Spotify is brilliant

wyliefan said:
I googled that and in spotify q&a it says you can't but I'll get my daughter to look into that thanks.
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Well you’d have to end hers and start yours, but keep a new family membership. It’s worth doing for ‘free’ audiobooks.
 
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ThatFragranceGuy said:
I don't really agree. I hate Bandcamp personally. A lot of artists I buy release exclusively on there and an album will be £22.99 for example but then it adds on shipping of £15 for a UK artist, and then I hit checkout and it bangs on tax. Often for preorder that then takes 3-6 months to come.

Very rarely a cheap option for me to buy from there. Occasionally it'll actually ship from the uk and shipping is low but every other time it's 20% VAT added on top of expensive shipping, so it being the only outlet at times is a pain & in terms of digital playback of purchases the app isn't great and poorly supported across digital platforms. It's also not for a great outlook after laying off half its staff when sold by epic late last year

I get the fact that streaming pays very low amounts, but on the other hand it also opens artists up to vast amounts of exposure they wouldn't otherwise have.

Historically bands would make nothing or very little on tapes or cds people made each other, or official sales as the label would take most of that. so this at least gives the residual income even if it is low, but vast amount of bands I go see on tour or buy vinyl for I wouldn't even know existed without Spotify, I certainly wouldn't have discovered them on Bandcamp, I don't think I've liked one of their suggested artists yet. I've also seen a lot of bands on tour & bought physical media thanks to the Spotify tour listings and links to albums etc

I prefer the model the Reytons use and just self release - prices kept low and it's working well for them
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It doesn't add up to a living wage for most artists. And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year.

Absolute scumbags...but people seemingly look the other way when they are getting something for next to nothing
 
ThatFragranceGuy said:
I don't really agree. I hate Bandcamp personally. A lot of artists I buy release exclusively on there and an album will be £22.99 for example but then it adds on shipping of £15 for a UK artist, and then I hit checkout and it bangs on tax. Often for preorder that then takes 3-6 months to come.

Very rarely a cheap option for me to buy from there. Occasionally it'll actually ship from the uk and shipping is low but every other time it's 20% VAT added on top of expensive shipping, so it being the only outlet at times is a pain & in terms of digital playback of purchases the app isn't great and poorly supported across digital platforms. It's also not for a great outlook after laying off half its staff when sold by epic late last year

I get the fact that streaming pays very low amounts, but on the other hand it also opens artists up to vast amounts of exposure they wouldn't otherwise have.

Historically bands would make nothing or very little on tapes or cds people made each other, or official sales as the label would take most of that. so this at least gives the residual income even if it is low, but vast amount of bands I go see on tour or buy vinyl for I wouldn't even know existed without Spotify, I certainly wouldn't have discovered them on Bandcamp, I don't think I've liked one of their suggested artists yet. I've also seen a lot of bands on tour & bought physical media thanks to the Spotify tour listings and links to albums etc

I prefer the model the Reytons use and just self release - prices kept low and it's working well for them
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I don't want Bandcamp to be cheap. I want it to enable the artists to keep making music.

There's space for both.
 
I've just noticed another new feature - 'Courses'. Looks similar to Udemy for anyone who's used that before.

Spotify | Online Courses

Spotify now offers online video courses. Learn how to make music, new business skills or healthy living. First 2 lessons of each course are free.
courses.spotify.com courses.spotify.com

Might check a couple of these out, specifically the art courses, they all seem to be free with premium, at least on my account they are.
 
The implementation of audiobooks, on spotify, is awful. The app jumps through chapters randomly if I try to rewind a little bit of the book I might have missed and if I don't have a WIFI signal (or decent cellular coverage - impossible where I live) the app won't start the book, even though it is downloaded to the app. I appreciate it is free with my subscription but it needs testing better.
I am hopeful it will improve update after update.
 
Comforts_comforter said:
The implementation of audiobooks, on spotify, is awful. The app jumps through chapters randomly if I try to rewind a little bit of the book I might have missed and if I don't have a WIFI signal (or decent cellular coverage - impossible where I live) the app won't start the book, even though it is downloaded to the app. I appreciate it is free with my subscription but it needs testing better.
I am hopeful it will improve update after update.
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My Spotify does this with music if it doesn't have a decent signal, even with stuff I've doenloaded. Try switching to offline mode, works for me.
 
