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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:
Second, there’s an obsession with audiophile-grade quality (lossless FLAC, etc.) that inflates file sizes, making it impossible to maintain a complete archive of all music ever produced.
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
They definitely don’t see paid accounts using too much. My library is mostly built from Spotify rips using onthespot. 400k songs.
Everything is broken now and a few patches are up, waiting for it to update and keep ripping.
1000% agree most people can’t tell the difference in the bitrates, I rip mine at 320 in mp3. I can’t tell the difference in flac even with decent headphones, not worth the storage for the extra file size, I use Bluetooth headphones anyway, don’t care about every single frequency. I did notice some of my super old 120kbps mp3s from the 90s were so shit quality though, redownloaded those.