Jens's dashboard

Zargon:

Can you really hear the difference between 320 kbps Ogg and uncompressed wav?

The problem with most living rooms is the fact that they are relatively small (acoustically speaking) and room modes make up a large part and the perceived sound and you cannot fix problems caused by standing waves with an EQ. A dip is caused by the canceling of sound waves in the listening position and if gain this frequency all you do is canceling these sound waves at a higher level (but you will still end up with a dip at these frequencies). If you have a peak in the spectra (usually also caused my room modes) you probably also have a high RT60 (reverberation time) at (or t least some of) these frequencies as well and that will not change if you add an EQ. If we are talking about live sound it’s another story since the spaces associated with live sound are a lot bigger and the modal area of the room is shifted as low (in frequency) so its effects are minimized and therefore it works to “fix” a trouble room with EQ in these situations. – Jens, on May 27, 2009 08:17

You can not compensate for bad acoustics with EQ (well you can sometimes make things a tiny bit better but then other things will suffer). – Jens, on May 25, 2009 23:01

Ok, let me try to lighten up this topic.

Music from different periods of time, or new music but different styles, have very different “RMS”-level. The RMS (Root Mean Square) level is (more or less) a measure of the perceived volume of music (or sound). Modern music generally have a high RMS-level since the material is heavily compressed (not talking about mp3 or ogg now...) and limited to get as high “level” as possible so the track will be able to compete with others when played in public media. This has lead to what’s called “the loudness war” in the industry. The tricky thing is that the “peak” –level of songs is the same (within a decibel =close to 0dB) so there’s no way of making the soft songs louder without adding compression or limiting and thereby affecting the sonic character of the song. The only correct way of implementing “volume normalization” (eliminating volume differences between songs) is to lower the playback volume of the songs with a high RMS level (the RMS level of each song is imbedded in the metadata of the track, the application reads it and adjusts the playback level to compensate for level variations). This technique has some other drawbacks witch you can read about here:

http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to...

Luckily, the Spotify team listened to the users and added the possibility to turn off “Level normalization” and that’s really good (thank you Spotify) but, what they also did, was to apply a limiter that enabled them to increase the playback level when “level normalization” is turned on. This would be ok if the user could choose to turn it off. Personally, I don’t care that much about the limiter since I don’t use the “level normalization” feature (I want as good quality as possible) but I find the situation funny that people are listening to music that is limited once more in the player and not being aware of it.

So, what about the commercials?

Well, if you listen to an old recording or a new one but with a low RMS level like symphony or some jazz, the commercial will probably have a higher RMS level and play louder, especially if the “level normalization” feature is turned off. If you listen to modern rock, the commercial will appear normal or maybe even low in level if not over compressed and limited. I don’t know how Spotify behaves when the “level normalization” is turned on but I hope that it treats the commercials like any other song when it comes to playback level.

? – Jens, on February 02, 2009 18:20

http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to... – Jens, on January 30, 2009 23:16

This might also come in handy:

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_ch...

I had an "Acer Ferrari" a few years ago and that machine had a hardware conflict between the network card, graphics card and the soundcard. You probably have the same issue. Try to update all (ALL) the drivers for the computer (including BIOS and main board chipset drivers).

This has already been reported. Wonder why is hasn’t been fixed yet?

Another small detail is the poor browsing between songs. I want to be able to browse forward and see the upcoming songs without the music changing to the next track.

A somewhat unrealistic idea maybe, is to let Spotify build up its own link database based on the users listening habits. If say more than 40% of people that listens to this band also listens to that band, they'll be linked and so fourth.

Oh, and a top 100 hit list of Spotify would be fun!

Agree, I think a WM-version is more important... (guess what OS my phone uses..:)

iTunes link... realistic...

A top 100 list of songs played in total from Spotify would be interesting though.

Carl-Axel:

Sorry I’m a bit late but perhaps you could invite me too since I’m... how should I say, involved?

Also, I would like to show my gratitude to you guys for listening to us! – Jens, on January 21, 2009 00:08

jenseklund – Jens, on January 21, 2009 00:04

And how about 16 bit resolution instead of 14 bit...

http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to...

http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/to...

I have sent a bug report about this two times and the first time was at least one month ago.