If you regularly use the Spotify app on your iPhone, then you know how useful it is for streaming music on the go. However, due to the app’s default settings, you may not get the best possible listening experience. Here’s how to quickly boost the audio quality of your music on the Spotify iOS app.

What to Know

  • Improve streaming quality: Go to Settings > Audio Quality and choose a quality option for Wi-Fi- and cellular-based streaming.Change the EQ: Go to Settings > Playback > Equalizer. Choose a preset or manually adjust the EQ parameters.

How to Improve Spotify Music Quality

If you haven’t touched the settings on the Spotify app, there’s a good chance you can boost the quality of the audio you stream. If you also use Spotify’s offline mode to listen to music when there’s no internet connection, you can enhance the audio quality of downloaded songs, too. To take advantage of this, you need to change the default settings of the Spotify app.

  • Tap the Spotify app icon to open it on your iPhone.
  • Tap the Settings cog in the upper-right corner of the screen.
  • Scroll down and select Audio Quality.
  • In the Streaming section, you’ll find a list of available quality settings for both Wi-Fi and cellular data. They correspond to the following bit rates:
  • Low: 24 kbit/sNormal: 96 kbit/sHigh: 160 kbits/sVery High: 320 kbit/s (only available on Premium accounts)
  • If you’re not familiar with audio bit rates, the average MP3 is 192 kbit/s, and higher quality MP3s are 320 kbit/s. Lossless audio codecs, like FLAC, tend to float around 1000 kbit/s.
  • If you connect to Spotify via a cellular network rather than a Wi-Fi connection, choosing a high streaming quality could potentially cost you a lot because of the increased data usage. You can disable cellular downloads on the Music Quality settings screen.
  • In the Download section, Normal (recommended) is chosen by default. You can change this setting to High or Very High only if you have a Spotify Premium subscription.
  • Increasing the Download quality setting makes downloaded files larger, and therefore more storage space is required on your iOS device.

Enhance Overall Playback Using the EQ Tool

Another way of improving the quality of music played via the Spotify app is to use the built-in equalizer tool. This feature has over 20 presets covering different types of music genres and frequency configurations. You can also manually tweak the graphic EQ to get the best sound for your listening environment.

Tap the Spotify app icon to open it on your iPhone.

Tap the Settings cog in the upper-right corner of the screen.

Scroll down and select Audio Quality.

In the Streaming section, you’ll find a list of available quality settings for both Wi-Fi and cellular data. They correspond to the following bit rates:

  • Low: 24 kbit/sNormal: 96 kbit/sHigh: 160 kbits/sVery High: 320 kbit/s (only available on Premium accounts)

If you’re not familiar with audio bit rates, the average MP3 is 192 kbit/s, and higher quality MP3s are 320 kbit/s. Lossless audio codecs, like FLAC, tend to float around 1000 kbit/s.

If you connect to Spotify via a cellular network rather than a Wi-Fi connection, choosing a high streaming quality could potentially cost you a lot because of the increased data usage. You can disable cellular downloads on the Music Quality settings screen.

In the Download section, Normal (recommended) is chosen by default. You can change this setting to High or Very High only if you have a Spotify Premium subscription.

Increasing the Download quality setting makes downloaded files larger, and therefore more storage space is required on your iOS device.

Return to the Settings screen by tapping Your Library and the Settings icon.

  • In the Settings menu, tap the Playback option.
  • Tap Equalizer.
  • Tap one of the equalizer presets. They include Acoustic, Classical, Dance, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Rock, and more.
  • To make a custom equalizer setting, use your finger on the graphic equalizer dots to adjust individual frequency bands up or down.

In the Settings menu, tap the Playback option.

Tap Equalizer.

Tap one of the equalizer presets. They include Acoustic, Classical, Dance, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Rock, and more.

To make a custom equalizer setting, use your finger on the graphic equalizer dots to adjust individual frequency bands up or down.

When adjusting the equalizer, it’s a good idea to have a song playing in the background so you can hear in real time the effects of your changes.

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