

Spotify bitrategate: 320kbps premium quality not there yet - kraymer
http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2011/07/spotify-bitrategate-story-so-far.html

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kenthorvath
Solution: Everytime a track is requested by a premium member, if it does not
exist in 320 then they send FLAC and the client converts it on the fly while
playing it and sends it back to Spotify. Do this 3x for every track and verify
that the md5 is the same on all three.

Then, the most popular songs will be available in 320, and the ones that
aren't would never have been accessed in the first place.

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davej
This solves the CPU issue but I reckon bandwidth is the real issue. This
solution actually increases bandwidth usage and there would need to be a lot
more checks than just 3 md5's to prevent abuse.

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danieldk
Maybe, but this could easily be refined, e.g. by using fingerprinting. Perhaps
even the fingerprint of the Flac data (assuming that fingerprinting is much
cheaper than lossy compression).

However, it would be odd if CPU power is the real bottleneck here. I read the
article, but can we actually be sure that licensing is not at fault? Or
simply, the lack of proper management?

Given how much more revenue iTunes sales would give for the average Premium
user, it could be possible that they (RIAA and others) want to keep the
incentive to buy iTunes tracks (or the physical album). Not that Spotify would
ever admit this, since it would effectively change their status to 'music
preview/demo/shareware' provider.

The quality plus the 'disappearing tracks' issues, make me think that it is
all about preserving buying incentive. At least, that's what it did for me.

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ulyssestone
Thanks for all the comments.

Personally I don't think licensing is the problem. Why would the labels let
Spotify stream the new Paul Oakenfold and Beyonce album as exclusive pre-
releases and, at the same time, not allow them to offer HQ streaming for those
albums? What's the point? To force the audiophile users to buy 320 kbps mp3s
or CDs? Many of the premium users don't even know it's not 320 kbps.

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danieldk
_Personally I don't think licensing is the problem. Why would the labels let
Spotify stream the new Paul Oakenfold and Beyonce album as exclusive pre-
releases and, at the same time, not allow them to offer HQ streaming for those
albums? What's the point?_

The very same reason they pay some television and radio stations to broadcast
particular material: to get people to buy the albums.

It's a combination of things that make Spotify subpar for many music
enthusiasts. The lack of availability of lossless streams, incompleteness of
the catalog in 320kbps, missing tracks on many albums, uncertainty about
future accessibility of music, etc.

When Spotify was introduced in The Netherlands, I absolutely loved it, and was
convinced that I'd never need to spend much more on music than 10 Euros per
month (imagine what a save this is when you buy at least 4 albums per month).
However, given the reasons listed above, I am now mostly using Spotify for
music discovery, and still buy albums. It only helped me to make more
'accurate' purchases. As a side effect, I ended my Premium subscription,
because the 2.5 hours/week, 5 plays per track is plenty enough for evaluation.

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cageface
In controlled listening tests most people have trouble distinguishing mp3 at
128-160 VBR kbits from the uncompressed original. 320 kbits is just a waste of
bandwidth but people just assume more is better.

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Shenglong
That depends on what you're listening to. For all my progressive/power metal,
128 just sounds terrible and _empty_. I'm not very well versed in the
terminology, so I don't know how better to describe it. On the contrary, 320
sounds _full_.

My two cents.

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cageface
People make a lot of those kinds of qualitative statements about sound
quality, but when they actually do a rigorous A/B test they usually can't tell
the difference.

I've done quite a bit of A/B testing on metal at ~128 kbits and it's _very_
difficult to spot differences on most tracks. Modern lossy audio encoders are
very, very good.

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shazow
Using decent in-ear headphones (I like the Etymotic HF2), listening to
Justice, I can definitely without a doubt tell the difference between 128 kbit
and +256 kbit. Or more specifically, 128 kbit and lower for specific music
makes me feel nauseous.

I'm guessing this type of music simply doesn't compress as well as say... Red
Hot Chili Peppers.

I'm not performing a rigorous A/B test, and I can believe that I would fail
said A/B test given other conditions (other speakers, other music, etc). I
would love for this to be true for all conditions and save all that storage
space. Unfortunately, in my personal real-life conditions, better quality does
make for a better listening experience.

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baddox
Are you doing the encoding and performing A/B tests yourself? There are all
kinds of things that can hurt audio fidelity a lot worse than bitrate. Some
MP3's are poorly encoded by some crappy shareware application. Some are
transcoded from an already-lossy source. Some productions will compress better
than others (supposedly, some producers actually mix and master with
inevitable compression in mind).

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shazow
My original source was pirated music at 128kbits. Since then, I bought it and
have the 320kbit version which immediately sounded incredibly better.
Occasionally I'll hear it on 128kibts or 192kbits on Pandora and such, and the
difference is very noticeable to me.

My data is purely anecdotal but I feel strongly about it and would be willing
to put money where my mouth is if someone wants to call me on it.

