[Music] Local FLAC Playback

[Deeb]

A member of spotify team said to separate the FLAC idea post, into FLAC local playback and FLAC streaming. Someone else can create a FLAC streaming post, as I'm only after local playback. The original post with the 2 ideas in one post is here.

http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Flac-on-Spotify-at-least-playback-of-your-own-flac/idi...

 
Vote for this post if you want LOCAL PLAYBACK OF FLAC FILES ONLY.

WHY WE NEED SPOTIFY TO PLAY OUR FLAC COLLECTION
Spotify already plays ALAC, all be it with stability problems, but what we really need is local FLAC playback because FLAC is the defacto standard for lossless audio encoding. 7digital has recently started selling FLAC yet spotify can't play them. Why not???

http://www.7digital.com/find-music/7digital-recommends/flac

The most commercially successful band on the planet (The Beatles), have released official remastered versions of all albums in 24bitFLAC format on a usb device.

http://www.everythingusb.com/the-beatles-stereo-usb-limited-edition-17961.html

Numerous bands have sold albums in FLAC format through their websites. FLAC is the defacto standard for lossless encoding, so please start supporting local playback of FLAC.

Another idea that is important to me is fixing the appalling "set the same volume level for all tracks", which doesn't take into account the subtle volume transients of an album that audio engineers spend hours working on. The following volume normalization method retains the intended volume differences as part of the album.

http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/VOLUME-NORMALIZATION-IN-SPOTIFY-DAMAGES-INTEGRITY-OF-T...

[yonasu3]

Lack of flac playback is a deal breaker for me because almost my entire library is flacs. Please add this!

[Piotr]

Most of my audio files are in flac format. Please implement this feature.

[Sören]

As most people posting here, I want to express my support for the idea of enabling Spotify to play locally stored lossless files too. I use Spotify to discover new music but when I like something enough to buy it, then I store it in my local library in a lossless format that Spotify cannot play and I really hate being forced to use another player for my locally stored music.

However, I don't use the FLAC format. For player compatibility reasons I use WAV instead, i.e. uncompressed files. Storage is relatively cheap nowadays so file size is not a major issue anymore. I hence really would like Spotify to support both FLAC and WAV.

Furthermore, in order to prevent Windows from deteriorating the quality of lossless recordings by it's internal sample rate convertion (a CD is recorded at 44,1 kHz but Windows transcodes all recordings to 48 kHz), I would also like Spotify to support by-passing of Windows' internal sound processing by enabling the bit-stream to be fed "bit-perfectly", i.e. without any transcodings or modifications, directly to the PC's internal or external (USB) sound card. The jRiver music player software constitutes an excellent example of what an audiophile really wants in this aspect. I wish Spotify would provide similar funcionaliy.

Finally, since I'm an audiophile, parts of my music collection is "better-than-CD" recordings, a.k.a. studio quality. It would hence be great if the implementation also would support both FLAC and WAV files with sample and bit rates up to 192/24, i.e. studio quality recordings. I fully accept the argument that one needs an exceptionally good hifi system in order to tell the difference and that one is probably crazy if one finds such a system worth the investment but still, some of us actually do.

If my audiophile's wishlist is too exhaustive for Spotify to handle, then an alternative solution would be to enable technically more competent software music players, such as jRiver, to embed a Spotify client, therby enabling me to play music from all my sources via a single player with the best possible quality. I would though prefer that the all-source player that I eventually will use is Spotify since I really like Spotify's user interface. And I assume that Spotify likes to have its user interface in my eyes as much as possible for commercial reasons?

Thanks,

Sören

[davidaheath]

I would like to show my support for this idea.

100% of my local music library is in FLAC and not having the option to include it within Spotify is frustrating.

Thanks,

David

[Exhu83]

Please add Local FLAC playback !! Wonderful service, it just lacks FLAC support ! How comes this not implemented yet, this is a very popular format amongst audiophile. 

FLAC streaming would be a hard because of bandwith, but local FLAC is not so hard to implement !

[Gero]

Please add FLAC support! The lack of FLAC support is the only reason I'm not going to use the spotify player.

[chea_one]

Please add Local FLAC playback !! Wonderful service, it just lacks FLAC support ! How comes this not implemented yet, this is a very popular format amongst audiophile. 

FLAC streaming would be a hard because of bandwith, but local FLAC is not so hard to implement !

[chea_one]

Please add Local FLAC playback !! Wonderful service, it just lacks FLAC support ! How comes this not implemented yet, this is a very popular format amongst audiophile. 

FLAC streaming would be a hard because of bandwith, but local FLAC is not so hard to implement !

[hahavaffan]

SInce WiMP is going to launch lossless streaming, the least Spotify can do is implement FLAC playback of local files. That way Spotify would still be able to keep a bunch of its audiophile customers, instead of loosing them to WiMP. I hate having to deal with dual players on my computer just to be able to play FLAC every now and then. Do it!

[chronocide]

+1 to flac on local computer

[axelwellington]

I'm surprised and disappointed that Spotify doesn't support local playback of FLAC files. I'd really like to see that feature in the future.