Spotify is lastly launching assist for lossless music streaming | TechCrunch

Spotify is lastly launching high-quality, lossless music streaming assist for premium account holders after years of ready.

The corporate first talked a couple of hi-fi tier in 2021 — which might provide CD-quality audio –however the plan confronted a number of delays, partially resulting from licensing points. Final 12 months, CEO Daniel Ek stated that the corporate was within the “early days” of launching lossless streaming assist.

Over the previous few years, experiences and code hints within the app advised that the corporate was planning to introduce a dearer tier for lossless music as nicely.

Now the corporate is lastly releasing assist for as much as 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC high quality streaming — a format that preserves the unique audio high quality with out compression — for paid customers. The corporate stated lossless streaming shall be rolling out to customers in in over 50 nations by October. It added that subscribers in Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the US, and the UK are already getting entry.

Customers will get a notification on their app once they get entry to lossless streaming. You may allow the characteristic from Settings and Privateness > Media High quality and choosing “Lossless” high quality for streaming on Wi-Fi, mobile knowledge, and downloads.

The corporate stated that the characteristic is out there throughout units, however you must manually allow it for every machine. Meaning the setting doesn’t apply to all of the units you utilize along with your Spotify account routinely.

As recordsdata with lossless streaming are bigger, it is possible for you to to maintain monitor of how a lot knowledge you’ve got used for streaming. Whilst you can stream lossless high quality tracks over Wi-Fi, this isn’t potential for Bluetooth-connected units resulting from bandwidth limitations. You should use Spotify Join to hook up with units from firms like Bose, Yamaha, and Bluesound to stream the music over Wi-Fi. Notably, Apple has additionally beforehand complained about Bluetooth’s bandwidth restrictions for streaming high-quality music.

Spotify is late to ship on its guarantees of constructing lossless music accessible to customers. Rivals like Apple Music rolled it out in 2021, and Amazon Music made its lossless streaming free after launching a paid HD tier in 2019. Spotify stated that this launch covers “practically each monitor” in its 100-million-son library, so there could be some tracks with out lossless assist.