Renewed Spotify Premium after waiting long for HiFi

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premoddev said:
I think you are right.. I too feel there is something happened (in a good way) in the new Spotify plugin on Volumio. Its too good... feels like Spotify became "Hifi" ;) .. Good recordings are playing very beautifully..

After very long time trying Volumio, it seems they have disabled access to Plugins without My Volumio login. So I had to install the plugin through Cli as mentioned in the above link.
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Oh thats wonderful. Yes one needs to register with Volumio to download the plugin, although a paid account is not required.

MaSh
 
aurobindosaha said:
For the 3rd year, I have renewed my Individual plan for a year today, after hoping that for long Spotify HiFi will launch in India. For the last 1 year, there are rumours that Spotify HiFi will launch soon, but we are yet to see that happen. Many would suggest why to stick to Spotify, and why not Tidal and other better audio quality streaming services. Two reasons, are specific to my preference.
  1. In my knowledge, Spotify is the music service that can be streamed to Volumio and thus play easily in RPI. There are other choices, however, I have to go via BubbleUPNP, or VPN, or some other intermediate hurdles. Spotify nicely offers an option to choose the output device
    View attachment 70438

  2. I like Spotify music discovery and suggestions, Over time Spotify baked itself to my liking and the long playlist I have. Now going for something else will mean training it from the beginning. Moreover Spotify interface is very intuitive.
And frankly speaking, I do not find Spotify quality not so bad.
At least in my set-ups, Spotify sounds very pleasing.
(Acoustic Portrait Thyaga>SwaraAmp>Thyaga MS610 Speaker or Dragonfly Black>Sennheiser HD598)

Your preferences? Open to listen to your thoughts.
Kind regards
Aurobindo
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Absolutely. Find it easier to stream on Spotify and the connect feature is my fav, seamless music i can listen to while at home and later pick up on it in my car. Just wish they start the HiFi streaming soon and in sure that will get them more subscribers .I have a basic setup but still sounds great via Spotify.
 
I recently started using spotify ( had the family plan for wife and kids though) and absolutely love it. i of course use a bluetooth headset hence my focus is not on absolute sound quality but loved their algorithm for discovering music.
came upon this thread now
mbhangui said:
The streaming happens directly between the spotify server and the PI playing the music. The spotify client (regardless from where it is run) instructs the application named librespot on raspberry pi, to stream the music directly from the spotify server. librespot is an extremely well written application in C.

In Airplay the first streaming happens between the apple server and the device where you are running apple music app. When you do airplay to raspberry pi, there are totally 3 machines involved. First the apple music server streams it to your apple device. Then from that apple device, another streaming happens to the raspberry pi. It is very prone to stutter. So in reality there are two streams happening simultaneously when using airplay. This is like a relay race. If one end drops the batton, the runner will have to stop. I suspect, that the shairport-sync application on raspberry pi isn't as well written as the spotify librespot. Even without any music playing it is consuming CPU. See the below screenshot. The librespot is happily doing its job with much less resource.
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What a wonderful explanation. Thanks for this
 
arj said:
I recently started using spotify ( had the family plan for wife and kids though) and absolutely love it. i of course use a bluetooth headset hence my focus is not on absolute sound quality but loved their algorithm for discovering music.
came upon this thread now


What a wonderful explanation. Thanks for this
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I have both apple music and spotify subscription. Forget about the big noise that apple fanboys create about apple hires. I don't have an ATMOS setup, so that's why, maybe I can't understand the brouhaha about spatial audio. However I will explain the mess apple hires is as of now below.

The only single case where apple can have better sound quality than spotify is when your DAC is connected to an iphone or Ipad or if you are an apple fan and consider connecting a ear bud to the iphone or using those apple home pods. The biggest issue that apple has is that it uses its own proprietary format known as ALAC to store high resolution content. In the early IPOD and itunes days, apple thought that if they use a proprietary codec, other devices (mp3 players, linux, windows) wll never be able to play high resolution music without using itunes or without using ipods. Now in this age of streaming, most devices out their (chromecast, chromecast clones, chinese devices, the denons, the marantz, yamaha, linux windows) cannot play ALAC. So the moment apple music app discovers that the end device cannot play ALAC, it streams the AAC version of the music, downgrading the quality to mp3 320 kpbs. So what this essentially means is that apple hi-res will always be restricted to apple devices. Apart from this hi-res issue the other problem apple has is bit-perfectness. Apple did an extremely lousy job with macbooks. The apple OS on macbook (OSX) doesn't have the ability to change the sample rate to match with the source. It will always play at a fxed sample rate set using Audio Midi Setup program. So in the end, bit-perfect hi-res is limited to just three devices - iphones, ipads and the apple home pods.

Spotify isn't limited by a proprietary codec. They are probably limited by money power to handle the huge increase in bandwidth if they go hi-res. But when it comes, it will trounce apple music for each and every non-apple device connect to a DAC or music streamers in your audio chain. So unless apple switches to a open codec like FLAC, I don't think I will renew my apple subscription next year.

Forget about the apple music recommendations that daily pops up in my feed. I do not listen to any bollywood music made after 1980. But apple keeps on pestering me with freshly minted trashy synthesised bollywood trash on a daily basis.
 
