[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...

[TheOnly4u]

Since I wrote the original post, I'm grateful for everyone supporting this "a must for all music lovers". I wrote about local flac support before Spority updated/changed their forum/community/idea box, and there the debate was lively as well.

Since I started the orginal post(s), my situation has changed, and I now own part of a hifi import company and I'm starting my own family owned High End Hifi/Surround store here in Norway. I have been traveling to music convetions the last 5 years, but only recently have I started to look for solutions that will work for the common user.

There is a kind of high tresh hold to get in to the whole High End sound via PC's, Sonos like systems that requier NAS etc. Most of the generation who can afford real high end products today, are not as tech savie as the younger generation are.

There is a real need for an easy to use system/program that will allow normal people with "limited" skill level, to use and aquire music  that have a lossless quality. This would have to start with being able to listen to your own lossless formats(where flac is the largest by a land slide). This first point alone would easely make spotify the single most used Library/player in the countries where Spotify is availeble.

2nd there would be a real need for the ability to discover new music, and here Spotify is one of the better system in the world. Spotify has an enormous advantage here.

3rd when you find New music that you Dont have in a lossless format, you would want to Buy this music in a lossless format, and if possible, in Flac HD 24 bit 48 - 192khz quality. The key word is lossless though. Today Spotify offers you to buy your own MP3's for most of the music they strem to you, but seriously..it's mp3, and even if you want to buy mp3's, Spotify's prices are step. If the music you bought was lossless and Master recording quality, many people would buy and more importantly, not care so much about the price.

I know(hope) that Spotify has though this idea, but most likely said it for the future. I'm telling you now:

The second someone realeses a complete solution like this with that 3rd option, they are a mile ahead of the competion and will, if they have a userfriendly interface like Spotify, take over as the primery Liberay/player in the western world.

Why? Because the trendsetters and heavy users also like simplisity, and would use such a system. The profesionals like me, would recommend that system to our customers because of the simplisity. 

The current spotify status in high end consumer market, are that while spotify is nice on the run and to find music(we all use spotify for that), you never use to actualy listen to good music unless you cant find it somewhere else. Once you find music with spotify, that you want to enjoy, you buy it from serious music providers that offer lossless and HD quality. I cant belive that Spotify are leting other music providers take their potensial income so easily.

I have been talking to other streaming/download service at the high end conventions, and the thing I'm talking about..that complete plateform.. it is coming soon.

------ End Rant to Spotify

------ To some of the comments in this and the original post

People are different and have different genetics and or hearing loss(es). Let's take a few looks at things.

Saying that: "I can't hear the difference between Flac and mp3 320(or even 192), therefor nobody else can either!" Or saying: "I can't hear the difference between a 80£ dac and a 1200£, therefor you can't either...because I'm perfect..bla bla bla"..well, it's just as smart as saying that: "I can't run 100 meters faster then 15 seconds, so neither can Bolt..."

I say it again..just because you Can't, doesn't mean that everyone else can't either.  So please leave the "I can't hear the difference" out of our threads and make your own.

------ End Comment Rant

------ On a sad note

Having used Nivida and AMD/ATI evenly for gaming and HTPC for years( since their beginnings), I'm said to say that never AMD cards with their new idle technoligy, no longer support sound via HDMI on many of their cards f.ex 7970. HDMI sound only works whem then Cards go out of Idle...this exclude thing windows desktop and programs runing there like foobar 2000, browser iow youtube etc.

This is as far as I can tell since drivers 12.4(most likely before) up to the latest beta drivers. So if your going to hook your graphic card to your reciever for bitstreamig to use Flac HD, blurays etc, get Nvidia. AMD has known about this since early 2012 and has made no effort in helping those affected, so it's not likely to be fixed any time soon.

So, in short, if you use hdmi for sound (f.ex. Spotify), you would save your self some grief by getting Nvidia for the time being.

------ End Sad note

------ Tips

If you relay want to hear the difference between power amps/speaker or streaming vs lossless HD, use a high end reciever( or any realy good dac and preamp) from 1000€(norwegian prices) and up...like Denon 3313 to onkyo 5010 that has a a dream of a 32 bit dac for all channels. Pioneer, denon, onkyo, marantz etc all have good recievers in the high end class.

