News Spotify now in USA

Spotify has landed in the U.S. Sign up to get your invite now - Spotify

Popular European music streaming service Spotify is now available in the US.

Free accounts are currently in an invite queue, if you don't want to wait premium accounts start at $4.99.

I currently have a Premium European account and must admit audio quality is superb through an Asus Xonar D2X via Yamaha DSP-AX620 and Audiotechnica ATH-M50 headphones or Mission 773(or 4 can never remember) floor standing speakers

Enjoy!

 

lossy codecs work by removing "unnecessary" audio data. The lower the bit rate the more audio data it drops. You will hear it. At higher bit rates it just causes fatigue, at lower rates it starts sounding telephone-ish.

 

Lord, I don't want to get into a long argument here but that really isn't how most lossy encoders work. They work by adding noise to the signal that can then be psychoacousticly shaped. Usually all that is "removed" is extreme high and low frequencies that 'most' people can't hear anyway. They also work in the time domain and not just frequency domain; this is why early mp3 encoders (Blade, early Fhg) had smeared transients.

Most widely used codecs are un abx-able above 192kbps and most at 128kbps. People that swear they can hear the difference are the same ones that swore cd's weren't as good as analog because they could "hear" the space in between the samples on the cd or the jitter on cd.

 

lossy codecs work by removing "unnecessary" audio data. The lower the bit rate the more audio data it drops. You will hear it. At higher bit rates it just causes fatigue, at lower rates it starts sounding telephone-ish.

I don't know what happens but this would sound right to me. I know I can hear a difference between 128k music and 320k. It's not even a question, it becomes distorted over even my logitech 2.1 speakers at 128k. Maybe 192k is ok but I still try and get nothing less than 256, but usually 320, I don't even bother listening to 128k songs...

 

Lord, I don't want to get into a long argument here but that really isn't how most lossy encoders work. They work by adding noise to the signal that can then be psychoacousticly shaped. Usually all that is "removed" is extreme high and low frequencies that 'most' people can't hear anyway. They also work in the time domain and not just frequency domain; this is why early mp3 encoders (Blade, early Fhg) had smeared transients.

Most widely used codecs are un abx-able above 192kbps and most at 128kbps. People that swear they can hear the difference are the same ones that swore cd's weren't as good as analog because they could "hear" the space in between the samples on the cd or the jitter on cd.

If lossy encoders didn't drop audio data you'd have mp3's running at 10mb per minute of audio.

Instead you can have 5 minutes of audio encoded at 128kbps mp3 at 5mb. Down from 50MB thats a heck of a lot of data gone.

The lower the bit rate, the more you well hear the data loss.

Paragraph 1 of this page: HowStuffWorks "MP3 Bit Rates"
Paragraph 1 of "Trimming the edges": How MP3 compression works | News | TechRadar UK

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It uses psychoacoustic models to discard or reduce precision of components less audible to human hearing, and then records the remaining information in an efficient manner.

All say data loss. Yes wikipedia agrees with your terminology, but essentially, whatever you cal it, at the end of the day, lossy encoding throws away data to shrink file sizes significantly.

Lower bitrates throw away so much it starts sounding digitised and muffled. Higher bitrates generally cause "listener" fatigue as the brain works to fill in sound the listener may not be consciously aware is missing.

If you still think lossy encoders don't throw out audio data please give me a link to a detailed explanation of how you can go from 10MB per minute of audio to 1MB or less per minute of audio without loosing data.

 

Yep, a 128k is usually a meg a minute. And it does remove data to shorten it. Which is why I like to stick with Flac when I can. If I can't find it in flac, I look for Variable Extreme encoding, and NEVER keep ones that are normalized.

There was a thing for a long time where people insisted that 128k was cd quality. That is not the case. A lot of it also has to do with what you use to rip the cd's. Going by all the audiophiles, Lame is the only one to use.

The standards are:

1. Use EAC
2. Use lame set to VBR -> -V 0 is the best quality (-v 0 --preset fast extreme).
3. Do not activate normalize.