What’s the difference between Spotify’s ‘Optimize Listening Experience’ and ‘Automatic’ quality

[ondersarioglu]

Hello

I’ve been exploring the sound quality settings in Spotify and find myself puzzled by the overlap between the “Optimize Listening Experience” feature and the “Automatic” quality setting. Given their similar goals of adjusting music quality based on the network, I have several questions that I hope the community or someone with technical insight can help answer:

1. What distinct roles do the “Optimize Listening Experience” feature and the “Automatic” quality setting play, especially since they seem to serve similar purposes?
2. If “Very High” quality is selected, will the “Optimize listening experience” still lower the quality in response to a less stable connection?
3. Conversely, if “Automatic” is selected, does the “Optimize listening experience” have the capability to enhance the quality when the connection is stable and strong?
4. Are there scenarios where enabling both “Automatic” quality and “Optimize Listening Experience” could result in conflicting adjustments, or are they designed to work in tandem seamlessly?
5. Specifically, I’m curious: Why they provide to us Optimize Listening Experince feature if sound settings already have “automatic” quality.

The coexistence of both these options in Spotify’s settings suggests a nuanced approach to managing sound quality, but it’s not immediately clear how they differ or interact with each other. I’m looking for any technical explanations, official insights, or user experiences that can shed light on this topic.

Thank you in advance for helping to clarify these functionalities.

[Elena]

Heya @ondersarioglu, 

Thanks for the inquiry! 

That's a very interesting topic you`ve picked. In essence the audio quality settings are put in place so that users with different devices can optimize the performance of Spotify based on their unique parameters. Some users have "weaker" tech and connection than others and so they would need to adjust in order to have the best experience possible.

To sum up your questions. Both settings are used in order to nitpick the systems parameters and its usages of data so that an uninterrupted stream can be achieved for any device. The "Optimized listening experience" toggle will not raise the audio quality above what it was set to whereas the "Automatic" toggle will ultimately try to equalize the stream as best it can. 

Hope that helped out.