this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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What use is the metadata? Or is that stuff like the album covers etc?
I'm also a bit concerned about this:
Does that mean that this spotify dump is a bunch of 64kbs mp3s, or worse some kind of lossy spotify transcode?
Spotify streams all music at 160kbps OGG for free users by default, so that's what this archive is dumped at - the original Spotify content, no transcode. The only difference is they re-encoded all the songs with a 'popularity' of zero at a lower bitrate, because that saved an enormous amount of data for all the AI crap pumped into Spotify that nobody listens to.
Side note - it would probably not be possible to do a dump as a paid used (as they would notice a user account is being abused, and ban it), but paid accounts go up to 320kbps OGG and some content is also available lossless (as FLAC).
Anyway, 99%+ of people can't consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that 'swear they can tell' are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There's tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html
Sure but if the purpose of the dump is musical archive, then the music should be stored in an archival format, not a lossy one.
They are archiving what they could get from Spotify and in this case what they could get was encoded in a lossy format to begin with.
It doesn't get any "more" lossy over time just being stored as an .ogg