Spotify in the US: My first two days

[pumprdave]

I had a problem with recurring static on every song for several seconds at a time. However I isolated this problem to the Play-through Mode of Pure Music 1.8. As soon as I set my DAC (an Audiophilleo II connected to a Burson 160HD) back in Audio Midi the problem vanished completely. So Pure Music Play-through Mode may have some early adoption issues.

 

Spotify sounds GREAT on a cable modem connection to the internet. Rarely a track is dead and won't play, and you just move on to the next song.

 

However on my office computer, where we have one T1 line used by 50 people, there is occasional static in the middle of a song probably caused by our overtaxed pipeline.

 

[pumprdave]

I've listened to Spotify for several hours now.

First of all it imported my iTunes library with 4600 CDs.

 

So I did a search on Burt Bacharach. First I see all of my own albums, then all the albums on Spotify. Moving between them I could not detect an overall difference in sound quality between my own ripped CD's (in Apple Lossless) and the Spotify tracks. But I wasn't playing my own tracks through iTunes and Pure Music, I was playing them through the Spotify app. I'll try that comparison tomorrow.

 

I used to listen to Rhapsody. It has a great interface, but I was always disappointed that the sound quality was slightly inferior to my CD's. Spotify has a mediocre interface but the sound quality seems indistinguishable from CD. I have the $10 per month subscription so I am mostly listening to 320 kb Ogg Vortiss files from their site.

 

The interface is all about searches. You can't browse pages of album covers like iTunes. Having a book of all CD releases would help the experience. But you can search by album name, artist, composer, genre or any other criteria.

 

My $10 per month also gets the music on my iPhone and iPad2 for business trips.

 

I am very impressed. Now if they would just create a world class interface like iTunes.

 

David Levinson

Newport Beach, CA.