SoundExpert Guest

One more web project from Sweden becomes popular – music service Spotify. Founded at the end of 2008 it offers almost the same functionality as iTunes but with one and very important difference – all music is available for “free” - adverts in Spotify player cover all expenses. Payed ad-free subscription is also available. More than ten million tracks and contracts with all major music labels make it a serious competitor on the market. A very reasonable description of the service is on Wikipedia – Spotify.

Spotify uses Vorbis encoder for streaming its content. Free users get ~160 kbit/s audio stream (Vorbis, -q5) and premium users - ~320 kbit/s (Vorbis, -q9). Exactly these two presets were added to SoundExpert rating system in 160 kbit/s and 320+ kbit/s groups respectively. Now their test files are ready for downloading and testing along with other encoders.

We thank Øyvin Eikeland for this suggestion.