I'm hope this doesn't come across as sour grapes, but I'm sure this might interest a few people. While there is no specific guarantee regarding the availability of high(er)-res (320k VBR) streams for individual tracks/albums, there is the expectation with a Premium account that if you request a 320k VBR stream, that you'll probably get it. It's used as a selling point for Premium. "Premium members deserve premium sound quality. To be precise, you can stream music at a higher bitrate of up to 320kbps on your computer. ThatÂ’s some serious high-fidelity listening coming your way." Well, OK it does say, "up to". Their technical help page is a little more explicit, "Note: not all tracks are currently available in high bitrate."
My expectation (and I cant remember where I read this) is that music that was archived several years ago had been encoded at a max of 160k VBR and music made available since then (subject to the odd record company that wouldn't allow 320k VBR) would be available at the higher-res. I wish I could remember where I read that. The cynic in me would suggest that they have a reason to hide the actual bitrate of the stream. The "official" API and client allows you to request a preferred bitrate. So, say you request 320k, if that's available for the track then you get it, if not then the next best bitrate that is available will be streamed, usually 160k. But you never get told what bitrate you are actually getting. The data is supplied as 16/44.1 PCM from their API and there is no way of querying it to find out what the bitrate was of the Ogg, prior to decoding. I think people would be very surprised to find out what music is not available at the higher bitrate. For example, only ~55% of music in the "Top 100->Albums" list is available at the higher bitrate. Interestingly, a quick spin through "New Releases" has me somewhat bewildered. It may be the case that the record companies are not allowing Spotify to stream new "current" releases at 320k VBR, but there is plenty of material (eg. old Jazz / contemporary) that is not available at the higher bitrate. Perhaps there is a popularity consideration. Maybe they wish to save disk space by not storing these "old" releases at the higher bitrate even though they have been very recently added to their library. Anyway, enough waffle..... (And I've already had a grumble about volume normalization.....) It's a shame that Spotify cannot be more transparent about this. The bitrate information is already available internally in their API, but not made available to the user. Perhaps a new thread needs to be started on GetSatisfaction requesting that they add the stream quality availability to the Track details and some way of requesting the actual bitrate of the track currently playing, rather than the requested, preferred bitrate, which doesn't tell you what you're actually getting. -- JackOfAll ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JackOfAll's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3069 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=79706
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