
On the other hand, you can identically replicate music that's made on instruments that natively use loudspeakers, like an electric guitar or a synthesizer. Of course, you would need to have identical speaker cones in identical cabinets to whatever the player used originally. The recording would have to consist of whatever signal was goi
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You may never be satisfied.
That's my opening line on every first date... /s =)
Hey, it'll be cheaper than dropping two grand on an exotic vinyl system.
In Capitalism, it's more important to spend capital resources than to enjoy what you have.
The science of acoustics is amazing (there's like 2 no-sound R&D studios near me which are used for sound isolation at the [whatever-incredibly-small-scale] level). Too bad consumer equipment costs so much -- if I had the means, I'd sound-proof/foam/isolate my home and setup the best sound system practical -- and proceed to skimp out and use a crappy ISP stream
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To boot, when CDs were introduced, some engineers didn't know how to master for them, which helped to start the myths that CDs are "brittle" or "not warm". What was happening was CDs got pressed with pre-emphasis [wikipedia.org], basically a treble boost EQ, and people would play them back in CD players that didn't support the pre-emphasis flag. So the EQ wasn't reversed on playback as intended, and it sounded like crap. You will never run into a CD like this without going to a garage sale and looking for early-80s pressin
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Music is mastered to a format. Lossless means you get that format delivered to your home. If it's mastered to 44.1/16 then that's what you should get. If it's mastered to 96/24, then that's what you should get. I don't see why this is hard to understand.
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If you hypothetically had a 1 pixel CCD that only had 1 it of resolution i.e. black or white, that would also be "mastered" to that quality, provided you could repreduce that 0/1 state "losslessly".
It doesn't mean it's going to be anything worthwhile to look at. I don't see why this is hard to understand either
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The master is the original.
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"Lossless" is short for "lossless compression". And yes, the compression is lossless.
Downsampling 96kHz to 44.1 isn't lossless, but neither is EQing, putting a fuzz pedal on your guitar, or running a master tape over the tape head. None of it has anything to do with lossless data compression.
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but even then a studio master is usually 24 bit, 96ksps, per channel, not "CD quality".
Most studio masters are 24bit 48kHz, not 96kHz. Anyway that's all beside the point because your hair splitting here would impress a ninja warrior from japanese comic book.
We know what lossy means in terms of compression. And PCM isn't it. Please stop applying your dictionary description of a term to something irrelevant to the discussion. Hell even with your absurd hair splitting PCM isn't lossy as its a perfect storage mechanism for recorded data, you may want to complain about the digitisation process its
Better than CD quality? (Score:1)
I wonder what kind of lossy compression from higher resolution recordings would be able to create higher sound quality than CD with lower number of bits than CD + lossless compression.
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CDs are really higher resolution recordings, with three quarters of the samples removed and 8 out of 24 bits removed from each sample. So in some way it's really just very primitive lossy compression.
What you're describing is decimation (or just simple rounding if it's the same sample rate), which is totally different than compression. I'm also not sure I would assume that all audio on every CD was recorded with higher bit depths.
I wonder what kind of lossy compression from higher resolution recordings would be able to create higher sound quality than CD with lower number of bits than CD + lossless compression.
That's MQA. Hardly anyone uses it.
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Besides that, resampling is more complex than just deleting every other sample. The simplest way to conceptualize it is that you're averaging multiple samples into one, but that's an oversimplification as there is filtering and other things that go on [wikipedia.org] in a high-quality resampler.
Moreover, if it's done right, you won't know the difference.
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> What you're describing is decimation... which is totally different than compression.
well, it's totally different than lossless compression (because it is obviously not lossless).
however, at the end of the process, the signal is almost the same to human perception but with fewer bits. that is literally the definition of lossy compression.
> That's MQA. Hardly anyone uses it.
no it isn't. it's a way to characterize the relative efficiency of one lossy compression scheme against another. MQA was a market
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> What you're describing is decimation... which is totally different than compression.
well, it's totally different than lossless compression (because it is obviously not lossless).
Decimation is (usually) lossless if there was nothing in the upper frequency range to begin with (which there shouldn't have been for audio). The passband will have 0dB attenuation (ideally). This is all entirely different than compression in basically every way. You're just cutting out unused bandwidth.
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The question isn't relevant for a couple of reasons.
First, lossy compression puts the data through a Fourier transform, after which the amplitude of the waveform at any given sample is not represented by a single value, but a combination of values describing the energy at different frequencies at that moment in time. That is to say, it has no bit depth.
More importantly, the question is built on the assumption that there is an audible difference between a 24/96 source and a properly downsampled 16/44 version
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No matter how correct you are, no matter how patiently you explain, you're never going to convince some people that numbers bigger than CD-quality don't sound better, no matter how many ABX tests say otherwise.
I wonder (Score:2)
What justification they will give for charging more for this, given bandwidth costs next to nothing.
Assumes everyone has high BW internet (Score:1)
Which is not the case. FWIW, I have max of 3 mb (yes, "b") per second internet and my backup is satellite with a 10 GB data cap.
Downloading lossless would take forever on my unlimited plan and also make me quickly reach the data cap on my satellite internet.
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Too bad I guess?
Was that the reaction you were looking for? I'm confused as to why we should care.
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Legal piracy (Score:2)
With the artists getting about ½ per play, Spotify are just parasites.
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well better 1/2 of somthing than 100% of nothing, I'm not saying spotify is generous here but ay least the artists gets something, and the userrs get better sound quality and no ads so wat's not to like?
I get better sound quality and the artist gets more money when I buy a CD, which I still do regularly. Why would I support Spotify?
Back to the 80's! (Score:2)
awesome, now your gnarly cuts can sound as like tubular as they did 40 years ago!
was hoping for hella better. grody.
- js.
Hmm, nothing better than CD quality? (Score:2)
Call me when there is 5.1 (or better) surround mix (Score:1)
At this point higher bitrates don't interest me as much as truly immersive sound. Dolby digital or DTS would be a nice addition I might consider paying more for. Pushing more ones and zeros for simple stereo sound and expecting people to pay more doesn't make sense to me when bandwidth is very cheap. If you can get your hands on some 5.1 mixes of Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd or Queen for example, the experience is mind blowing. It seems like these 5.1 mixes had great promise and died out when SACD format f
by all means (Score:2)
...spend your $ how you like, but understand that bit-perfect audio isn't doing anything for you as you work out or listen on a subway. Or even in a car.