> Because of their no DRM policy and full on downloads, not just streaming, Bandcamp has basically become the only place I’ll buy music outside of CDs.
Just so you know, Apple and Amazon also offer DRM free music downloads. Obviously, you have to actually buy the individual song or album, not a streaming plan.
In Apple's case you do need to install iTunes to get your DRM-free file (on Windows, I'm not sure what the status is on Mac nowadays), which kind of sucks.
I have also purchased music on Amazon and let's not pretend its "full on downloads", Amazon has V0 MP3 only iirc and Bandcamp offers ever format under the sun including FLAC and ALAC.
Don't know about Apple because iTunes doesn't have Linux support and the whole setup of downloading an app in order to download a file strikes me as a bit gross.
It's true Amazon doesn't offer lossless audio downloads, but they're very good quality, and DRM-Free.
iTunes downloads are AAC, 250+ kb/s (remember this bitrate is with a more efficient codec).
I'm probably opening a can of worms here, but I'm really quite skeptical more than one in a million people could tell the difference between iTunes and lossless in a blind test. Maybe drop that to one in a thousand for Amazon vs Lossless. (I really do wish Amazon offered AAC downloads.)
For me it’s not about somehow hearing a difference (at least, not anymore, especially at my age. Thought I do remember the days when mp3s had a good chance of sounding tinny from bad encoding, even when done by myself from a CD). Honestly, I probably have a nonzero amount of bandcamp flac files that are actually just mp3’s that were converted, but I’m unlikely to ever know unless I analyze the waveform.
For me it’s about having a reference/master copy to archive and then modify, cutting parts away I don’t like, applying equalization, etc and compressing for streaming/loading on a device. I am not going to compound losses on a file if I can help it.
Storage space is trivial these days, so just grabbing a flac file and declaring that it’s perfectly as the artist intended removes any potential cognitive load of trying to evaluate audio quality or “which of these mp3 files is the best one to archive” anxiety.
This is what I do as well. I prefer to have the FLAC files for local playback and archiving then have a script which watches the FLAC folder, converts to v0 MP3 which then gets synced to my phone using Syncthing (because phones have such limited storage these days without Micro SD).
> I'm really quite skeptical more than one in a million people could tell the difference
Consider that lossless is good not only for listening, but also for transcoding. For example, when you want to use a media player with limited formats, or when the inevitable future codecs become popular.
(And for archival of digital source material, lossless is the only sensible option.)
AAC is one of the most widely used and implemented codecs in existence. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever need to transcode it for compatibility since the only reason to do so (licensing) becomes moot over a preservation timeframe as patents expire. If you aren’t noticing technical defects in your recordings now, you’re really not going to care in 20 years - many of us will be lucky to still hear well enough!
> And for archival of digital source material, lossless is the only sensible option.
I work in digital preservation and one thing everyone is keenly aware of is the cost of storing large amounts of data. Archivists like lossless, of course, but if it’s below the level where humans can notice problems they’re often more forgiving than you might think because preserving twice as many works with the same storage budget has its own appeal. Your personal music collection is probably small enough that it fits in your personal storage slop but maybe that’s not true if you’re a huge fan or partial to high-res soundboard recordings, and if you’re archiving for a larger group you’ll start to exhaust what capacity you can get for free.
> that’s not true if you’re a huge fan or partial to high-res soundboard recordings, and if you’re archiving for a larger group you’ll start to exhaust what capacity you can get for free.
But hard drives are cheap. I have a multi-TB hard drive that is used exclusively to store my music. When that fills, I'll just get another.
> It's true Amazon doesn't offer lossless audio downloads, but they're very good quality, and DRM-Free
They are DRM-free, but I wouldn't characterize the MP3s as "very good quality". They're only OK. It was the quality of their encodings that got me to stop buying music downloads from Amazon.
I'm a DJ on mid-range monitoring hardware and I can definitely hear the difference with apple's encodes vs FLAC, at least on their older encodes. I am not 100% sure its the compression protocol (could be differences in mastering since streaming has different requirements) but the attentuation on bass and watery-sounding cymbals stick out like a sore thumb in the right listening environment
I only buy music on itunes as a last resort, so I don't have a huge sample size.
