Relatively popular songs are stored in their original 160kbit/s OGG Vorbis quality, while the rest use 75kbit/s to save hundreds of terabytes of storage.

75 kbit/s can sound pretty bad depending on the songs. If you listen to it on your phone speaker you probably won't notice, but this isn't for quality listening experience. Depends what they mean with popular though, maybe all "good" songs are stored in the higher bitrate.

[–] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 40 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The only songs reencoded to that quality is a sample of the 0-streams songs, which do make up a lot of the total count.

Everything that has been listened to at least once is in high quality.

[–] hietsu@sopuli.xyz 16 points 1 day ago

0-popularity, not 0-streams, which are two different metrics according to the archive blog post. But nevertheless, the re-encoded stuff is stuff pretty much no one will miss. Also Opus at 75kbps is much better than Vorbis or mp3 at that bitrate.

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think the most interesting part is all the metadata. The audio quality is not fit for archival purposes, archives use e.g. flac

[–] figjam@midwest.social 4 points 1 day ago

Oh no! The free music is not top tier quality for my ears!

Getoutahere

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What I've read is it's about: Preservation.

This aint just about piracy because free media.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 3 points 1 day ago

And that's why I think it's an issue. The least popular tracks, which are the most likely ones to disappear from the internet, are the ones they store in the lowest quality. While I'm glad they made this huge effort for preservation, and understand the limitations of storage space, I also wish they would have at least preserved the original 160kbps streams.

[–] potustheplant@feddit.nl 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've literally never been unable to find ogg, flac or mp3s for any album on Soulseek. Why is scraping Spotify even necessary?

[–] Mondez@lemdro.id 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There is probably a lot of listening data that could be useful. Say you like a particular song, you could look at what other songs people who stream that do also streamed a lot?

[–] potustheplant@feddit.nl 2 points 1 day ago

True. An "open source" music discovery algorithm would be nice. They could've just scraped the metadata for that though.