Spotify

Almost everybody has Spotify installed and almost nobody has opened its settings. That is a shame, because the desktop client contains a set of playback controls that change what you hear considerably, and it ships with several of them set to values you would not choose if anybody had asked.

The obvious part needs little describing. A catalogue you search, playlists you build, podcasts and audiobooks in the same window, recommendations that arrive whether you wanted them or not. Everyone knows how that works.

What follows is the other half, the audio path, the local file handling and the device controls, because that is where the difference between adequate and good actually lives.

The default quality setting is not the best one

Streaming quality offers five steps, from a low setting through to lossless, and the default is not any of them. It is set to automatic, which adjusts according to what the connection appears to manage and in practice usually settles on a middling bitrate rather than the best available.

Worse, the automatic mode is aggressive about dropping. A connection perfectly capable of the higher setting can still find itself served something considerably thinner because the client decided conditions were uncertain. Setting the value manually is the single most effective change available.

Streaming and downloading have separate quality settings, which matters more than it appears. A downloaded track plays at the quality it was downloaded in, permanently, so raising the setting does nothing for anything already saved. Those files have to be deleted and downloaded again.

Lossless, and the three things that undo it

Spotify delivers lossless music at up to twenty-four bit depth at compact disc sampling rate, in a compressed lossless format, and it belongs to the paid tier where it has been made available.

Three limitations are worth establishing before anybody gets excited. It applies to music only, so video podcasts and audiobooks continue at their usual quality. It wants a steady connection of around one and a half to two megabits per second, and falls back rather than stuttering when it cannot get that. And wireless headphones recompress the stream, so a lossless setting into Bluetooth is not lossless by the time it reaches your ears. Wired output or playing to a capable device over the network are the only paths that preserve it.

The fourth complication is the one nobody expects, and it has its own section below.

Exclusive mode, the setting nobody finds

Buried in the Spotify playback settings is an option that hands the chosen output device to it alone, preventing other applications from using it while it is active. That means the audio path is not being resampled or mixed by anything else on the way out.

The maker’s own guidance on using it is unusually direct. Alongside exclusive mode, switch off volume normalisation, confirm the equaliser is off, disable the automatic mixing between tracks and turn off crossfade. With all of that done you hear the recording as it was mastered rather than as the client decided to present it.

That combination is the closest this software comes to what a dedicated audio player does by default. If unaltered playback of files you own is the actual goal, foobar2000 has been built around that principle for years and gives you output configuration this cannot match.

Normalisation and the transition controls

Volume normalisation in Spotify is on by default and doing more than most people realise. It adjusts every track towards a target loudness, with three levels available, and the level you choose changes how much dynamic range survives. It also applies to lossless playback, so the pristine stream you enabled is still being adjusted unless you say otherwise.

Whether that is good depends entirely on how you listen. Across a shuffled playlist spanning several decades of mastering practice, normalisation is a mercy. Listening to one album that was mastered as a whole, it flattens exactly what the engineer intended.

Crossfade is adjustable up to twelve seconds, gapless playback removes the pause between tracks that belong together, and an automatic mixing option smooths transitions on some playlists. For tone shaping beyond the built-in equaliser, Equalizer APO works at the system level and applies to everything rather than one application.

Local files, and what that is not

Spotify will play audio stored on your own machine, from folders you nominate in the settings, and they appear alongside streamed content in your library.

Be clear about the limits of that, because the feature invites a misunderstanding. There is no tag editing, no library organisation beyond what your file names already provide, no folder browsing of the kind a music library manager offers, and no attempt to match your files against the catalogue’s metadata. It plays them. That is the whole feature.

Anyone with a substantial collection of their own needs a real library manager rather than this, and MusicBee handles tens of thousands of files with proper organisation, tagging and playback settings.

Fixing metadata before importing anything is a separate job again, and a dedicated tagger for correcting file information does in minutes what would otherwise be an evening of renaming.

Connect, and playing to other things

The device feature is well implemented and underused. Spotify running on the desktop can push playback to a speaker, a television or a phone on the same network and keep the controls locally, so the machine becomes a remote rather than the source.

One quirk deserves recording. Setting lossless quality for playback to a third-party device has to be done from the mobile application rather than the desktop one, which is the sort of inconsistency that sends people through the menus for an hour.

Private session is the other setting to find. It stops the current listening from influencing recommendations, which matters if you share an account or if a single evening of children’s music would otherwise reshape your suggestions for a fortnight.

What the client asks of the machine, and what you do not own

The desktop application is a wrapped web application rather than native code, and it uses memory accordingly. Several hundred megabytes to play music is not unusual, which on a capable machine is irrelevant and on an older one is noticeable next to a native player.

If resource use matters, a native player that runs on a fraction of the memory will play your own files without the overhead, though obviously without the catalogue.

The deeper point is ownership. Everything here is licensed rather than owned, so an album can disappear when an agreement changes, a track can be replaced with a different master, and a playlist can develop gaps that nobody announces. That is the arrangement rather than a fault, and it is the reason people who care about specific recordings keep buying them.

Conclusion

Spotify is the default for good reasons, and the desktop client rewards ten minutes in its settings more than almost any other application people use daily. Setting quality manually, understanding what normalisation is doing, and finding exclusive mode together turn a convenient service into something that sounds properly good on decent equipment.

Where it stops is ownership and library management. Local file support is a courtesy rather than a feature, the client is heavier than a music player needs to be, and everything in the catalogue is there on licence rather than permanently. Use it as the enormous convenient catalogue it is, keep a real player and your own copies of the recordings you actually care about, and change those three settings before you next sit down to listen properly.