I tried Tidal, Apple Music and Qobuz, & tried both in Roon also but whilst the majority of music I listen to is on there, its that % that isn't that I am not willing to lose. A lot of my playlists transferred over 100% but I'd say about 20% of them were missing tracks, anywhere from 5% to 40% of tracks where there was a delta. I've got a large 900 track synthwave playlist that I maintain and there was quite a lot missing from that one. I see comments on Spotify's "bad" audio quality all the time and it often surprises me. Tidal fannied around with MQA for too long which was absolute snake oil, actually introducing noise. Think they've started to step away from that now though.

There was a good exercise on /r/audiophile on reddit designed to remove confirmation and expectation bias from these tests by using an ABX testing plugin for Foobar2000 and some samples from each service, and it was fairly difficult for people to reliably pick out the higher quality stream to the point where you might as well toss a coin, so by doing each track 10-15 times where it anonymises the tracks and you have to guess which is the one you are listening to, gives a good indication if you can actually tell the difference or if you are telling yourself that you can. Plus strips out things like app based gain settings which basically represents the loudness wars we went through in the 90s. I found that frustrating switching between apps on my stereo amp as some of them were using higher default gain settings. Anyway, anyone worried about Spotify audio quality feel free to give it a go, the results are usually interesting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/ymk4fj/curious_to_see_if_apple_music_tidal_qubuz_really

The beauty of the plugin is that 1) It lets you switch between the samples and maintain track position so you can flip rapidly and listen for differences, or skip back and 2) it gives you stats on how many times you guessed each track correctly (or not)

If Spotify would integrate into Roon I would use that, as I loved the interface, but they won't so I'll stick with Spotify & vinyl.
 
ThatFragranceGuy said:
I tried Tidal, Apple Music and Qobuz, & tried both in Roon also but whilst the majority of music I listen to is on there, its that % that isn't that I am not willing to lose. A lot of my playlists transferred over 100% but I'd say about 20% of them were missing tracks, anywhere from 5% to 40% of tracks where there was a delta. I've got a large 900 track synthwave playlist that I maintain and there was quite a lot missing from that one. I see comments on Spotify's "bad" audio quality all the time and it often surprises me. Tidal fannied around with MQA for too long which was absolute snake oil, actually introducing noise. Think they've started to step away from that now though.

There was a good exercise on /r/audiophile on reddit designed to remove confirmation and expectation bias from these tests by using an ABX testing plugin for Foobar2000 and some samples from each service, and it was fairly difficult for people to reliably pick out the higher quality stream to the point where you might as well toss a coin, so by doing each track 10-15 times where it anonymises the tracks and you have to guess which is the one you are listening to, gives a good indication if you can actually tell the difference or if you are telling yourself that you can. Plus strips out things like app based gain settings which basically represents the loudness wars we went through in the 90s. I found that frustrating switching between apps on my stereo amp as some of them were using higher default gain settings. Anyway, anyone worried about Spotify audio quality feel free to give it a go, the results are usually interesting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/ymk4fj/curious_to_see_if_apple_music_tidal_qubuz_really

The beauty of the plugin is that 1) It lets you switch between the samples and maintain track position so you can flip rapidly and listen for differences, or skip back and 2) it gives you stats on how many times you guessed each track correctly (or not)

If Spotify would integrate into Roon I would use that, as I loved the interface, but they won't so I'll stick with Spotify & vinyl.
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Anyone ever do a hearing test? I swear they drive people mad because you're torn between:
A) am I hearing something?
B) do I think I'm hearing something?
C) should I be hearing something?
 
ThatFragranceGuy said:
I tried Tidal, Apple Music and Qobuz, & tried both in Roon also but whilst the majority of music I listen to is on there, its that % that isn't that I am not willing to lose. A lot of my playlists transferred over 100% but I'd say about 20% of them were missing tracks, anywhere from 5% to 40% of tracks where there was a delta. I've got a large 900 track synthwave playlist that I maintain and there was quite a lot missing from that one. I see comments on Spotify's "bad" audio quality all the time and it often surprises me. Tidal fannied around with MQA for too long which was absolute snake oil, actually introducing noise. Think they've started to step away from that now though.

