It looks like Spotify’s road to lossless audio is long and full of hurdles. It’s been about three years since the streaming giant first announced it would be adding lossless audio to its offerings, but we’ve yet to see it materialise. However, Spotify does seem to like to tease us with leaks and “updates” to its apps.
In the latest leaks that have surfaced thanks to Reddit user OhItsTom, we finally get a glimpse of some of the features and app interfaces for “Lossless” on Spotify. The screenshots of the desktop app show that Spotify might be considering ditching the “HiFi” branding and sticking to “Lossless”. It also gives us a glimpse of the quality that Spotify is gunning for with Lossless and it’s an impressive 2117kbps. That said, it looks like a majority of the offerings will be 24-bit audio FLAC files. The interface also indicates that audio files could be as large as 15.9MB a minute. That’s a HUGE file! A typical song would be between 65MB to 80MB which isn’t too bad considering ripping lossless tracks from a CD can sometimes go larger than that.
In addition to this, it looks like Spotify will be including a whole bunch on introductory screens for Lossless when it finally launches. It does suggest using Spotify Connect over Bluetooth for a better listening experience for lossless. It will also come with a compatibility checker for Spotify Lossless that will let you know if your device can support Lossless audio.
These screenshots are the latest in leaks that have been teasing the upcoming release of Spotify’s Lossless Audio support. However, it comes after more rumours pointed to Spotify introducing a brand new tier – Supremium – to its offerings. The Supremium tier would set you back USD$20 a month. This is about USD$5 more than the Premium tier which is priced at USD$16.99. There is also no indication if this tier would be supported in the Family plan. Currently, Spotify Premium is priced at RM15.90 a month in Malaysia while the Family Plan is priced at RM24.90 a month.