[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...

[olehenrikj]

I will vote for both local and streaming (at least when it is selectable), but mainly I want local flac-support.

[here4music]

FLAC (offline is enough for me) support would rock! And please, don't forget mobile (iPad/Android) users (FLAC is also great for listening while on the go). Also, a little improvement in the management of the library would ease handling lots of tracks (I'm also a f2k user because of that).

[sporkle]

I like the idea of unaltered high-quality audio. But there are a couple of interesting points to make here. First of all "extreme quality" audio is encoded as Vorbis q9, which is very good. 

Some of us might be detecting small amounts of distortion "artifacts" in the audio, and this may be motivating us to request that Spotify use un-compressed formats. However these artifacts are probably not the result of audio compression, rather they are the result of digital watermarking - identifying information encoded into the digital audio - for purposes of tracking piracy. Universal does this, along with its subsidiaries (EMI) and others may as well. Ideally, watermarks should be inaudible, but that does not seem to be the case, and I for one notice a high degree of degradation in audio tracks which have watermarks.

See my post for more info: http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Allow-comment-on-audio-quality-to-address-the-problem-...

[user-removed]

That may be true, sporkle, I don't really know, but here we're asking for LOCAL flac support. These are files that are on our hard drives, files we already know how they sound on other players. We just want to play them on Spotify. That's not weird or uncommon as has been said.

As a way to add some more info to the title post by Deeb:

We can buy FLAC files at many well known label shops or online retailers. Matador Records (the biggest independent label of America?) should also be on this list that I think is outdated: http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#music

https://store.matadorrecords.com/

We can also download (or buy) them at sites like Bandcamp, maybe the biggest MySpace substitute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandcamp

[Zulithe]

We have waited long enough, Spotify! This feature has been requested for years. When will you take it seriously? All i want is to be able to play the FLAC files on my computer and have Spotify recognize them just as it does my local MP3s. Please

[alexsabree]

There is a demand for this. For me I use Spotify's radio feature to discover new music. Once found I either buy ALAC off iTunes or rip FLAC off a CD. The fact that Spotify doesn't play FLAC really stops it from being my "one stop shop."

Please make it happen.

[Ether]

I also would like to vote for local flac playback.

I have a Sonos setup and have all my physical cd ripped into flac and saved on my pc (soon to be NAS) which I can play using my android (sonos) controller. (and you can tell the difference between the streamed spotify and the local FLAC)

But when I want to listen on my pc I cant use the spotify client and have to use a different program.  (I can however play the very few MP3s and they tend to be songs I'm not that interested in re ripping to flac).

Please consider enabling FLAC from local sources.

E

[pedalhead]

Another vote for local FLAC support please!  

Like many people who value sound quality, for years now I've had my entire collection ripped & FLAC encoded.  As it stands, Spotify only functions as a streaming client for people like me.  The addition of local FLAC support would make Spotify the hub of my music system, surely a good thing for Spotify in the long run.  

It may be true that FLAC users are very much a minority, but I'd bet my dinner that those same FLAC users are amongst the strongest customers (ie, biggest spenders) of audio related software & hardware.

Cheers!

[Eric22222]

This is needed in spotify.

[Noun]

All my library is in flac format. Can't understand why spotify do not implant this simple feature... :(