Flac Support

[LaoTzu]

will spotify be upgrading to flac support soon? and streaming in flac for higher quality music? if so spotify would be a leader in sound quality and would set it apart from other competitors. please consider this.

[TomasJohansson]

Well, lossless isn't really the future, since we've had that since 1983. And lossless isn't really lossless, since it's been downscaled from analog / digital masters. DVD is 10% higher sampling rate, and it sounds "smoother" (more vinyl-like) to me. Then we have blu-ray audio with twice the sampling rate of DVD and better quantization, and I guess 4K will be double (192khz) of blu-ray, bringing us up to master copy, that's the future.

[fueltank]

Another vote for at least local flac playback please.

Understand if streaming flac is not a priority but at least local playback?

If you can't hear the difference then either you're using ordinary headphones/speakers or your ears are shot 🙂

[forgotn]

I would love to see FLAC support, at least for local files. If they don't want to do FLAC support for streaming of their content, I would love to see them go for some sort of extremely high quality streaming type. I even know the magic words: I would be willing to pay a couple bucks extra for it (say $2 or so extra a month), if it was a huge improvement. It would be worth it to me to have higher quality.

[Fozzy]

flac support is long long overdue, I have asked support on several occasions for this and have always hit a blank.  

I am not too concerned about streaming lossless just,  yet as I realise this will hit server loads, but need to link my player to a large library of lossless FLAC on my local drives.  Surely such a trivial thing to add. 

Spotify has just taken a large step backwards with the interface on 8.8 as well which led me to the forum in the first place! How to go back a version... ?

[excessivefunk]

Agree with you. I would easily pay the double for FLAC.

[AbsolutelyNoFB]

How about it, Spotify? There are customers willing to pay more for better quality audio. Why not offer this to them? I would gladly pay $20/month if all your content streamed in FLAC vs. the mid-fi Ogg format that you use now.

[TagUrToast]

I'd pay $20 a month if a decent amount of content was avaliable in lossless form (even if it's a download only type thing)

[whitlander]

I would sign up to Spotify if they support playback of local FLAC file without transcoding.   I'm still waiting for the day when I can serve media to my TV, listening to my music files, listening to live BBC radio stations, and play spotify tracks all inside one holistic application.

itunes for my local files and playlists, VLC for films, plex for serving media, spotify for checking out new music, XBMC for serving media from phone to laptop.   5 disparate apps!!!

Spotify you can do it!

[user-removed]

IMHO:

This would require more power from the playback device, and would therefore reduce batterylife on mobile devices.

This is because:

- A FLAC file is kind of like a Zip-file and requires decompressing to play, making it consume more power on the playback device.

- The FLAC file compared to a MP3 file will be much bigger. A FLAC file size would be approx half of the original file, while a MP3 file could be a 5th or lower of the original file size. This is not a problem when the playlist is stored locally on the device, but with streaming, you increase the needed bandwidth, and again you increase the battery consumption due to more data traffic on the phone. If using 3G/4G, you will decrease the battery life very fast on a mobile device (cell phone data is much more consuming than WiFi.)

But, don't misunderstand me. I'm definitely one of those who would prefer FLAC when listening to music, but this would be in my home, on speakers which would actually be able to reproduce all the frequencies, not an iPhone and some cheap headphones. If listening to classical music, you will definitely hear the difference on FLAC vs MP3 320kb, but rock music really doesn't use the frequency range in the same way, and would therefore not make a big difference.

Hopyfully there will be a future where Spotify will be able to send FLAC to your home receiver or computer, but still keep a simpler format for mobile devices.

Sorry for my babling here, hope my post makes any sense...

[user-removed]

when WIMP get FLAC Spotify must do it also  or die...

[excessivefunk]

It's at home I wan't FLAC. No need for flac on mobile devices with earbuds. But if you have a hifi-system for thousands of dollars it seems quite pointless when you are feeding it with 320kbps. There is a difference between 320 and flac worth paying for. So if WIMP is getting it, i think spotify should be joining it. Otherwise all audiophile users might start looking at wimp. 

[AbsolutelyNoFB]

---

@user-removed wrote:

IMHO:

This would require more power from the playback device, and would therefore reduce batterylife on mobile devices.

This is because:

- A FLAC file is kind of like a Zip-file and requires decompressing to play, making it consume more power on the playback device.

