this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Spotify vs. Anna's Archive (reincantamentox.substack.com)
submitted 3 days ago by chobeat@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 49 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (5 children)

Spotify streams all music at 160kbps OGG for free users by default, so that's what this archive is dumped at - the original Spotify content, no transcode. The only difference is they re-encoded all the songs with a 'popularity' of zero at a lower bitrate, because that saved an enormous amount of data for all the AI crap pumped into Spotify that nobody listens to.

Side note - it would probably not be possible to do a dump as a paid used (as they would notice a user account is being abused, and ban it), but paid accounts go up to 320kbps OGG and some content is also available lossless (as FLAC).

Anyway, 99%+ of people can't consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that 'swear they can tell' are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There's tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Heh, like wine tasting.

[–] BlackAura@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Anyway, 99%+ of people can't consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that 'swear they can tell' are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There's tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

Ooohhh I did that test when I got a new speaker / amp setup at my PC and as a musician I thought "I got this". Plus I was trying to decide if Tidal was worth upgrading to from Spotify.

I did slightly better than average. Like just slightly. I might have the results somewhere.

I ended up doing Tidal's free trial. I couldn't tell a difference. Went back to Spotify. (though now my group of people are on an Apple Music family plan).

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I tried Tidal and could not go back to Spotify.

I guess it also depends on what type of music you are listening to. Simple FM pop or hip-hop works fine compressed. Rock, classical, melodic or more complex music gets the high range completely smashed by artifacts.

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

They definitely don't see paid accounts using too much. My library is mostly built from Spotify rips using onthespot. 400k songs.

Everything is broken now and a few patches are up, waiting for it to update and keep ripping.

1000% agree most people can't tell the difference in the bitrates, I rip mine at 320 in mp3. I can't tell the difference in flac even with decent headphones, not worth the storage for the extra file size, I use Bluetooth headphones anyway, don't care about every single frequency. I did notice some of my super old 120kbps mp3s from the 90s were so shit quality though, redownloaded those.

[–] Cenzorrll@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I try to keep lossless on my server for the fact that new algorithms come out all the time. I don't want to be stuck with a 160k mp3 when a better algorithm comes out or if I need to stream just a little lower than that. I'd rather have lossless quality that can be converted at any time to whatever I need, even though I mostly have it set to 160k for listening if I'm streaming away from home. My work internet and cell service can get really terrible, and being able to buffer 10 songs when I get a few minutes of service is a godsend while not getting stuck with low quality, several times converted files, or keeping multiple bitrate versions of the same song.

[–] sefra1@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)
  • For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
  • For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to [OGG Opus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_/(audio_format) at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.

Source

[–] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sure but if the purpose of the dump is musical archive, then the music should be stored in an archival format, not a lossy one.

[–] foofy@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

They are archiving what they could get from Spotify and in this case what they could get was encoded in a lossy format to begin with.

It doesn't get any "more" lossy over time just being stored as an .ogg