I miss Oink/What.CD.
Yeah, you get the version they choose. Admittedly, this is not something I run into often, but for example: the stereo remasters of the early Beatles albums sound terrible to me with headphones because everything is hard-panned (e.g. vocals are only in the right channel). These albums were originally mixed in mono and sound way better that way. It's impossible to listen to these albums in mono on Spotify even though digital versions do exist.
Messing with the few options offered by the spotify client didn't help either. I'm mostly looking for a solution to use my music libary with a streaming service as drop-in for missing tracks.
Anecdotally though Spotify's "Very High" quality works well for me and honestly in 99% of cases it is indistinguishable. My setup sure isn't the greatest, but I have a dedicated DAC, a headphone amp, and speaker amp with some reputable headphones and bookshelf speakers. I keep CD sourced FLAC files on a local disk but I never really play them anymore.
Maybe if I had large floorstanding speakers in the 1000$+ category there'd be a lot more cases where Spotify falls short - where the HiFi offering or local FLAC would have a strong case - but I certainly recognize it is a niche case.
[1]: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-22/five-things-to-know-...
What makes it worth it for you?
The long version: I know it's a lot of money, and I'm not looking to die on this hill, but here's the bullet point list of why it really works for me:
- I have a large (400gb) lossless local library, and I really wanted an intelligent way to just put it on "random", if that makes sense. So the truly killer feature for me is being able to play an album/song -- and then have that mood continue afterwards without my interaction. My own local Spotify is worth quite a bit to me, as it turns out.
- related to the above -- I'm aware lifetime license means just the company, and I've been bitten before. But the people behind it have specifically stated that, in the event of a buyout or closing of shop, they would release a final "untethered" version of their product. They also apparently have a history of supporting products in similar ways, since I believe their previous, defunct companies servers are still operational.
- The metadata/connections are pretty fabulous. They have coverage for a significant amount of niche artists, and plenty of backup photos/notes. They do a great job of connecting musicians in the same "scenes" too, so I've had fun exploring my own library wiki-style and learning influences and collaborations I would never know otherwise.
- the wide cross-compatibility with other audio hardware. Not something I've explored much, but very reassuring since I can make it play out of pretty much anything I want.
- I realize Tidal is somewhat opposed to the local-Spotify goal I listed up top, but Tidal also had a deal at the same time, so I figured why not.
- What ends up happening is that I listen to an album or two I own, get busy in something -- then realize it's switched to Tidal and it's something I've never heard/like. I then go on Bandcamp and buy the album, thus adding it to my local library.
So it's given me this nice loop of discovery, to collection, to adding it to the main queue for when I switch to library-only mode.
()I was also fortunate enough to have a job during this pandemic, so I figured I could use the stimulus for something I would not otherwise purchase -- the lifetime license.)
CONS:
- Lossless music isn't a dealbreaker in a streaming service for me, so I do wish they integrated with something a little cheaper like Apple Music or even Spotify. But I get that's against their Audiophiliac Code of Conduct, and I can live with it.
- No good way to use it remotely, like in the car. Hopefully that'll be a part of 2.0.
torrents of such material are non-existent, dead or unreliable at best, and almost never lossless
the point being to avoid being constantly let down by audio streaming providers
but safe to say the point was missed on this occasion
So you still have to do that. It's not an option so we don't get the point you're making.
it’s usually downloading, fixing the tags (if needed), moving it to its subdir in the music directory. that’s all