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.

Last edited by JohnGB; 2011-07-07 04:59.
G92-DAB, G55, speakers: PMC FB1+, Squeezebox Touch, Duet, Sennheiser HD600, HP Proliant Microserver running Ubuntu