Spotify has announced it will be rolling out CD-quality audio for all Premium users who switch it on.

‘Hallelujah!’ you might say, if you have good enough speakers or WiFi headphones.

Even the company itself admits this has been a long time coming, describing lossless audio as ‘one of the most anticipated features’ – which is another way of saying they first claimed it was coming ‘later this year’ in 2021.

It means that if you’ve stayed loyal to Spotify all that time since music streamers first hit the mainstream, you’ll finally be rewarded, and won’t need to migrate all your playlists.

The feature is rolling out now and next month, and users in the UK, US and Australia are already starting to get access.

It’s still in process though, so don’t worry if you can’t see it yet (we couldn’t).

Although Spotify, which launched in 2008, pioneered music streaming, in later years some users have become frustrated with a lack of good sound quality.

Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, Amazon Music, and Qobuz all offer lossless audio (actually, Apple has done for four years), so some Spotify users had been questioning if they should jump ship.

The addition of direct messaging in the app last month had even annoyed some as an unwanted distraction when lossless still wasn’t available.

Gustav Gyllenhammar, VP of Subscriptions, said: ‘The wait is finally over; we’re so excited lossless sound is rolling out to Premium subscribers.

‘We’ve taken time to build this feature in a way that prioritizes quality, ease of use, and clarity at every step, so you always know what’s happening under the hood. With Lossless, our premium users will now have an even better listening experience.’

If you have a maestro’s ears and top-of-the-range speakers to stream your AI playlists, you might still be disappointed, however.

Spotify will let users stream ‘almost every’ track in up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC, which is slightly better than that offered by CDs, but it’s still not as high as Apple Music, Tidal, and Qobuz, which support up to 24-bit / 192 kHz. 

How to enable lossless audio on Spotify?

You should get a notification when the new feature is available to you. Make sure you keep the app updated.

1. Tap your profile icon in the top left.
2. Go to Settings & Privacy → Media Quality.
3. Select where you want to enable lossless audio: Wi-Fi, cellular, downloads.

You’ll know it’s on because the Lossless indicator will appear in the Now Playing view or bar.

It’s best to stream on Wi-FI, as Bluetooth does not currently provide enough bandwidth to transmit lossless audio, so the signal has to be compressed.

Lossless should be rolling out to all Premium subscribers, without the need for them to pay extra.

Bear in mind that it will use significantly more data, so if you don’t have an unlimited plan, you may want to be careful with it.

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If you’re in the mood for a road trip and have a few hundred million years to kill, we have the destination for you.

About 40 light-years away, orbiting a dim, cool red star called Trappist-1 are seven planets.

One of them, scientists have revealed in two papers published Monday, may be habitable to life as we know it.

Trappist-1e is a rocky exoplanet – a name for planets outside our solar system – that would take you 453million years by car to travel to.

While most of the other six exoplanets in the star system have proved to be barren rocks, Trappist-1e may have an atmosphere not too far off Earth’s, according to the findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Dr Ryan MacDonald, a lecturer in extrasolar planets at the University of St Andrews and one of the paper’s lead authors, said the roughly Earth-sized planet might not look like much at first glance.

But just like in the Goldilocks fairy tale, Dr MacDonald says, the planet is just the right distance from its star where ‘the temperature is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface’.

‘Without an atmosphere, a planet cannot support liquid water on the surface,’ Dr MacDonald adds.

‘Earth would be a frozen ball of ice without the greenhouse effect provided by carbon dioxide, and the same is true for Trappist-1e.’

Trappist-1’s habitable zone is relatively snug, given it’s a dim red dwarf star and its planets closely orbit it. You’ll be a fair bit older if you lived on Trappist-1e – a single year on the planet is 6.1 Earth days, Nasa says.

Scientists haven’t confirmed Trappist-1e has an atmosphere, but they believe it has a nitrogen-gas-rich atmosphere.

‘We are in the early stages of assessing whether Trappist-1e could support life,’ says Dr MacDonald.

‘Right now, we are trying to answer whether the conditions on the surface of Trappist-1e are hospitable to life (as-we-know-it) by measuring if the planet has an atmosphere and, if so, what gases make up the atmosphere.’

Dr Sarah Casewell, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Leicester, who was not involved in the study, said the findings suggest Trappist-1e’s skies aren’t full of carbon dioxide, meaning it’s not like the frigid desert of Mars or the toxic wasteland of Venus.

‘The new results are consistent with nitrogen-rich atmospheres like we have on Earth,’ she said, ‘but the authors caution that the planet may equally likely be a bare rock.’

How did scientists figure this out?

Dr MacDonald and his team examined observations of the exoplanet made by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2023.

The Webb telescope has spent years pointed at the system’s four innermost planets, which all fell into the habitable zone.

But the results haven’t been great so far – Trappist-1b and 1c have no atmosphere, and there doesn’t seem to be any Earth-like molecules in 1d’s.

