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Fidelity wars: Rdio upgrades its music, matches Spotify and Beats [The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.](Oregonian (Portland, OR) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Oct. 17--The battle for your streaming-music dollars is heating up--and sounding better. Rdio, a competitor to Spotify, Beats and other subscription-based, on-demand services, has announced it has converted its digital library to "pristine-quality" 320 kbps AAC files -- the highest quality the format, Apple's answer to the MP3 codec, allows. (Spotify, weirdly, is stocked with neither: it uses the previously nerds-only Ogg Vorbis format, though telling the difference at higher quality levels should be next to impossible.) That's for paying customers at the "unlimited" level: all Rdio users can listen at 192 kbps, which sounds quite good as well, if not on par with your CD collection. I'm an Rdio user and prefer it to Spotify and the rest: it handles a large playlist collection without notable lag and offers a seemingly endless new releases page each Tuesday, which might be the best place on the Internet to navigate new music. Spotify has such a stream too, finally, but it's limited to the current week -- and has fewer releases. I was under the impression Rdio's 320 conversion had happened already, everything was sounding so good through my upgraded headphones, but apparently not: you can check your Rdio quality by clicking the arrow next to your name, to settings and then to advanced, where you'll find the quality selector. I pay $4.99 for the web-only version, which doesn't get you top quality: for $9.99, sigh, you can listen in glistening 320 (and play songs on your phone). The benefit of lower quality--aside from the fact that many have grown used to the brittle, compressed sound it creates--is it generates smaller files and less bandwidth for streaming, which can be important if your home or phone data plan has a low limit. Rdio gives you four options: 64, 96, 192 and 320 kbps, with file sizes increasing at each mark. To my ears, 96 kbps MP3s introduce audible, ugly distortion: even as a 17-year-old downloading from Napster, 128 kpbs was the baseline, as well as the quality level originally sold by the iTunes store. So it's odd that Rdio falls from 192 to 96 (and then 64!) rather than 128 -- not that you would want to listen below 192 ever anyway, unless you were, say, racking up data roaming charges on some tropical cruise but really had to hear the new Taylor Swift single. Both Beats and Spotify also offer 320 kbps audio for paying customers, though newer streaming services, including the European-based Deezer, are pushing into even bigger files--the "lossless" FLAC format, which runs about half the size or less of a CD's data. As wi-fi and cellular data improve, we're likely just a few years from every service upping the ante into maximum fidelity--which will be a big win for both musicians and listeners, unless MP3s, the Big Macs of the audio world, have ruined everyone's ears first. -- David Greenwald ___ (c)2014 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) Visit The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) at www.oregonian.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |