- Good news: Spotify Lossless is rolling out to Sonos users
- Early reports say it sounds better, especially at higher volume
- Bad news: the Android Spotify app is crashing and hanging for some
We've got good news and bad news about Spotify today. The good news is that Spotify Lossless is now rolling out to many Sonos users, and they're very pleased with what they're hearing. And the bad is that on Android, the Spotify app is suffering from an ongoing issue that causes it to crash on some Wi-Fi networks.
Let's start with the good news. Redditors are reporting that Lossless is now available in their apps, and they're sharing screenshots to demonstrate it. And the early word is good: as tman2damax11 posted, while they were cynical about the supposed benefits of lossless they're now convinced. "I've been able to listen to music ~20% louder than I normally would without the track getting muddy from compression."
If you've just got music playing in the background there's not really any noticeable difference, but if you're focusing on listening "the higher dynamic range is noticeable", the poster says.
As ever with higher bitrates, there's some debate: some people can hear the difference, and some can't. But the people who can seem very pleased with how it's sounding on the best Sonos speakers, and it might make the likes of the Sonos Era 100 even more tempting to Spotify fans (especially after its permanent price cut not too long ago).
What's wrong with the Spotify Android app?
While Spotify subscribers are discussing lossless audio on Reddit, other users aren't so happy: as 9to5google reports, Sonos has confirmed that there's an ongoing issue with the Android app.
Spotify says:
We’ve received reports from Android users (mainly Samsung and Google Pixel) experiencing issues where the Spotify app becomes unresponsive, freezes, or crashes when connected to certain WiFi networks. The issue doesn’t occur while using mobile data.
At least a temporary fix is obvious if you're having trouble, but it's not ideal if you're somewhere with poor signal (or if you're on a capped phone data plan). Spotify has said that its teams are working on a fix, but so far there's no indication of when that's likely to arrive.
As the report says, the problem isn't universal – but it does appear to be affecting quite a few users, particularly on Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones. And some users suspect that the problem may be related to Chromecast, which would perhaps explain why the problem goes away when you drop Wi-Fi. Whatever the reason, here's hoping Spotify finds the issue and fixes it soon.
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