I’m John, engineering manager at Spotify. I helped develop the Lossless feature. AMA!
Hey all!
I’m John, an engineering manager at Spotify, and for the past couple of years, I’ve been a part of the team working on Spotify Lossless. It’s finally rolling out in Premium, and I’m here to do an AMA on Friday, September 12th from 10am-11am ET to answer your questions about how it works, what exactly it is, what to expect as it rolls out, and more.
A little about me: I’ve been at Spotify for 7 years, working on the consumer UX side of things. Basically, I care HUGELY about delivering software that people will love. That’s what motivates me. Lossless has been one of the most exciting (and challenging!) projects I’ve worked on, and I’m really proud of what our team has built.
So today, ask me anything about:
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How Lossless streaming works
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Supported devices, data use, storage, or sound quality
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The UX experience
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And even some Lossless trivia!
Can’t wait to chat and geek out about audio quality with you all 🎧
- John, Spotify Engineering Manager
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Update: Sorry all, tried to stay on a little longer but have to run now! Can I leave you with a true story that there was a moment in this project where we had a typo and launched "ossless" to all our team. So for a few hours, everyone internally was streaming in full "ossless" 🤣 Still sounded great though... In all seriousness, thank you all so much for all the questions. It was great to celebrate the launch of Lossless with you all 💚
Why 24-bit/44.1kHz instead of 48kHz or higher?
So we’ve actually got this amazing audio lab in Stockholm, looked after by a true audio GURU (hej Andreas!). We’ve done tons of testing, and listened to all sorts of qualities under the very best conditions.
It is true that supporting full High-Resolution audio would offer greater objective precision. However, this also introduces entirely different requirements, not only in terms of data volume and bandwidth but also in the hardware used, so there’s lots of complexity across a user base of hundreds of millions.
We believe 24-bit/44.1 kHZ FLAC lossless sound is the perfect experience for fans who want the highest quality for streaming music on Spotify and the most perceptive listeners. The difference between audio quality settings can be very subtle and hard to detect for most people. Even under the very best lab conditions, people can’t tell the difference once you get over a certain quality. You don’t need higher quality than what we are offering. Unless you are a bat or an owl, or a Greater Wax Moth or something.
You probably don't even get that many masters that are above 48 kHz do you? 144 dB range and 22 kHz max frequency are more than enough for my less than perfect ears.
And as I understand it, there is no benefit to interpolating/upsampling audio for listening purposes.
Edit: the one thing I am not clear on is whether 24 bit/44.1khz might have aliasing introduced in the exporting process. Even with minor aliasing, the introduced frequencies surely are at a very very low dB.
48 kHz is good for anti-aliasing.
I mean, you do also get 24 kHz range, but we're not dogs.
Still, 48 kHz would have been better. Anything over that is useless, however.
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See I was a little bummed out seeing the difference between Apple and Spotify in regards to the quality, but in all honesty, it makes sense the way you explain this as for example: over 175 Hz the human brain can’t visually tell the difference if the frame rate is increased further than 175, same can be said for the audio here for losses quality.
Right before the mix came out because there was just nothing coming out, and Apple had a $10.99 promo (one time payment) for three months.
So far, I’m absolutely loving the mixed options from Apple Music, and Dolby Atmos is a nice touch, especially with my AirPod pros, with that being said it’s a hard turnover to switch back to Spotify, but knowing that that mixing feature is, they are alongside lossless, it may be just enough for me to get back into Spotify
What will really truly win me over? Dolby Atmos. Dolby, Atmos, Dolby, Atmos, Dolby, Atmos
For the love of God, I don’t know what can be done for it, but please please please introduce Dolby Atmos and the ability for artist to upload Atmos like music.
For me and other pro users out there who want to really dive into the song and truly feel like they’re in the experience, having drums on the top left of my ears with deep base on the bottom right with vocals, shooting out from the front of me with the airy whisper of angel angelic, voices coming from the back, with this mix alone, it creates a different type of environment, which enhances my music and listening experience.
Please, please please, what can be done with Spotify and Dolby Atmos. It is 2025, there are business businesses out there who can do it, why not Spotify?
Off topic, but for the record this is not true
I don't just want to talk out of my ass, so I wrote a script to blind test myself by setting my monitor to either 165hz or 360hz (it has no 175hz option). I can discern correctly every time just by dragging windows around for a few seconds
Diminishing returns has firmly kicked in by the time you're looking at 175hz, but it is still distinguishable
I agree. Many music distributors, used by indie artists (like Distrokid, Tunecore) already support uploading Atmos albums & tracks to supported platforms (like Apple Music)
Eli5 what’s the big deal with Dolby atmos?
Makes perfect sense. Thank you so much for answering! Really appreciate it.
Excited for Lossless audio to arrive in my country!
Will there be an indicator in UI if the content is HIFI or not?
Yes! You’ll see a label in the Now Playing view and bar and via the Connect Picker when you’re listening in Lossless. There will also be troubleshooting information in app if you’re facing any issues - find this via the Connect picker.
Yes, would be cool to see what quality an album/song is played at.
C'mon spill the Spotify beans, what took so long?
Fair question. We wanted to make sure we did it in a way that worked across tons of devices and setups, and that it made sense for our business too. Sometimes in software, that means you pause, rethink, and build something better. We were honestly ** itching ** (in the best way!) to get this out to you... You cannot imagine the desire to ship this, I've been in engineering for 25 years and this is the highest motivation I have ever seen from a team (hello to my team Elza, Kav, Annino, Ben, Yev, Rafa, Marc, Viktor 👋you’re the best). So many engineers from so many teams across the company have been working so hard on this - we're so proud to get this to you. On launch day Yev (who actually pressed the button) wore a suit for the second time in his life - that’s how much this meant. I hope it's worth the wait. We built around two things we know matter most to listeners: transparency and control.
