Premium gets 320kbit/s (or lossless)
so either they found a way around that lock, but not the quality lock, or they just decided 160k is good enough (it generally is), and decided to stick with that for filesize & bandwidth savings
My understanding is that the premium requirement is there to avoid having the repo taken down.
So I suppose if one wanted to use librespot for archiving, one would have to modify it to support this use case.
