Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorm | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand how someone can complain on Spotify. It's a great service with very good sound quality at a decent price.

View on HN

Yeah, if you're looking for the best quality, maybe streaming services are not your cup of tea.

Or MP3s, for that matter

Spotify streams OGG. While MP3 160kpbs "sucks", OGG 160kps is pretty decent.

MP3 (at last lame mp3) is actually very good at 160kbits.

hence, I think, GP ironic quotes regarding its quality, putting emphasis on the decentness of OGG.

It is indeed a decent service, and I guess it was worth the money I've paid for it, but there certainly are a bunch of flaws. I miss a lot of my personal music library in it, for example, (and yes, while you can add them, but I pretty much only use/used spotify at work). To be honest, I didn't even remember to enable the HQ option when I had a paid subscription. I also use it on gnu/linux, where the windows client under wine for me is very sluggish (but only at work, not at home), and the native client still has ways to go.

Anyway, I seem to have gotten quite sidetracked, the point I was trying to make is that at least OP is giving them direct feedback and thus an opportunity to improve. While you think it's a great service, surely you can find some ways to improve it? I could, for example, live with a larger cache on the android app so that I can enter a store under ground without the music stopping when the cell service does...

It's always room for improvement on any service, but it's not really fair to complain that a service costing $10 a month is not suitable for critical classical listening on a stereo that cost $10.000.

Best step IMHO is to push more online music retailers to sell lossless files for critical listening or maybe Spotify could sell it, hopefully for more than $10 a month.

Eh, my stereo equipment didn't cost anywhere near ten grand, but I wager it can still show the difference between 160 and 320 kilobits of compressed music. From what I gathered from the op, though, it's not so much about the practical difference than the fact that he feels he's paying for something he's not actually getting - and that's something that is fair to complain about.

What are you missing in the native linux client?

Well, for example, an ncurses interface would be nice. That way I wouldn't need to use NX or other RDP software if I wanted to use spotify from my jukebox computer.

If you have Premium, you can create your own ncurses interface with libspotify: http://developer.spotify.com/en/libspotify/overview/

Depending on the functionality you need, you can also use DBus with the native client. We implement parts of the Mpris2 specification. If all you need to do is change tracks and play/pause on your jukebox machine that should work with a few simple scripts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com