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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Spotify is inching toward adding the level of personalisation that Google Play Music used to have and YT Music is still playing catch-up. GPM used to have playlists for location and time of day (Wednesday afternoon at home, or Friday night at work, Tuesday morning on the road, etc). I’m still salty they killed it. Unfortunately they all sound like trash if unless you’re listening to Bluetooth. The lossless files make a tiny difference on old car Bluetooth but not much, it’s a tad cleaner when it’s only being compressed once as opposed to twice. On wired headphones though it’s a night-and-day difference



  • Spotify and YT music have the two lowest bitrates at 192kbps for YT and 328kbps for Spotify so they both sound like garbage. I’ve never listened to music less than when I was using YT music. Bad personalized playlists, awful sound quality, it would mix in music videos and shit. I’d rather the radio at that point

    Tidal sounds vastly better (1441kbps lossless CD quality at the same price) but their personalized playlists are quite lacking.

    However… I’ve found Apple Music to be the best one. Its audio quality is even higher than Tidal, supporting not only lossless, but also high-res lossless (between 4608 and 9616 kbps… far above above CD quality, great for studio speakers.) Its recommendations are almost as good as Spotify too.

    I don’t own any Apple hardware btw, the app works great on Android. The Windows app is “in preview” but it’s pretty stable and both of them support lossless audio (just don’t use the website to listen, that’s not lossless)

    Edit: spelling and formatting looked okay on my tiny phone

    Edit 2: I forgot to mention that both Spotify (and especially YT Music try as hard as possible to not pay artists. Tidal was known for paying artists really well until a year or two ago when new ownership changed things. Apple Music still pays pretty well (for a streaming service)

    Edit 3: Tidal also has high-res lossless but the “Max” tier is twice the price