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robert-boehnke
From Spotify's perspective, there is a low incentive to offer unpopular songs
as 320kbps streams.

If there is only a small number of peers in the network that have the high
Bitrate stream (paying users with HQ enabled on desktop clients and with
interest in unpopular song X), they benefits of the peer to peer networking
are less likely to pay off.

However, that does not explain why they don't offer HQ for some of their more
prestigious releases, though I wouldn't be surprised if the labels hand them
'shitty' 192kbps mp3s every now and then.

Interesting read about some of their p2p architecture (PDF):
[http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.p...](http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.pdf)

EDIT:

After looking at the spreadsheet, I’d wager that there is a correlation
between lower popularity of tracks and being 160 kbps only. The only track out
of the last 40 is Michael Jackson's This is It, and a quick look up in the
Spotify client gives most of them a very low 'popularity' measure.

I mean, really? <http://open.spotify.com/track/7kBDTeWty0z1MXjcH9twph>

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pornel
Spotify uses Vorbis for streaming and Vorbis' 320kbit is not the same as MP3's
320kbit.

In fact, MP3 has quality problems (sample/frequency resolution limit per
block) that cannot be fixed at any bitrate. Moreover, re-encoding one lossless
format to another ( _edit: not what article suggests_ ) would further degrade
quality. You'd get desired bandwidth, but not the quality.

It's a shame that bandwidth became synonymous with quality and MP3's upper
limit is taken as "highest quality". 320kbit (and lossless!) WAVE sounds like
a phone line! OTOH it's quite possible that Vorbis at lower bitrate has higher
quality than MP3's maximum.

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dirtbag
I believe you are referring to lossy formats, as re-encoding one lossless
format to another will not degrade quality. Re-encoding the lossless format to
320kbit Vorbis is what he's requesting which will ensure minimum quality
degradation while still reducing the file size.

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ulyssestone
I think the ever-ongoing war between audiophiles and "nobody can tell
128/192/256/whatever kbps lossy files from CD" supporters is irreverent here.
I am not suggesting Spotify to give us a better quality that maybe doesn't
mean too much for some other users, I am asking them why they didn't deliver
the goods they promised more than two years ago.

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drv
You probably mean "irrelevant".

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tintin
Not to start the "320kbs is better" discussion but with my Unlimited account I
only heard one or two albums which sounds very compressed
(spotify:album:07hc4SjPjogLqwBc7dUCiD for example: Alan Parsons). Most of the
time the quality is just very good. I think the standard 160kbs is great imho.

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buro9
That really depends on what you're listening to the music on.

If you want to use Spotify at home and are listening on a nice stereo, then
compression artifacts are very obvious in almost everything on Spotify.

For that reason, if I'm not listening to local music I tend to listen to
KEXP's uncompressed stream. It's a mere 1.4Mbps.

Which then hits on why Spotify are most likely not serving 320. "It's the
bandwidth, stupid".

It's all about the bandwidth. How few people are going to hear the difference,
and how much would it cost to implement? The bandwidth costs are definitely
non-trivial for their subscriber base, so implementing 320 is going to hit
their costs hard.

For the article linked, notice the blog title, Spotify Classical.

Classical music really does show up artifacts in compression like Hip Hop, Pop
and Rock (and Prog Rock) simply doesn't. The strings and low bass both exist
in the upper and lower audio ranges precisely where compression is most
aggressive and therefore noticeable. This isn't going to affect greatly the
Beyonces of this world, but it affects some delicate string recital.

To be honest, if I were Spotify, I'd probably just rip the classical in 320 as
that is a specialist crowd who probably can hear the difference and would kick
up a stink. And then keep the vast majority in 160 as the vast majority aren't
going to notice and wouldn't kick up a stink. If I wanted to be more
intelligent, I'd write something to try and detect artifacts, and if a 160
file exhibited above a certain threshold, then I'd make that a contender to be
at 320... thus trying to find a sweet spot between quality and bandwidth
costs.

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tintin
To give a little context: I listen to everything from classical music to noise
and use good equipment.

You make it sound like classical music is the only kind of music where quality
is important. This is not true. Quality is also important in modern music.
Listen to Amon Tobin or Aphex Twin for example.

Besides Ogg is not the same as MP3. It's not a "kill all low and high" format.
Listening test showed that Ogg is fine for strings. Short attack times are the
problem areas when using a lower bitrate.

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aw3c2
"Give us the snakeoil you advertised no matter if it is actually 'better'"

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niklas_a
It's not like high bit rate is the only feature of Spotify Premium. It's
definitely a good feature but I ordered premium without even knowing about the
high bit rate option.