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My wife is on all apple ecosystem and does use the apple pods pro but despite trying out Apple music she too prefers Spotify. perhaps more due to the diverse content and intelligent recommendation which i am pretty amazed by.She is of course not thinking as an audiophile but over the years has learnt to differentiate between low rez MP3 and high rez/lossless ( and that i consider a win ! )
mbhangui said:
---

Spotify isn't limited by a proprietary codec. They are probably limited by money power to handle the huge increase in bandwidth if they go hi-res. But when it comes, it will trounce apple music for each and every non-apple device connect to a DAC or music streamers in your audio chain. So unless apple switches to a open codec like FLAC, I don't think I will renew my apple subscription next year.
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Spotify goes to around 320kbps is what i got to know and 256-320 is a very good range for wireless headphones and regular systems so Spotify may not really see a need to go higher.
 
arj said:
My wife is on all apple ecosystem and does use the apple pods pro but despite trying out Apple music she too prefers Spotify. perhaps more due to the diverse content and intelligent recommendation which i am pretty amazed by.She is of course not thinking as an audiophile but over the years has learnt to differentiate between low rez MP3 and high rez/lossless ( and that i consider a win ! )


Spotify goes to around 320kbps is what i got to know and 256-320 is a very good range for wireless headphones and regular systems so Spotify may not really see a need to go higher.
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Yes. Spotify can be set to high quality which gives 320 kbps. I use that setting. I too end up using spotify most of the time and I find absolute no difference between spotify and AM. But I find the apple music app unusable. When I quit the app, I loose the playlist. In spotify I select a playlist of songs on one device, it shows me the same information on all my phones, sony playstation and all other devices. With apple music I select something on my macbook pro, my phone shows something very different. I can't switch devices and expect to get the interface to show the same playlist and the same song playing. I have to start fresh selecting the songs to play. This is the biggest turn off for me.
 
mbhangui said:
Yes. Spotify can be set to high quality which gives 320 kbps. I use that setting. I too end up using spotify most of the time and I find absolute no difference between spotify and AM. But I find the apple music app unusable. When I quit the app, I loose the playlist. In spotify I select a playlist of songs on one device, it shows me the same information on all my phones, sony playstation and all other devices. With apple music I select something on my macbook pro, my phone shows something very different. I can't switch devices and expect to get the interface to show the same playlist and the same song playing. I have to start fresh selecting the songs to play. This is the biggest turn off for me.
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Agree with all of your points on Apple Music. I am quite into the Apple ecosystem, but after multiple tryouts have settled on Spotify for the reasons you mentioned - the most important for me being the native play through Spotify Connect on my streamer. The sound quality is second to none, irrespective of the resolution which to me is lesser of an issue. However I am not as happy with their recommendations as most users - may be my expectations from the AI are much more. And I hate the podcasts wasting premium space on the Home Screen in the app even if I don’t ever listen to them (always preferred the written word over the spoken).

However there are some pluses/uniquenesses to Apple Music which can appeal to some users. And am not referring to the lossless/hi-res/Dolby, the highly attractive pricing or even the platform benefits. For example, AM has an excellent music videos section which is not even present in most of its competition. And it’s good! If I ever want to put another Rs 99 pm for AM (or take the Apple One package), it’d be for these music videos, streamed through my Apple TV. And frankly, nothing comes close to Apple TV when it comes to video streaming. Their Radio stations implementation is also quite good and Apple keeps coming up with their own content (music or music programs).

In summary, both Apple Music and Spotify Premium have their own pros and could appeal to different audiences. And thank God for that as we don’t want clones competing! But both these are miles ahead of everything else out there in terms of overall music streaming experience.

P.S. I keep paying Rs 169 for YouTube Premium every month irrespective of what other service I am subscribed to as there’s absolutely nothing that comes close to the user-generated musical (video and audio) content on YT/YT Music. It’s a boon for those of us who love concerts, especially Indian - whether Classical or Orchestras or other Live performances - there’s just nothing to beat this content on YouTube
 
sachinchavan 15865 said:
P.S. I keep paying Rs 169 for YouTube Premium every month irrespective of what other service I am subscribed to as there’s absolutely nothing that comes close to the user-generated musical (video and audio) content on YT/YT Music. It’s a boon for those of us who love concerts, especially Indian - whether Classical or Orchestras or other Live performances - there’s just nothing to beat this content on YouTube
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and you dont get pesky ads :)
 
I settled on apple music after waiting long for Spotify hifi, the good things I experienced with apple music after using Spotify premium for quite a long time are: no dropouts while playing lossless via airplay on my usbridge streamer, noticibly good quality over Bluetooth (shows Bluetooth hd connection with my pioneer car head unit, quality seems almost as good as flacs played from usb), price, 3 months free trial and good collection of well mastered old bollywood tracks.
 
amit_s said:
I settled on apple music after waiting long for Spotify hifi, the good things I experienced with apple music after using Spotify premium for quite a long time are: no dropouts while playing lossless via airplay on my usbridge streamer, noticibly good quality over Bluetooth (shows Bluetooth hd connection with my pioneer car head unit, quality seems almost as good as flacs played from usb), price, 3 months free trial and good collection of well mastered old bollywood tracks.
Click to expand...
Same here...
however I'm still using Spotify as a mobile and car listening streamer
 
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