The reason was rather simple, says Dr Beth Biller, of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Astronomy, who was not involved in the studies.

Trappist-1 is hyperactive and prone to throwing fiery temper tantrums that can strip planetary atmospheres, leaving behind ‘bare rocks’.

‘Really small stars like TRAPPIST-1 actually produce per capita a lot more X-ray and gamma ray emission than a more massive star like our Sun,’ she says.

Next on the list was 1e, but observing it is easier said than done. Researchers had to wait for the planet to pass between its star and the telescope, which ever so slightly dims the star’s light, called transiting.

This data is beamed back to the telescope as a wavelength chart.

This might not sound like much, but scientists can understand a great deal about a planet this way, explains David Brown, a senior research fellow at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Exoplanets and Hospitality.

‘If the exoplanet has an atmosphere, then some of the light from the star that reaches us during transit has passed through that atmosphere,’ he tells Metro.

‘As it does so, specific wavelengths of light will be absorbed by chemical elements in the exoplanet’s atmosphere, so that at those wavelengths the exoplanet looks larger (the size of its radius plus the height of the atmosphere), while at other wavelengths the light is unaffected, so the planet looks smaller (just its radius).

‘So, if you can observe at specific wavelengths and measure the radius of the planet at that wavelength, then you can see at which wavelengths the planet looks larger, which gives you an idea of the elements in the atmosphere.’

Astronomers have only observed Trappist-1e transiting a handful of times, so, as every expert Metro spoke with said, it’s far too early to say that Trappist-1e has an atmosphere, let alone aliens strolling around on it.

The Webb telescope is still taking snapshots of Trappist-1e, with the experts also saying that we’ll have an answer to this question one day.

Any answer we get, however, will be an interesting one. Given that the dwarf stars are so common in the cosmos, knowing that the rocky planets that tend to orbit them can cling to an atmosphere would be a big deal in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist, told Metro that this would raise questions about how life emerged on our pale blue dot, too.

‘If life can be supported near dwarf stars,’ he says, ‘the question arises as to why we reside near the Sun and not near a more typical dwarf star?’

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The ‘clearest sign of life on Mars’ yet has been discovered, Nasa revealed today.

The US space agency has spent three decades combing the rust-red desert of our cosmic neighbour for signs of life, only to find red herrings.

Many of these could be explained away, such as dusty rocks that look like faces or soil that has strange chemistry.

But Nasa’s Perseverance robotic rover has discovered minerals on rocks on the red planet that one of the ‘only explanations’ for them is aliens.

Not quite little green men, but microbial life.

A Nasa spokesperson said today at a press conference: ‘This could very well be the clearest sign of life we’ve ever found on Mars, which is certainly exciting.’

Microbes, as they wriggle around on rocks, can create minerals as they gobble up chemicals, leaving behind minerals.

Perseverance discovered the groovy rock on an outcrop of dried mud along the Neretva Vallis last July. The quarter-mile-long river once flowed into the Jezero Crater.

The rover drilled into this outcrop of clay rock, known as the Bright Angel formation, to collect samples.

According to a paper published today in the journal Nature, the sample has features reminiscent of what microbes would have left behind when the region was warm and wet billions of years ago.

The 350billion-year-old mudstone, named Cheyava Falls, is covered in specks a few thousandths of an inch wide that contain two minerals.

One is vivianite, an iron phosphate often found in lakes and marshlands as a byproduct of microbes eating organic matter.

They also unearthed greigite, an iron sulphide, which some microbial life on Earth produces, according to the mineral catalogue, Mindat.

Both could be ‘biosignatures’ – something that might have a biological origin.

But researchers stressed that this is a very early result and that more research is needed to say that the rock is evidence of Martians.

For one, the specimen is still on Mars – Nasa needs to bring the samples back to Earth.

The ingredients in this mud could also have made the minerals through chemical reactions, they admit.

Matthew Cook, the head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency, told Metro: ‘This exciting discovery represents a significant step forward in our understanding of Mars and the potential for ancient life beyond Earth.

‘The chemical signatures identified in these Martian rocks are the first of their kind to potentially reflect biological processes that we see on Earth and provide more compelling evidence that Mars may have once harboured the conditions necessary for microbial life.’

Cook cautioned that the specimen isn’t proof of extraterrestrial life but said the findings are ‘promising’.

‘The upcoming Rosalind Franklin Mars rover mission, built here in the UK, will be crucial in helping us answer whether samples similar to those observed in this study represent genuine biological processes, bringing us closer to answering: are we alone in the universe?’ he added.

For people like Mark Christopher Lee, a film-maker and UFO investigator, today’s announcement was exciting, to say the least.

‘Proof of microbial life is Nasa’s first release of the truth about UFOs and the existence of alien life in the universe, in my opinion.’ he told Metro.

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