Quick check in with others. I’ve lost my mp3 player, and in its absence have finally started using my iphone 5 as a music player when out and about. Having demo-ed both spotify premium (ie offline) and itunes it seems that Spotify drains the battery at a significantly slower rate, but that itunes gives a slightly better sound quality. Would others agree?
Spotify premium vs itunes on iphone
by 9 Comments
Sorry should add playing mostly in iTunes 192 kps from Emusic or my own 320 kps files
To be honest I’ve always though the opposite was true and that Spotify was a better sound quality. I use both on the iphone. With Spotify set to Extreme I would say its a higher quality sound.
In theory/practice, the compression in AAC files is twice as good as that of MP3 files. So a 160kbps M4A should sound as good as 320kbps MP3 and 192kbps M4A should sound better.
Of course, FLAC or ALAC sound better than both. Whether you care is up to you. Lossless files can enhance battery life, too, as there is less decompression for the processing to do, but data rates are higher. Tidal and Qobuz both do Flac.
What headphones are you using? Spotify premium on my iPhone is how I listen to pretty much all my mobile music, and it’s great. Make sure you fix the Spotify settings to get the higher quality streams/downloads.
FWIW, I have listened to a Pono, it’s very good.
Standard iPhone buds,
I agree that the Spotify sound is really good. Better than standard mp3 (to these jaded ears anyway). Cant say that I can distinguish much difference between the 2 mediums
I use Spotify Premium and it sounds fine to me but I am not a sound purist so my views might be irrelevant!
I recently went back to iTunes due to the severe lack of Van Mirroson on Spotify. What have they done to it? It was a nightmare. You can no longer copy from the computer into your phone’s playlists, and no matter how many times I added songs or re-edited playlists, they kept reverting to older saved versions. Over the course of two nights, I just about rescued my playlists, but they now don’t show up on the computer, and I’d be scared to ever plug the phone back into the computer again.
I recently went back to iTunes due to the severe lack of Van Morrison on Spotify. What have they done to it? It was a nightmare. You can no longer copy from the computer into your phone’s playlists, and no matter how many times I added songs or re-edited playlists, they kept reverting to older saved versions. Over the course of two nights, I just about rescued my playlists, but they now don’t show up on the computer, and I’d be scared to ever plug the phone back into the computer again.