[peatmoss]

Apple is also the only service to get gapless playback right, near as I can tell. Since adding lossless (I care less about "high-res" or "spatial"), they are far and away my favorite.

EDIT: In case anyone is wondering why gapless playback is important, the entire genre of classical music pretty much demands it. Also, anyone who listens to popular music where one track seamlessly leads into another will know how frustrating it is to not be able to stream an album as the artist intended it to be heard.

[iggldiggl]

I've stumbled across some instances where the tracks as uploaded by the recording company had been improperly cut, though, so you can't get the correct playback no matter which service you use or even if you'd actually buy and download the tracks outright.

E.g. the between-tracks material on quite a number of live tracks of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series (which on the physical CDs is part of the pregap, so it's skipped if you directly navigate to a track, but it's definitively played if you just listen to the album straight through) is currently missing from all official digital releases, even though those bits are definitively part of the appeal of those albums.

[piva00]

I get proper gapless playback in Spotify and have had it for years. To be honest I can't remember a time it didn't work. I listen to quite a lot of classical music and avant-garde music where albums are basically one song divided in multiple tracks, they work seamlessly.

[rozab]

Alas, it still fails to loop Nonagon Infinity seamlessly

[peatmoss]

Hadn’t heard of that, and I also didn’t know that CDs could reference back to a previous track that way. Also interesting music… cheers!

[seba_dos1]

They can't, it's the music that loops if you play it back with no gaps, which not all CD players will be able to do (it needs to be buffered because of seeking latency). Easy to achieve with local playback from files though.