This is great news!

No need for an extra Spotify laptop anymore

But where is the squeezebox classic? Is it out of production? Replaced by Squeezebox Touch?

Anyways, I got to try this the coming week.

THANKS Martin for posting this comment and link!

A while back I didn’t see the point in going for premium Spotify subscription. Why pay for something you can get for free? Now I do see the point.

The big advantage is the sound quality, the second advantage is avoiding the commercials. I could live with the commercials though. I understand there are other advantages if you are the proud owner of an iPhone; read more about Spotify for iPhone on the Spotify blog.

With the premium subscription a new option is enabled in the preferences where you Enable high bitrate. The enhanced bitrate is “up to 320 kbit/s using the Ogg Vorbis q9 codec“; read more on the Spotify blog. With the free subscription you are restricted to somewhere around 160 kbit/s.

The high bitrate option is still disabled by default and you need to check it. I can now play the Spotify stream at 320 kbit/s through my Squeezebox and it sounds really good.

The actual premium purchase was really smooth. You sign up for a recurring monthly subscription of 99 sek/month. You can discontinue new monthly payments right after buying the first month or at any later time.

A nice bonus is that you receive 2 invites every month you buy or renew your subscription. Another bonus, if you don’t have a free Spotify account, is that you can go premium one month and then stay on the free subscription option on your account after that.

Read more about my Playing Spotify through Squeezebox setup.

The Spotify music service has become really strong and more then enough music is available. The Spotify client search and play features are working fine and online services such as Spotylist gives me the same kind of features as last.fm -maybe better.

The only thing I’m not happy with is the quality limitation of up to 160 kb/s (UPDATE: check the comments to this post), I would really prefer 320kb/s or even better a lossless format such as FLAC or Apple Lossless.

I wanted to play the Spotify music stream through my Squeezebox, the reason being that the hardware of the Squeezebox has really good sound performance and I don’t want a laptop connected to my stereo. Compared to my PC laptop line out the sound quality is amazing and even compared to my Macbook Aluminium the sound is really clean on the Squeezebox.

Using Nicecast, from rogue amoeba, I can create a music stream from any sound source application on my Macbook and play this on on the Squeezebox (or any other player capable of music URL streams).

I have to do a few one-time settings; In Nicecast I have to select broadcast on start-up and set the source to Spotify. In Squeezebox I save a bookmark to the sound stream URL from Nicecast.

When I want to play Spotify I simply open Nicecast on my Macbook -this triggers Spotify to open since it is the default source, select the music I want to play and select the music stream bookmark on my Squeezebox.

Note! I have only tried this on my local network and I assume it’s not within the Spotify usage terms to stream the music out on Internet

Good luck.