May 07, 2024
Spotify announced its lossless audio streaming a couple of years ago. Now, it is expected that it will finally launch this year. Lossless audio allows audio streaming of high resolution without compression and improves the overall audio quality.
In February 2021, Spotify first announced to offer a high-fidelity audio option called ‘Spotify HiFi.’ This feature was supposed to deliver CD-quality music streaming to users. However, the launch was pushed back and never implemented. Since then, there have been rumours of a ‘Supremium’ tier with lossless audio, but Spotify hasn’t announced such a thing yet.
Read more: How to listen to audiobooks on Spotify
Lossless audio runs up to 2,117kbps, at up to 15.9 megabytes per minute. By comparison, ‘Very High’ is 320kbps, consuming 2MB per minute. A screenshot was taken by u/OhitsTom, a Redditor, from Spotify version 1.2.36 in which there is an option for lossless on the top of the five available options under streaming. Spotify build code samples have also mentioned the FLAC audio format, which may offer listening capabilities of up to 24-bit/44.1kHz for ‘limited songs.’
The UI elements in the app indicate that the launch of lossless audio is near, but it isn’t working yet. The lossless audio streaming is already used by some music streaming platforms such as Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal and Pandora. While there is no official announcement, people have to wait until it is confirmed by Spotify.
