Are there any notoriously bad Ogg Vorbis encoders?, I think Spotify might be using one of them... Options

[mmontag]

I am wondering because I have noticed a particular disturbing artifact on many Spotify tracks. What could cause this? I'd like to reproduce this sound in order to back up my suspicions. I can't seem to reproduce the noise no matter how low quality I compress my test audio, so my first guess was that Spotify could have used a bad encoder, earlier version, etc. Much like some early MP3 encoders, such as Xing, were notorious for producing poor quality MP3s.

I have some samples available on my blog:

http://www.mattmontag.com/music/weird-spot...ssion-artifacts

Matt

This post has been edited by mmontag: Aug 1 2011, 08:19

[mixminus1]

According to the spotifyclassical.com blog post linked on the OP's website, the stream is encrypted, so that could be tricky...I'm "assuming" that the WAVs Matt provided on his website were captures of the actual playback, either by sound card loop-back, or by grabbing the decompressed PCM stream via something like Total Recorder.

Matt, how did you create those WAV samples?

On a whim, I did some searching on Amazon, and it just so happens that all the tracks that Matt posted come from Universal Music Group labels...after what was discovered in my previously-linked thread, I'm going to double-down on watermarking, particularly since Matt says that the artifacts are still there on the 320 kbps stream.

Edit: added the last bit about the 320 kb stream

This post has been edited by mixminus1: Aug 1 2011, 21:59