After years of waiting, Spotify Lossless has finally been released!
“Lossless is available on mobile, desktop, and tablet, as well as on many devices that support Spotify Connect, including Sony, Bose, Samsung, Sennheiser, and more. Support for additional devices, including those from Sonos and Amazon, arrives next month.”
It is indeed good news, to bring it almost in line with Apple Lossless on Sonos (certainly to anyone’s ears it’ll be an equal). Although not sure I can congratulate Spotify on this ‘epic’ achievement after all these years...
I love their turn of phrase: “Lossless audio has been one of the most anticipated features on Spotify...”!
I think they meant “Lossless audio is one of the most fundamental features of a music streaming service, and for us to take eight years to get there is quite frankly an embarrassment. That said, for some reason we remain the world’s most popular music streamer so offer no apology, and have been delighted to continue taking subscriber money for a lesser audio experience. We are now pleased to be where everyone else has been since forever - Amazon, Apple, Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal. And in another exciting development, the next highly anticipated feature - Atmos audio - is currently slated for 2035, but could well be later.”
Interesting. More technical details here:
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/audio-file-formats/
- Tracks delivered at sample rates higher than 44.1 kHz (e.g., 48 kHz, 96 kHz) or bit depths higher than 24-bit are downsampled and/or reduced to a maximum of 44.1 kHz / 24-bit FLAC for playback on supported clients, with a fallback to 16-bit FLAC for backward compatibility.
That downsampling is good wish I could get my non-Atmos Amazon streams to do that.
My reading of that part was it's for the Artists uploading their tracks in the best quality and Spotify take care of it from there
Spotify already downsample when you select a lower quality stream now?
From the video included in the original link, using Spotify Connect you can choose the audio quality.
Will wait to see what streaming options are available once lossless is available from Spotify within Sonos app.
My reading of that part was it's for the Artists uploading their tracks in the best quality and Spotify take care of it from there
Correct. Same as Apple.
https://www.apple.com/apple-music/apple-digital-masters/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf
Some mastering engineers prefer to control the SRC process by sending already converted files, however we ask that you deliver the highest native sample rate available. As technology advances and bandwidth, storage, battery life, and processor power increase, keeping the highest-resolution masters available in our systems allows for full advantage of future improvements to your or your client’s music.
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