Comment by timothya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timothya | Hacker News Reader

An interesting stance he's taking.

Spotify, Google Play Music, and Rdio all stream at 320kbps MP3 or OGG, and Apple Music streams at 256kbps AAC (which is approximately the same quality as 320kbps MP3). [0][1]

Yet, the vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between 256kbps MP3 and lossless, let alone between 320kbps MP3 and lossless (tested many times, for example: [2]). I'm not sure Neil has much of an argument to make here when it comes to audio quality, particularly for the use case of casual listening.

[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/30/8863315/streaming-music-se...

[1]: http://www.whathifi.com/news/apple-music-tracks-are-256kbps-...

[2]: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-mp3-bitrate-experimen...

Also, if you're really that concerned about audio quality, you should be campaigning against earbuds. For many, many people it doesn't matter what quality the recording is, because the limiting factor for fidelity is going to be the hardware it's playing through.

Apple Music uses AAC, not MP3, which gets better quality at the same bitrates, so surely 256kbps AAC is indistinguishable from 320kbps MP3.

Thanks, I didn't realize that! I've updated my comment to make that point clear.

Hmm, I thought Google Play (and possibly Spotify as well) used OGG. MP3 is a very old format at this point.

Google Play Music seems to be streaming with MP3 for me, at least in Chrome on Mac (maybe the native apps are different?). I don't use Spotify so I am unable to test it (I updated my post to note OGG anyhow).

Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis.

Google Play uses MP3, which is kind of sad these days because Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Opus would both be much better choices.

Just a quick correction, Play music uses OGG Vorbis, not MP3

I just tested Google Play Music, and it's streaming in MP3 for me (Chrome on Mac). Maybe it streams using different formats for different platforms, though?

Sorry, you're right, Spotify is the one streaming with OGG Vorbis, Play Music uses 320kbps MP3 :)

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