You use the Reciever as a  preamp for you power amp/speaker or active speakers. Get a song you like in Flac-HD or bluray recording and compare it to Spotify Premium. Ex get Jackie evanchos dream with me in concert on bluray (US import) and compare to hear albums on Spotify.

Remember, don't get hung up on price...at a certain price level, sound quality becomes hard to tell apart. I've heard 10k € systems sound better then some 120k+ €. Remember that making a sound monitor speakers inst that hard, making a sound monitor speakers with soul is what tells the boys from the men. What does this mean, you say? Well no matter what ANYONE says, no mater how good they think they are, they can't tell you what you like! Close you eyes and listen with your heart,  and if the component doesnt move you(or dont move you enough) or you have doughts, move on and test something else. And always test in your own room before commiting to a component.

PS: Again Keep pressing kudos on every positive post in these two treads, not only on main post. This way Spotify can see that we realy want flac support....and more.

[rouge568]

Without .flac support, spotify is failing in the one basic area I need it to work in - playing my music.

Right now I'm sticking with itunes because large amounts of my (huge) local collection was ripped from CDs in flac. I'm actually a little shocked that it isn't supported right now, and while I like most other aspects of sopitfy a lot more, I need it first and foremost to play my local collection befoe I can use it for branching out.

Thanks for reading, and I'm hoping all these posts are helping convince you that this is a much needed feature!

[Scoiattolo]

Unless you can create a winamp plugin to feed your playlist data from Winamp, then FLAC playback is a MUST for anyone who cares about the quality of their music.

I know several people who insist on lossless, mostly after being taught about MP3/AAC artifacts and how to hear them.

Once you go FLAC, you never go back!

[Deeb]

I give up with audio quality. Fed up. DR compression and data compression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/BETTER-AUDIO-QUALITY-LOUDNESS-WAR/idi-p/124162

[pbrekke]

There are really no good music librarly/playback software solutions on the Mac for those of us who have large FLAC music collections. I've looked at a bunch of them: Songbird, Enqueue, Play, Clementine, VLC ... they all stumble on different aspects - either they crash repeatedly, cant handle large librarlies, distort (big surprise there from VLC!), are ugly and unwieldly - there is really nothing on the Mac in this regard that can compete with Windows offerings. Spotify could easily be the one great cross-platform audio player/library that integrates one's own files with internet streaming. 

PLEASE, PLEASE make the Spotify player for Mac and Windows play back local FLAC files (local drive or NAS, as in my case), it would solve a lot of headaches!  Just search for "audio player for mac" and see how many frustrated users are out there - most resign to iTunes and re-code their FLAC collections to ALAC or MP3(I admit to having a complete MP3 mirror of my 30K file FLAC collection for use on my iphone - how silly is that????!!)

Fix the world, spotifiers! 🙂

[hollowaxis]

I do hope they implement this soon. 

I'm holding off on a paid Spotify subscription until it can play my FLAC library too.

[Moonpile]

I'm in my first month of a full membership, and very much enjoying it.  Local FLAC playback support would go a LONG way toward helping me justify keeping a membership.

[user-removed]

At the moment, flac is still a relatively uncommon format.

I agree. Don't know any single person that use flac or other lossless format.

[mysterybadger]

As a recent convert to Spotify I was pleasantlyy surprised to find local file support and then extremely disappointed that this didn't include FLAC support.  

I can't believe that FLAC is so uncommon it's not worht supporting: if you are goingto go tot hetrouble of ripping your entire CD collection it seems pointless to use anything other than a lossless format.  Even quite cheap MP3 players like the Sansa Clip range now support FLAC, so why not Spotify?

[user-removed]

Yo, I think Spotify is the bee's knees, and I love how it not only lets my friends on Facebook know what I am listening to, but it also has an audioscrobbler built in as well!! 

But HEY, you know what, Foobar2000 has support for scrobbling too! You wanna know why I'm using Foobar2000 instead of your lovely software? Well... aside from it being much more lightweight?

Take a wild guess.

For people who actually give a [naughty word] about the music they listen to, FLAC is quite the opposite of "uncommon", and being how this is almost the year 2013, not to mention how we've already had the capability to rip our legitimatly-owned (haha) CDs to FLAC for a very long time, it's really quite unacceptabe that Spotify still doesn't support native FLAC playback.

Come on, guys. You can do better.