- The FLAC file compared to a MP3 file will be much bigger. A FLAC file size would be approx half of the original file, while a MP3 file could be a 5th or lower of the original file size. This is not a problem when the playlist is stored locally on the device, but with streaming, you increase the needed bandwidth, and again you increase the battery consumption due to more data traffic on the phone. If using 3G/4G, you will decrease the battery life very fast on a mobile device (cell phone data is much more consuming than WiFi.)

But, don't misunderstand me. I'm definitely one of those who would prefer FLAC when listening to music, but this would be in my home, on speakers which would actually be able to reproduce all the frequencies, not an iPhone and some cheap headphones. If listening to classical music, you will definitely hear the difference on FLAC vs MP3 320kb, but rock music really doesn't use the frequency range in the same way, and would therefore not make a big difference.

Hopyfully there will be a future where Spotify will be able to send FLAC to your home receiver or computer, but still keep a simpler format for mobile devices.

Sorry for my babling here, hope my post makes any sense...

---

Many people have iPhones/iPads which have headphone outputs that when used with decent headphones/earphones are plenty good enough for there to be great benefits for FLAC playback.

Also consider playback in a party/club setting via wifi/LTE. FLAC will rock the house. Ogg/MP3... not so much. And the 5+Mbit/sec of LTE is plenty fast enough for FLAC.

The world is moving to higher and higher bandwidth wifi and cellular networks. For wifi, keep in mind that new phones (such as the HTC One) support 500Mbit or faster wifi 802.11ac. Within a couple years, there will be over a billion devices that support 802.11ac.

Even on cellular, the size difference between FLAC and low quality MP3/Ogg/etc streams is already not meaningful for many using LTE. And LTE adoption is increasing rapidly. Yes, FLAC uses more bandwidth and data. But if someone wants to have great sound, it should be available. There is no technical reason standing in the way.

And, of course, downloaded music could easily be FLAC as you mentioned.

I'd like to have FLAC support on my mobile, especially if Spotify restores the feature to let me fully specify my music download location. But even if it is purely streaming, it'd be great to have high quality streaming. Many times I have access to decent wifi and the bandwidth for FLAC is not a big deal. Even when the wifi drops out, I'm not worried about some FLAC data usage. I've got "unlimited" data and for the most part, nothing to use it for. FLAC would be a great use of my data plan 🙂

[tyua]

Just registered to forums only to post here : I am quite interested in flac quality and expect to be able to get that quality some day from internet. At the moment Qobuz offers flac files but their price is too high. Would be great to see Spotify moving to flac since I am a premium Spotify user.

[howzz1854]

let me just chime in. i own a HD598, with separate DAC and AMP, and will soon be getting a Tube Amp. the only thing that's stopping me from going Spotify premium is the lack of FLAC. 

i hope you're listening spotify. the demand is there. 

[iamnotjerry]

I am new to Spotify as a premium user, due in part that I feel the people in the know @ Spotify realize that if they do add Flac a big % of the current market is theirs. I disagree with many in the above post about 99% of the uses do not care if it is lossless. With more and more cars getting higher end stock audio systems made to play aux devices- Flac will make a huge difference and the 99% will tell the difference but not the why.   I have tested XM vs Mp3 vs CD vs Flac in my high end car system. Thus far Flac is the winner. However some CD's sound very good. (I use the stock CD player that is with the navi). 

I would pay more a month to Spotify for Flac.

[Joe]

I'd like to be able to play my local FLAC files without switching players. There is a request for this in this idea thread. Although it has been marked " not right now", it won't hurt to add support.

[hetman_it]

the problem is not so much to have a better listening quality with the flac format rather than an mp3 at 320k, in my opinion the problem is that there are users like me, who have at least 60-70% of  music stored in flac format. This way I can create playlists with only a small part of my music, which makes it unnecessary to use Spotify, which in my view should be a fantastic way to share ALL my music, and not just one part. One solution would be to convert the lossless songs to mp3, but you also understand that it is a rather ugly solution for all users.

[JarrodP]

I have just joined Spotify Premium, still on free month, dont think i'll be hanging around if i cant get the most out of my music collection, i was pretty pumped till i found out no flac.

Do with that what u will

[Naptoss]

I would love to see the option to stream .flac files, even if it is just for some of the more popular albums and genres. 

[Rollo_]

I'd love to see FLAC playback support myself.  However, I see FLAC as a backup to the originals, and have no problem using MP3 for everyday playback.  TBH, I don't hear that much difference, but I DO consider MP3 a throwaway format.  I used to have multiple drives filled with FLAC files.

For quick easy flac to mp3 conversion, try dBpowerAmp and the add-on Helix MP3 encoder.  WAY WAY faster than the LAME encoder, and to my ears, just as good.