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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Spotify is horrible quality for 2023

    To my surprise, even Spotify’s standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify’s standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar’s ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that’s apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn’t grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would’ve added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).

    Our conclusion is that the quality “difference” is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.








  • In my experience, Wayland has been the one that “just works.” No disabling compositing, higher than 60 refresh rate on my monitors, screen share portals, and a few other things that annoyed me about x11. From what I hear, x11 is ancient and wasn’t designed to be used as it is today. Waiting on a couple features but never had any stability issues, hopefully more app devs realize it’s existence and switch from x11 like all it’s devs did.