Spotify - high quality, legal, free, streaming music.

[Mn Dave]

I also learned something - last night when I got home I installed Spoify on my home computer and imported my iTunes library - now I can play any song in my iTunes library that is on Spotify, which sseems to be most.  This is definitely a good feature not available on last.fm or Pandora.

Yep, I wonder if I can do that on my phone. Probably.

[Mandryka]

Compression doesn't add background noise. You must have a problem with your gear.  Please test each part to find the culprit.  Is it only when you stream from your pc to the squeezebox? Or is it whenever you use the squeezebox?  Or is it even when you play mp3s from another source (i.e. not your squeezebox)?  You're not enjoying the music to the full potential until you resolve this problem.

I first noticed it whed I downloaded Ugorsky playing Davidsbuendlertaenze at 320kbps a while ago and was annoyed by the background hiss. Anyway I dumped it and gor a lossless format but I did check briefly on the web and it is a problem which other people experience. It could be a hardware thing as you're suggesting though.

[Todd]

It's as if nobody here used streaming services before.

Well, I for one have not, so the free Spotify service will let me know if it's worth spending money on.  I'll be taking multiple factors into account, like sound quality, selection, advertising annoyance factor, etc.  Though I got all set up last week, I have yet to listen to a single track.  Perhaps that's an omen of things to come.

Naxos Music Library, expensive but it has an amazing catalogue for classical, beating all other services by far with the one weakness that they don't have major labels.

That's a pretty big weakness.  Not a few reasonably good artists have recorded for majors.

Spotify does have the majors' catalogs.  Sort of.  Spotify's catalog is not as robust as I would have thought it would be.  A whole lot of Wilhelm Kempff's discography is missing, for instance.  Ditto Zimerman and a few others I've searched.  Part of the attraction of streaming is to be able to hear the recordings I can't buy.  I'm not seeing that here.

Here's what I'm looking for in a streaming service: 1.) At least CD quality sound, and high res when available, 2.) a comprehensive catalog that includes all classical recordings that have been converted to digital.  I'd be willing to pay decent money each month for such a service or combination of services – $100 to $125, say, maybe more – which would save me quite a bit from what I currently spend on CDs.  However, I do not see any service or combination of services that do this.  Maybe next year.

[DavidW]

That's a pretty big weakness.  Not a few reasonably good artists have recorded for majors.

The lack of both breadth in the major services is also a big weakness.  There are glaring problems with every streaming service.

Spotify does have the majors' catalogs.  Sort of.  Spotify's catalog is not as robust as I would have thought it would be.  A whole lot of Wilhelm Kempff's discography is missing, for instance.  Ditto Zimerman and a few others I've searched.  Part of the attraction of streaming is to be able to hear the recordings I can't buy.  I'm not seeing that here.

They're all like that sadly (rhapsody, napster, mog etc).

Here's what I'm looking for in a streaming service: 1.) At least CD quality sound, and high res when available, 2.) a comprehensive catalog that includes all classical recordings that have been converted to digital.  I'd be willing to pay decent money each month for such a service or combination of services – $100 to $125, say, maybe more – which would save me quite a bit from what I currently spend on CDs.  However, I do not see any service or combination of services that do this.  Maybe next year.

Yes that would be great!  I would pay quite a bit for a service like that, because I could simply replace cd purchases with streaming.  Maye in the future.

[Mn Dave]

I can replace plenty of my CD's with streaming. Not the Beatles though. 

[DavidW]

I can replace plenty of my CD's with streaming. Not the Beatles though. 

Yeah never the Beatles!  And there are a few other bands that will never show up on streaming, but yeah most of them are there.

[Mn Dave]

Pink Floyd's not on there, but I don't really care about them anymore. Peter Gabriel's not on there, but I'm sick of him anyway. 

[DavidW]

Pink Floyd's not on there, but I don't really care about them anymore. Peter Gabriel's not on there, but I'm sick of him anyway. 

Oh I didn't know that Gabriel wasn't there!  That's strange about Pink Floyd because they are on mog, all of their albums.

[Mn Dave]

Seem to have all of Genesis though, or most of it.

[DavidW]

Leon there are a couple of things you should consider for your playing your music since your ipod broke:

(a) an external portable hd, fit in your pocket and you'll be able to carry 500 gigs of music in with you to work.
(b) a cloud service, such as amazon, then you can play all of your music library without having to pay a monthly fee.  It has a built in player so you can play the music without needing to download.

I think that the first is the better choice, but amazon does give 5 gigs for free. 

Edit: Amazon has any paid cloud account gets *unlimited* space for music, where music is defined as mp3 and aac files.

[Mn Dave]

15 million tracks is a lot of music...

Indeed.

[DavidW]

Leon I didn't mean instead of using spotify, I meant so that you could listen to your own music library again at whatever bitrate floats your boat with perhaps superior tagging.  You don't need itunes, just use windows media player which is already installed.

[Todd]

(b) a cloud service, such as amazon, then you can play all of your music library without having to pay a monthly fee.  It has a built in player so you can play the music without needing to download.

I think that the first is the better choice, but amazon does give 5 gigs for free. 

Edit: Amazon has any paid cloud account gets *unlimited* space for music, where music is defined as mp3 and aac files.

I wouldn't mind leveraging a cloud service but for one thing, the size of my collection.  Storing as wav files, I figure I'd need at least 4 TB of storage, which means between 400 GB - 1TB or so compressed, depending on format and bit rate.  I just wonder if free storage is truly a permanent thing, or what the caveats may be.  And I don't have the time to do all that ripping.  (And I would not send my collection off to have a company rip it all.)  Looks like I may be stuck with physical media for a while.

[Mn Dave]

We need a great recordings on Spotify thread. 

Maybe.

[Tamsin]

We need a great recordings on Spotify thread. 

Maybe.

Well this one was started but didn't catch on 
http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,18380.msg539480.html

[Mn Dave]

Well this one was started but didn't catch on 
http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,18380.msg539480.html

Thanks. It must be where I got the idea since I posted there not too long ago.

[Mandryka]

I have just noticed that my squeezebox server computer interface is giving me information about the quality of spotify albums played through their 3rd part app.

Muraro's Ravel and Jumppanen's Ponthus's Boulez and the Janet Baker/Giulini CD with Nuits d'ete all showed up at 320kbps.

That's very encouraging.

[DavidW]

That's really lousy Leon!  Why would they do that?  If they have the license for the album, all the tracks on it should be available.  That sucks.

[Mn Dave]

My main complaint with Spotify is that the number of tracks not available for playing seems vaguely higher than one might expect from a paid service.  I have found the Hagen Mozart Quartets, for example, and about half of the tracks from the late works are missing.  This is also the case with other recordings and is frustrating to have two movements of a piece but not the 1st and 4th.

Yes, very odd. I wonder how that happens.

[starrynight]

I think it had (maybe still does) the Minna Keal symphony which I had wanted to hear for quite a while.