5 Spotify settings you’ll wish you changed sooner
Improve your audio quality, keep kids music out of your algorithm and more.
Max Miller for Engadget
Spotify’s app feels designed to get you listening to something as quickly as possible. From the moment you launch it, you’re greeted with a flood of suggested playlists and podcasts that head you off at the pass before you can start crate digging. It’s undoubtedly a well-tested system that many users enjoy, but it does mean that fewer will venture into the deeper pockets of the app, such as the settings menu. And that’s a shame, because leaving Spotify’s settings in their default state can degrade your music-streaming experience.
We rounded up five of the most impactful settings to your Spotify experience. These options will improve the sound quality you’re getting from Spotify, help you to hear more of the music you prefer and prevent people from seeing your guilty pleasures. Any one of them will provide immediate benefits for your listening experience.
Most of the settings discussed here are available for users who are subscribed to Spotify Premium, and will not be on offer for free users. You can make most of these changes in the main settings menu of the Spotify app, accessible on mobile by tapping your profile picture in the upper left corner of the app, then tapping Settings and privacy, or on desktop by using the Ctrl + P shortcut (Cmd + comma on Mac). Some settings can only be changed in the mobile app. The mobile settings menu is divided into further submenus as of this writing, whereas the desktop app throws all the controls onto an interminably long, scrollable list.
Turn volume normalization off (or on, if you like)
Max Miller for Engadget
It can be quite jarring to go from a quiet ballad to a high-powered rock anthem when you’re not expecting it. The music files themselves can be vastly different volumes, and the problem is even worse when listening to music from different eras. Modern music has grown increasingly loud as digital workflows made it possible for engineers to apply so-called “brick wall” techniques to sound louder than their competitors. The result is that listening to equally generational talents back to back, such as The Beatles and T-Pain, can give a listener sonic whiplash as the latter’s autotune croon slams into the eardrums. For that reason, Spotify includes a loudness normalization setting that ensures all the music you play sounds like it’s at the same volume.
Volume normalization sounds like a good thing, but it has a major drawback. Whether you’re making quiet songs louder or loud songs quieter, one of the two is getting compressed in the process, which means it’s also being subjected to a reduction in quality. You might be the sort of person who prefers the convenience of normalization and is willing to accept a small loss in audio quality in exchange for it, and that’s entirely fine. Go ahead and enable it. But if you’re the type of person who felt their heart skip a beat upon hearing you might not be getting every drop of sonic perfection from your favorite songs, you should disable volume normalization.
To toggle volume normalization on or off, head into Spotify’s settings and find the volume normalization toggle in the Playback section under Volume controls. If you enable volume normalization, you can choose between three different modes. Quiet will bring more loud songs down in volume, loud will raise quieter songs in volume, and normal does a balance of the two. Spotify warns that the Loud setting may diminish audio quality. That’s not the whole story, since all volume normalization does so to a degree, though it is the case that Loud will introduce the most compression.
Choose how random the shuffle feature is
Max Miller for Engadget
In the early days of the iPod’s success, Apple encountered a bizarre user complaint. As recounted in WIRED editor Steven Levy’s book The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness, users were increasingly convinced that the iPod’s shuffle feature was broken. Their rationale seemed solid — out of hundreds or thousands of songs in their libraries, songs from the same artist or album were constantly being played back-to-back. One or two Britney Spears songs could be a fluke, but three? Four? Shuffle was broken! The more conspiracy-minded even suggested Apple was secretly being paid to weight the shuffle algorithm in favor of certain artists.
Except there was no bug, no industry payola. Anyone with a beginner’s foundation in statistics could tell you that a few thousand songs is a relatively small sample size, and that clumping is inevitable in a random distribution. Shuffle a deck of cards randomly and you’ll get multiple spades in a row. Human perception, not Apple’s code, was the flaw.
Even so, Steve Jobs decided to put the complaints to bed. In 2005, during the iPod Nano launch event, Jobs announced a feature called Smart Shuffle that prevented random clumping. Only Jobs could get away with telling his customers they were wrong, declaring, “Even though people will think it’s more random, it’s actually less random.” Indeed, Engadget’s blog at the time felt Smart Shuffle was more random — forgive us, we succumbed to psychology.
Spotify may have displaced iTunes, but the Swedish streamer should have learned from Apple’s lessons. In 2014, it ran into the same problem and implemented a similar solution. Consequently, in Spotify settings, under Playback > Listening Controls, you can choose between two shuffle modes: “Fewer repeats,” or “Standard.” The former makes your music less random, but you may perceive it differently.
Set your streaming quality to lossless
Max Miller for Engadget
In October 2025, lossless audio was made available to Spotify Premium subscribers free of extra charge. Overnight, millions of listeners who had previously been restricted to lossy Ogg Vorbis files were granted access to beautiful, high-resolution FLAC at up to 24-bit/44.1kHz.
You’ll need reasonably nice playback equipment to reap the entire benefit of lossless audio. For most people listening on the most common earbuds or headphones, the difference will not be audible and the “very high” setting Spotify offers is more than sufficient. Moreover, iPhone users who stream with Bluetooth headphones such as AirPods need not apply, as iPhones are limited to 320kbps over Bluetooth (what Spotify includes in its “very high” quality setting). Bluetooth users on other platforms such as Android can gain some benefit from lossless when using headphones with a high-resolution Bluetooth codec like Sony LDAC or Qualcomm aptX Adaptive. There’s an argument to be made that those with lossy Bluetooth devices still benefit from the better encoding, which results in a wider soundstage and better instrument separation, but only a wired connection can deliver true lossless, regardless of your playback device.
Because it’s not for everyone, you have to enable lossless audio in the Spotify app, or else you’ll be stuck with the same compressed audio as before. And you have to do so on each one of your devices. Thankfully, it’s easy to do so. Head into settings and locate the section labeled “Media quality” on mobile or “Audio quality” on desktop.
Source: www.engadget.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.