This has been driving me nuts for a really long time. I’ve been hearing a lot of clipping artifacts when playing music through spotify on my PC. All these while, I assumed this was due to the source file uploaded on spotify being spotty.
I was today years old when I made the link that most songs that I hear clipping artifacts were songs that are low in volume. Turns out, the normalize volume setting in preferences will attempt to boost the volume of these songs (as the option is supposed to do) but introduced a fuck tonne of clipping artifacts into it.
Its a useful function but the volume normalising algorithm is broken on spotify.
I always disliked this feature on Spotify. I can swear that it messed up dynamic range in the songs somehow, because with this setting on, parts of the song just sounded… wrong. That said, the last time I used it was probably 2 years ago.
Replay gain is great when implemented properly. But at least then, Normalize was kind of borked on Spotify.