topic Re: Offline Sound Quality in iOS (iPhone, iPad)

Offline Sound Quality

Malfeitor — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:47:59 GMT

Thinking about moving up to premium service but I have a question about offline mode. Will the sound quality for my offline playlist be the highest quality automatically or can I set it in the preferences?

Re: Offline Sound Quality

user-removed — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:01:44 GMT

Hey there!

Glad to hear you're interested in Premium.

The quality for streaming and Offline is highest available. However you need to set 320 kbps quality in Preferences (Edit - Preferences or CTRL + P). Also if you use mobile phone, you can install app and listen music also in Extreme quality (320 kbps), it can be enabled in iPhone and Android app from Settings.

Also keep in mind that 100% of Spotify content is in 320 kbps waiting you!

Hope you enjoy Spotify Premium soon.

Re: Offline Sound Quality

Malfeitor — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:42:11 GMT

Great to hear that information and thanks for the quick reply.

Re: Offline Sound Quality

user-removed — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 04:33:07 GMT

You're welcome! Hope you enjoy Spotify.

Re: Offline Sound Quality

liberalis — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:26:18 GMT

I have just enabled 320 kbit and resynced the offline tracks on my iPhone but the sound quality is now very poor. Howcome?

I have set the quality back to normal but with no difference. A reinstall of the Spotify app didn't make any difference either.

Best regards,

Lars

Re: Offline Sound Quality

user-removed — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:38:32 GMT

Hey there,

Before you play anything after re-install, make sure to choose right quality. Spotify can't change a quality on air, so you need to enable it first after clean re-install. However maybe in time Spotify re-create cache for selected quality, I'm afraid I do not know how mobile Spotify works in those situations.

So give to it another try!

Re: Offline Sound Quality

liberalis — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:47:07 GMT

When I chose premium sound quality, it started to resync the tracks. The newly sync'ed tracks sounded awful. So - am I still doing something wrong? 🙂

Let's keep the app reintallation out of this. It was only something I've tried to fix the problem. That didn't make it better or worse.

Best regards,

Lars

Re: Offline Sound Quality

user-removed — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:48:50 GMT

Does those tracks playing fine in Desktop with 320 kbps quality?

Re: Offline Sound Quality

liberalis — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:51:21 GMT

Yes - I have tried to verify with the same pair of headphones.

Re: Offline Sound Quality

user-removed — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:51:32 GMT

OK, reported to Spotify.

Re: Offline Sound Quality

liberalis — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:52:32 GMT

Thanks a lot and also for your prompt reply 🙂

Re: Offline Sound Quality

user-removed — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:59:45 GMT

There also should be different settings for Streaming and Caching.

So I suggest you to see iPhone's Spotify settings and check you have Extreme quality on both - streaming and download.

At least in my Spotify for Android I have both on Extreme - streaming and download.

I think you use low quality in Download mode.

Let me know if this does the trick!

Re: Offline Sound Quality

liberalis — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 11:04:21 GMT

Hi again,

They're both at extreme.. makes no difference what I set it to. I have just tried again with a resync'ed track. On my PC it sounds splendid but on my iPhone it sounds awful. Same track from the same playlist.

And - I have purchased the very same song on iTunes store on my iPhone. There it sounds great.

Re: Offline Sound Quality

user-removed — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 11:08:12 GMT

One from Spotify Customer service should be here soon. Hopefully.

Re: Offline Sound Quality

David — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:06:28 GMT

Hello there,

This certainly sounds very odd - This shouldn't be the case at all. Does this only happen with one specific song? Could you tell us what that track is at all?

Re: Offline Sound Quality

ZeshanA — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:46:42 GMT

Hi,

I've been having this issue too, all tracks in my iOS Spotify library are synced at a low bitrate, despite both streaming and syncing being set to 'Extreme' in the iOS app's settings. I've tried reinstalling the app multiple times, opening it for the first time, setting the quality to Extreme and then opening Spotify on my PC and clicking 'Sync all music to this device' and it's still at a low bitrate.

Any ideas on what to do? I've had to redownload my 15GB+ library on iOS about four times trying to fix this and it's getting frustrating.

Thanks,

Zeshan

Re: Offline Sound Quality

liberalis — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:35:57 GMT

Hi David

It happened to my entire library and not just one song. Seems like I'm not the only one.

Re: Offline Sound Quality

David — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:46:00 GMT

I've just tried this using 2 versions of the same track - One synced in a low bitrate, the other in Extreme. I'll mention some Ogg Vorbis quality numbers below, and you can read about them right here. In the mobile version of Spotify, Normal is q3, High is q5 and Extreme is q9.

The song I tried was Careless Whisper by George Michael. The Extreme (q9) version certainly seemed to have more clarity in the top end to me than the "Normal" version (q3), and was comparable to the q9 (with "High Quality Streaming" enabled) version on the desktop client.

For the benefit of full disclosure, I was using a set of MDR-XB300 headphones, with a dynamic range of 5 - 23,000 Hz (Other headphones are available). I'd recommend doing the following if you're still encountering some differences:

* Perform a clean installation of the Spotify application on your iDevice. Keep in mind that any offline tracks you had previously synced will be removed when doing this.

* Enter the application, and select "Extreme" under the Music Quality tab for the "Sync" option

* Select "Don't Resync"

* Sync the playlists you wish to listen to offline

This should sync the playlists on q9 quality.

Re: Offline Sound Quality

liberalis — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:29:55 GMT

Hi again

I tried that - still the same. I am comparing the sound quality with the same songs purchased from the iTunes store.

Any other suggestions?

Re: Offline Sound Quality

liberalis — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:44:49 GMT

Oh i forgot to mention that i run the latest iOS 6 beta. Does this make a difference?