From Rdio to Spotify

Music, I mean, it is pretty awesome. The only problem I can think of is that there are just so many ways to listen to it these days. I used to not really care much, and I cound never work with music playing, that would be too distracting.

Man, how I have changed.

Now, it simply must be playing. I have found myself more towards the audiophile side of listening as well, I simply love being able to hear all the nuance in the music that you cannot get without both quality components and most importantly high quality source.

For the hardware side, I have that covered rocking some Presonus Eris E5 studio monitors connected through a Focusrite Scarlett audio interface. Quality stuff that gives me the best possible sound from this MacBook Air.

Now, about the source quality. I am by no means an expert, barely even a hobbyist, but this is what works best for me and my setup. In an ideal situation I suppose I would buy CD’s (remember those?) and rip them all into a lossless format such as AIFF but I am not quite there yet. So the next option would be finding and downloading all I want via iTunes, but nah, too many restrictions and variable bitrates there anyways. So, high quality streaming will be my current avenue.

It began with Rdio and I was pretty much in love. Great interface, easy to use and find music of which the catalog seemed pretty well stocked. Now, this was my first dive into streaming music, so I had no other baseline. I do enjoy some metal especially when writing code, and love me some old school Metallica! Alas, Rdio does not have them, what was I to do.

Search elsewhere.

Enter Spotify. They apparently have an exclusive, so if I wanted to streamt them, I would need to switch. So I signed up for the trial and was very impressed. Not with the web interface, but their Mac app is quite good, including;

• Fast searching
• Easy sharing
• High quality option!

So spotify offers not only the main artist I was missing, but much higher quality source. Advertised at 320 kbps vs Rdio at 192 Kbps.

Source: Spotify FAQ

So, that is what sold me on the move. Better quality that is noticable to my ears, and a larger library that contains artists I love to hear.

What do you use for your music pleasure? If you have any sweet playlist recommendations on Spotify let me know! Feel free to follow me, though I am still building up my own library there 😉