Jordan O'BrienHigh-end speaker manufacturers keep on banging on about lossless audio, but it hasn’t always been easy to find music available in the format. Thankfully, that’s all set to change as Deezer has just announced that its new desktop app will support lossless audio.
Deezer isn’t exactly the first streaming music service to offer support for FLAC lossless audio in a desktop app, as Tidal subscribers already benefit from that privilege. Deezer does benefit from many more songs, however. In fact, Deezer’s 40 million tracks dwarves that of Tidal’s 25 million.
Users who have yet to try lossless audio can currently do so for a reduced cost with Deezer. That’s because the firm is offering 16-bit FLAC support to those subscribed to its Premium+ plan, which costs £9.99 a month. That’s a limited time offer, as users will have to switch to Deezer HiFi after January 2018, which costs £19.99 a month – the same as Tidal’s lossless offering.
Alexander Holland, chief content and product officer, Deezer, comments: “Deezer’s desktop users will now have a new home to play their Flow, discover unknown artists and watch exclusive video content – all within a newly designed, one download app. Furthermore, we are excited to offer hifi audio to users who want to further enhance the quality of their overall listening experience.”
Deezer and Tidal may not be alone in offering lossless audio streaming on the desktop for too long. Spotify has already trialled un-compressed audio on its platform, with a bitrate of 1,411kbps, but it has yet to release it to the public. At the time, the company was considering a new Spotify HiFi subscription tier, with an additional $5-10 monthly cost on top of an existing subscription.
Outside of the mainstream music streaming services, there is technically one other service that offers lossless streaming – Qobuz. Priced identically to Deezer and Tidal’s HiFi offerings, Qobuz is noticeably higher quality, with some tracks streaming in 24-bit hi-res.