Must be fun to work on your team, you seem like a good dev manager.
I would take their answer with a grain of salt , all the pricing and stuff leaked years ago and Spotify wanted to charge $20 for a premium plan including it and then got screwed by Amazon and then Apple announcing theirs for free so they took their ball and went home for 4 years.
Came here to ask this as well.
Thanks for your hard work on this!
I have 3 questions:
Any ear/headphone recs for the best experience with the lossless audio?
How exactly does lossless audio streaming work? How do you adapt the songs on Spotify to suit the lossless audio?
What devices will be supported?
I've been using Spotify for years - happy customer here!
Glad to hear it, thanks for listening! I was a happy customer once and then decided to come and work here 💚…
To answer your questions:
1. Wired headphones or speakers, and on a non-Bluetooth connection like Spotify Connect. To give some personal perspective, at home I listen mainly over Spotify Connect. I’ve got a pretty old setup (Arcam amp and Mission speakers from the 90’s), but the great thing is that it’s easy to add Spotify Connect to a setup like that (Cambridge Audio CXN v2 streamer in my case). On the go I don’t always use lossless - as the Stockholm tunnelbana isn’t the best listening environment, so I’m often on Very High over Bluetooth…
2. For lossless, the point is really to not adapt the songs - we want them to be as unadapted as possible. Streaming lossless tracks works just like streaming lossy/compressed tracks, they’re just quite a bit larger files.
3. Lossless is available on mobile, desktop, and tablet, as well as on many devices that support Spotify Connect, including Bose, Denon, Marantz, Samsung, Sennheiser, Sony and more. And good news, an update from what we shared earlier this week: Amazon speakers are now also compatible with connect and voice commands too! Sonos will be available from next month.
By the way, I am still a happy customer.
is the rollout random? likewise with the mix feature, not seeing either lossless or mix on my end. a live queue count on the website to see how long until these features would be available to me would make the wait a bit more 'fun'
I don't know how far UX goes but can you tell me the logic behind putting "smart shuffle" on the same button as "shuffle"?
In bigger playlists it's extremely laggy if you want to go from "shuffle" to "no shuffle" because you have to pass "smart shuffle" first. On some devices this can be a frustrating 10-15 second task.
I know recently there's an option to disable smart shuffle, but it doesn't seem to work and sometimes it deactivates again on some devices.
Make it so smart shuffle only turns on when you hold down the button for 3 seconds or something like that
Other services that have Lossless, like Apple and Tidal, also have Atmos. Are you planning to include that in the near future?
What criteria does Spotify use when deciding which countries get access to the lossless feature first, and are there plans for a global rollout timeline?
Will Dolby Atmos / Spatial tracks be coming and if so then when??
On the backend side, what work was needed beyond simply allowing artists to upload lossleess files, and then simply serving it to us the same way all the other music is served
What were the biggest technical challenges the team faced in bringing lossless audio streaming to Spotify, and how were they overcome?
You mention how it's a challenging project, I am very curious, what were the major challenges you ran into? Other platforms have been able to implement lossless before Spotify, so I'd love to know if there were different hurdles that you had to pass!
Moreover, what impact do you think lossless will have on the user experience? It's been a heavily requested feature, but you hear a lot of people say that 'most people won't notice anyways'. I'd love to hear your opinion on this!
How about the lossy options? Many people (including myself) think that OGG VORBIS sounds worse than apple music's AAC and youtube music's OPUS. Do you plan to change the codec you use for the lossy options?
Why the staggered rollout when other music providers especially Apple Music is able to roll it out to users worldwide without issues?
this. For every goddamn new feature
Will the feature have an "exclusive mode" for PC or Mobile? If not, are there any plans to add such a feature so we can bypass the system's audio resample and achieve bit-perfect? I'm so tired of "lossless" and having it not actually play "lossless" or "bit-perfect".
View in your timezone:
Friday, September 12th from 10am-11am ET
Not a question, just wanted to give a huge shoutout to you and the team for finally delivering on this <3
Why thank you! I was a bit nervous about coming to Reddit, this is lovely to hear! I just want to stress that this was a huge team effort from so many people across the whole of Spotify, engineering and beyond, team work of the very highest level. It’s been a blast, we are all THRILLED that we’ve got lossless to you.
Whats's up with Spotify's extremely slow release policies? The stages releases are very frustrating. Meanwhile, Automix or even the AI DJ, which was first released two years ago, is still not available in most countries. Why not close-Beta test first and then release to everyone instead of keeping everyone asking "when do I get that?"
Will there be bit perfect on windows desktop ?
I know we’ve got people waiting for WASAPI Exclusive Mode playback (we’ve spotted the comments on Reddit). Well, let’s just say we’ve got engineers who want this too (hey Barnabas, Dan!)...
Hey there! I have 3 questions for u :)
Are you guys planning to give support for Dolby Atmos or Sony 360 audio?
When is lossless coming to Spain?
Is it launching mobile only first or will be it available across PC, TV etc as well?
Can you talk about Dolby Atmos? Will this be coming anytime soon?
As a paying user, it doesn’t feel fair to be charged the same premium price but not get access to all the features. If Spotify keeps its premium pricing consistent across countries, then why are some features rolled out in certain regions while others have to wait months to get them? There is literally no communication on rollout timelines, now I don’t even know when lossless would be coming here.
If you continue to have music downloaded in lower quality than lossless, if you set the streaming quality to lossless (such as either on Wi-Fi or cellular), will it override those settings to stream it in lossless quality when available on either Wi-Fi or cellular?