What's a good streaming service these days quality-wise? I'm looking at Rdio and Spotify, Rdio has more songs but it's unclear what the bitrate is. Spotify claims 320kbps.
Spotify uses Vorbis at varying quality settings (http://www.spotify.com/se/help/faq/tech/codec-quality/). They state that q9 "about equals" 320kbps, but they don't use 320kbps CBR, which would also be quite pointless, because it would waste immense amounts of bandwidth on their end with no audible benefit. In my opinion even q9 is pointless already, if you have q5 available, but some people are just gullible enough to buy Premium for that (also, it's the only way to use Spotify on mobile devices ).
Rdio don't want to give technical details about the codecs or settings they use (http://help.rdio.com/customer/portal/questions/25419-sound-quality-give-me-details).
I don't think codecs or settings are important, because you have no control over it anyway. If it sounds fine their settings are good and there is nothing to complain about, and if it sounds bad you should probably just avoid it. I would be more concerned about song availability, pricing, the ability to play while mobile or offline, etc.
For some reason I get a lot of background hiss on Spotify.
It's completely illogical because I don't get it with anything else. I wrote them and looked to see if it was a common problem. Not many others reported it and all they could suggest was delete and re-install. Which I did but it didn't change anything.
I really don't understand it. What could be different?
Shame really because I've practically stopped using Spotify now.
OT: Soundcloud is still good. Standard is only 128 but many quality conscious posters load 320 or even FLAC for downloads.
& of course there is always LastFM.
For some reason I get a lot of background hiss on Spotify.
It's completely illogical because I don't get it with anything else. I wrote them and looked to see if it was a common problem. Not many others reported it and all they could suggest was delete and re-install. Which I did but it didn't change anything.
I really don't understand it. What could be different?
Shame really because I've practically stopped using Spotify now.
OT: Soundcloud is still good. Standard is only 128 but many quality conscious posters load 320 or even FLAC for downloads.
& of course there is always LastFM.
That's strange about Spotify. You must have caught some odd bug, I experience no hiss on my system.