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rms
I'm impressed by Spotify. 20 hours of the same sort of unlimited free music as
what.cd and waffles.fm. 50 million Spotify users in the first year seems like
a possibly not that unrealistic prediction for them to make. Perhaps Spotify
motivates the record companies to launch and relentlessly promote their own
Hulu for music. I don't think the record companies can react that quickly
though. Maybe a few Swedish entrepreneurs just took quietly over (or become
the prime influencers of) the US record industry.

@Daniel Ek: I'll sign up for the $9.95/month plan when you have 95% of your
music available at ~192 kb/s OGG. I just want the slightly more bandwidth that
ensures I can't tell it apart from CD and it isn't much more bandwidth.

Actually, what I really want is one of those menus where you got to choose
your own encoding like allofmp3.com had.

Edit: Actually, these ads are really annoying. I guess I have to sign up. Damn
you, compelling product.

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vizzah
well, I guess it can really be only due to bandwidth reasons. It is a lesser
known fact, that Spotify (in the same way as Skype), is relying on P2P behind
the scenes.

Often, the music you listen to is streamed from other users, and so bandwidth
load is a very crucial factor. Looks like Spotify can't afford harder load to
their servers and they're gradually increasing the requirements.

But marketing their whole library as 320kbps is really disappointing. As a
premium subscriber, I was under impression that it is what I was getting.

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nateberkopec
It should definitely tell you something that he had to check file sizes to
determine if the song was 320 kbps.

Spotify knows most users just don't care - so they don't really care either.

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ulyssestone
So... You are suggesting me to write this entire report based on "from what I
heard, about 70% of the 100 tracks I auditioned are probably not at 320
kbps"?...

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nateberkopec
Well, it would have been interesting. There is, of course, quite a bit of
controversy over what bitrates a normal person can distinguish. You make it
sound like Spotify is being unreasonable, but I think they're being completely
reasonable - if people can't hear the difference, why should they devote a
large amount of their operational capacity towards making sure all their
library is 320kbps?

I'm guessing Spotify would need to receive the 320kbps version from the label
for it to be legal/work with their licensing. Can you imagine working with
record labels? These are the guys that brought you the RIAA...working with
them must be like pulling teeth. And doing all that work for almost no
appreciation from your users (who can't tell the difference?).

If the listening experience is the same, your perception of the end product is
the same - does it really matter? I mean, bad on Spotify for false advertising
and everything, but I wouldn't chalk up their behavior as being a big deal.

I understand that for someone with good taste in music, like yourself, this
matters. But for 90% of Spotify's users, I'll bet it doesn't.

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ulyssestone
Yes I understand, actually I know quiet a bit about how dinosaur like
RIAA/IFPI make their lives:P

But as I quoted in my article, Spotify staff admitted that they got music in
lossless from labels, and have the rights to convert and stream them in HQ.

To be frankly I know how this will end: most users don't care and the story
sinks into nowhere. For my own interest I don't even want to do this, @Spotify
tweeted about my blog about eight times since last year, and I'd assume it
won't happen again after this post. The US launch tripled the traffic of my
site, a post like this will only bore the new visitors away. I did this
because I believe it's the right thing to do, and I still have faith in
Spotify. That's all.

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gorm
I really don't understand how someone can complain on Spotify. It's a great
service with very good sound quality at a decent price.

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modokode
It is indeed a decent service, and I guess it was worth the money I've paid
for it, but there certainly are a bunch of flaws. I miss a lot of my personal
music library in it, for example, (and yes, while you can add them, but I
pretty much only use/used spotify at work). To be honest, I didn't even
remember to enable the HQ option when I had a paid subscription. I also use it
on gnu/linux, where the windows client under wine for me is very sluggish (but
only at work, not at home), and the native client still has ways to go.

Anyway, I seem to have gotten quite sidetracked, the point I was trying to
make is that at least OP is giving them direct feedback and thus an
opportunity to improve. While you think it's a great service, surely you can
find some ways to improve it? I could, for example, live with a larger cache
on the android app so that I can enter a store under ground without the music
stopping when the cell service does...

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gorm
It's always room for improvement on any service, but it's not really fair to
complain that a service costing $10 a month is not suitable for critical
classical listening on a stereo that cost $10.000.

Best step IMHO is to push more online music retailers to sell lossless files
for critical listening or maybe Spotify could sell it, hopefully for more than
$10 a month.

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modokode
Eh, my stereo equipment didn't cost anywhere near ten grand, but I wager it
can still show the difference between 160 and 320 kilobits of compressed
music. From what I gathered from the op, though, it's not so much about the
practical difference than the fact that he feels he's paying for something
he's not actually getting - and that's something that is fair to complain
about.

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augustl
Some of the albums I've been listening to (with HQ enabled) have raised red
flags, I've recognized compression artifacts. But I dismissed this as being
deliberate, a weird sounding microphone, an effect, or whatever, since the HQ
box was checked in Spotify settings.

Time to investigate..

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s04p
what about rdio? Does anyone know?

