Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat Spotify now available in the US!

We gave you IKEA now it's time for Spotify! And it's free!

Spotify is now available in the US!

https://www.spotify.com/se/coming-to-the-us/

"Spotify is so good" - Mark Zuckerberg CEO and founder Facebook
"It blows the doors off of anything on the market." - L.A Times
"Those who have tried Spotify know it's like a magical version of iTunes in which you've already bought every song in the world" - WIRED
"The celestial jukebox is no pipe dream; it's here now." - TIME
"Spotify makes music fun again, just like the iPod did nearly 10 years ago." - Billboard.biz

PS. Meridian it's time to get that integration done with AMG+Spotify+Sooloos now that we discussed here before. And yes time to retire that iPod dock and integrate Airplay as well ;-) DS.

May be we will get in on Sooloos now! Well I hope so.

Regards,
Carl

I wouldn't hold your breath. Perhaps it's time to buy a SB Touch?

Good news for Spotify, hopefully this will put it into profit soon.

Is Spotify MP3 only?

Currently Spotify streaming bitrate is 320kbit (ogg vorbis) for subscriptions and 160kbit for free.

Mobile devices (iOS, Android) streaming bitrate is 160kbit and require subscription.

Playlists can be marked for offline mode and will then be fully cached to your device or computer this requires subscription.

There might be some variations on this during the US introduction but this is what we have in europe now.

Thanks Crion!

I use my own quasi spotify on my iPhone: it's called DS audio and it accesses my entire 1T+ lossless library from the Synology NAS. A very cool feature.

I hope Spotify offers a lossless solution one day as Meridian has indefinite excuse to not partner in for substandard specs

Well Spotify with its 320kbit is probably the highest quality commercially available streaming service there is. It is also extremely reliable and instant in searches.

Spotify currently have 13M songs with 10.000 songs added every day. It has 1M paying subscribers in europe and 10M+ users. It served 45M Euro to artists in 2010. Currently valued $1B.

And could as we noticed earlier be interfaced with AMG database with not much programming if you were an integrator like Meridian for example. Spotify is pretty open that way.

Interesting that you say that as I understand that the delay in getting Spotify onto the Sonos platform was due to the Spotify API not being easy to integrate into the Sonos application. I don't know what the problem was and don't know what the solution was, but it was eventually resolved but it sounds like it was not a straight forward integration.

Unless we know the specifics it's hard to tell what really they had issues with. Meridian does have the IP to do this and have done so earlier with the US-only Rhapsody service.

The only problem with Spotify at the moment is that, on the Intel platform, volume normalization is on permanently, with no option in the API to turn it off. There is a campaign to get this changed.

Great news that it's coming to the US: more users = more justification for Sooloos integration. The funny thing is, that if M does this, my interest in Sooloos increases, but the lack of affordable storage expansion rears its ugly head! I wonder if M is planning to allow generic storage?

Spotify is certainly a great resource. But there are a couple of important caveats. (This is my understanding of the situation - please correct me if I have got anything wrong.)

(1) The much vaunted 320 kbps bitrate:

In my experience (mainly with classical music) this bitrate is only available on a minority of albums, say 20-25%. When you are selecting or listening to an album there is no indication what the bitrate actually is. So you can only tell what the bitrate is if you have a utility on your PC which can measure the bandwidth being used. Therefore many people who have subscribed to Spotify in order to get the 320 kbps feed might believe that is what they are listening to whereas they are getting the 160 kbps more often than not.

Perhaps this has changed since I last checked but, if not, I feel it is very dubious practice.

(2) Volume normalision

If you are using the PC interface normalisation can be switched on or off.

I understand that if you using a Squeezebox Touch or Radio with the Logitech Spotify app that normalisation not implemented. This is also the case if you are running Squeezebox Centre with Triode's third party Spotify plugin on an ARM based NAS.

However, if you are using any other Squeezebox device or an Intel based NAS and are using Triode's third party Spotify plugin normalization is ALWAYS applied (and that totally ruins classical music).

The reason is that Spotify have two versions of the application they provide for third party developers (libspotify): a build for ARM (which doesn't normalise) and a build for Intel (which does). My understanding is that Triode has asked Spotify to provide an Intel build without normalisation or with normalisation that can be selected if required - but to no avail as yet.

Having said all that I still believe that Spotify is a very valuable resource.

Thanks for bringing this up John, I found a good analysis of the 320/160kbit issue right here:

http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2011/07/dear-spotify-please-give-us-premium.html

I thought everything old was slowly being reripped @320kbit but it seems that is not the case.