There was a good exercise on /r/audiophile on reddit designed to remove confirmation and expectation bias from these tests by using an ABX testing plugin for Foobar2000 and some samples from each service, and it was fairly difficult for people to reliably pick out the higher quality stream to the point where you might as well toss a coin, so by doing each track 10-15 times where it anonymises the tracks and you have to guess which is the one you are listening to, gives a good indication if you can actually tell the difference or if you are telling yourself that you can. Plus strips out things like app based gain settings which basically represents the loudness wars we went through in the 90s. I found that frustrating switching between apps on my stereo amp as some of them were using higher default gain settings. Anyway, anyone worried about Spotify audio quality feel free to give it a go, the results are usually interesting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/ymk4fj/curious_to_see_if_apple_music_tidal_qubuz_really

The beauty of the plugin is that 1) It lets you switch between the samples and maintain track position so you can flip rapidly and listen for differences, or skip back and 2) it gives you stats on how many times you guessed each track correctly (or not)

If Spotify would integrate into Roon I would use that, as I loved the interface, but they won't so I'll stick with Spotify & vinyl.
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Might give that a go. Think I did something similar a while ago and could tell the difference albeit tech (and my hearing) have probably evolved since then!
 
goalscrounger said:
My Spotify does this with music if it doesn't have a decent signal, even with stuff I've doenloaded. Try switching to offline mode, works for me.
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This is definitely something spotify should fix. You shouldn't have to switch to offline mode. If the app can't get a signal it should still immediately allow you to access your offline library.
 
SmallTown said:
This is definitely something spotify should fix. You shouldn't have to switch to offline mode. If the app can't get a signal it should still immediately allow you to access your offline library.
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In my case I may have a cellular signal but it will be E or 3g (so, not very reliable) and it'll just hang. Once I enter a decent cellular zone it will spark into life, usually just to make me jump!

Sometimes if I force close the app I can get it to re-establish a connection long enough for it to access my downloaded library and off she goes.
Not ideal if I am in the car, listening through Carplay. There is no SIRI command to force close Spotify.

I didn't know about the offline setting trick, but that means remembering to do this before I get into the car. Still, I suppose a workaround is just that, for now.
 
changingman said:
Might give that a go. Think I did something similar a while ago and could tell the difference albeit tech (and my hearing) have probably evolved since then!
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I did one before that wasn't blind and was convinced I could tell, but with this one it removes any sort of bias at all especially if you do enough repetitions that you're taking any element of luck out of it. I think that's the key difference with other tests I've done as it's "guess the high quality version" which you can largely get a good score on through chance alone, which leads you to believe you're on the right track if you fluke an 8 or 9 /10 score but you can't fluke 15 repetitions on each of 10+ tracks so it removes all that completely

I was actually surprised because I expected to be able to tell a good difference but be ok with that difference due to playlists and price difference. My gear is no slouch either, my stereo amplifier is a Lyngdorf TDAI-3400 and I tested with focal floor standers and dual subs as well as sennheiser HD600 headphones with a headphone amp in case headphones gave better fidelity
 
Comforts_comforter said:
In my case I may have a cellular signal but it will be E or 3g (so, not very reliable) and it'll just hang. Once I enter a decent cellular zone it will spark into life, usually just to make me jump!

Sometimes if I force close the app I can get it to re-establish a connection long enough for it to access my downloaded library and off she goes.
Not ideal if I am in the car, listening through Carplay. There is no SIRI command to force close Spotify.

I didn't know about the offline setting trick, but that means remembering to do this before I get into the car. Still, I suppose a workaround is just that, for now.
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Yeah I think that’s where it struggles: where it has a signal but not one strong enough to stream music
 
ThatFragranceGuy said:
I did one before that wasn't blind and was convinced I could tell, but with this one it removes any sort of bias at all especially if you do enough repetitions that you're taking any element of luck out of it. I think that's the key difference with other tests I've done as it's "guess the high quality version" which you can largely get a good score on through chance alone, which leads you to believe you're on the right track if you fluke an 8 or 9 /10 score but you can't fluke 15 repetitions on each of 10+ tracks so it removes all that completely

I was actually surprised because I expected to be able to tell a good difference but be ok with that difference due to playlists and price difference. My gear is no slouch either, my stereo amplifier is a Lyngdorf TDAI-3400 and I tested with focal floor standers and dual subs as well as sennheiser HD600 headphones with a headphone amp in case headphones gave better fidelity
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I have a feeling I don’t have hi fidelity ears. I used tidal for a while: with Sony headphones that optimise the app to work with their codecs. I couldn’t tell much difference between that and Spotify
 
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