Note that parent is a DJ and while DJing the files are bot just reproduced but usually there is some digital processing involved. This makes it easier to hear the difference.
Maybe but I don't do critical listening on club systems unless I'm checking my own mixdowns. Unless the DJ is redlining (which they shouldn't be if they're competent) the audio should come out of the mixer relatively unmolested. My critical listening rig is a broadcast amp with two passive studio monitors.
Should also note I can't hear the different between well-encoded 320kbit and FLAC. But lower bitrates (256kbit and lower) on mp3 are audible.
I showed a friend once how bitrate and sampling frequency start to really matter when doing stuff like slowing down a lot. But I guess it's not typical in DJing.
I generally record everything in 44khz, but I will record at 192khz if I know I will be doing any time stretching. The high sampling frequency matters for that.
I can spot and recognize the audio on ABX if I focus with basically a 100% rate on the infamous ABX test website with a HD600 headphone, so basically a crap one. Now if you ask me which one would be the best sounding or lossless (for the "highest" quality one, obviously for other it's relatively easy to spot in a clean environment), I believe I would have a harder time.
It's a shame (and puzzling really) that Apple only offers lossless on the streaming side and not on the purchase side. I don't need a physical CD, just the bits on it.
Afaik 7digital is the main backing service of a lot of streaming sites like qobuz and Deezer.
7digital is chock full of spam. Spotify, for all their faults, has some people who care about quality on those sort of things (the old Echo Nest people). 7digital and their white-label frontends don't, they're skeleton crew operations.
I hope they understand, they can't run Bandcamp like that. Bandcamp has had problems like this in the past, with people spamming the services with other people's music and pretending to be them. It happened to an old classmate of mine who's a reasonably well known Jazz musician. Someone pretended to be her on Bandcamp for years.
If this roll-up company plans to run Bandcamp like 7digital, there will be a ton more of stuff like that.
7digital doesn't accept music directly from artists, it's up to their distributor to ensure the music is valid... and there are several distributors that are known to be very very lax in that regard.
The 7digital acquisition is still pretty fresh, so your experience with them was the state of things prior to the acquisition. Also moving forward, remember that this was already the state of things on Bandcamp, lest people forget and think that the impersonations started after this acquisition.
Songtradr's core business has been B2B sync licensing. One of the reasons "Trust" is such a big deal on the website is that very large brands can't risk having a debacle where it looks like they've stolen music. So we do a lot of vetting of information before music is made available to our B2B partners.
Rest assured that if things slide in a direction, it'll be towards more vetting, not less.
Unfortunately, that is a big if and is frequently an issue on Bandcamp where stuff you get in flac has been passed through some lossy format. 7digital often sells flac for more money so hopefully that makes them more likely to verify that they are actually lossless (I haven't found an issue from them but only have a few albums there since the negative of them is the distributer model that is heavily geographically restricted).
if you digitized at 24 bit, then 16 bit is technically compressed. with flac, the waveforms aren't compressed, but the amplitude is, so audio buffs claim they can hear more separation. I can't hear it, but I also can't taste the difference between coffee bean origins, but I know people who can.
FLAC supports bit depths between 4 and 32 bits per sample (the reference decoders only support up to 24 bits per sampl). Other than that, it does not change the bit depth of the data.
You could hear the difference with a 24 to 16 conversion only because it usually involves dithering, which means there is some injected noise. If they choose not to do that, 16-bit dynamic range is enough to store someone whispering in your ear next to a running jet engine.
According charts in google, a jet engine at 100 yards distance is 105dB louder than a whisper. 16 bits can do 96dB without dither.
More importantly, the problem isn't trying to hear 96dB of range all at once. The baseline is fixed in place, so when you have a quiet section all those high bits are 0 and you need the low bits to have enough detail by themselves. And a whisper is pretty far from the quietest thing you might have in a track.
If you can hear the dithering noise, then I'm pretty sure there are sounds you're hearing that would be wrong or missing without the dither.
I'm pretty sure the 16-vs-24 thing has been proven already. 24-bit only really makes sense if you're fucking with the material. Same with 44.1khz vs higher sample rates.
They have the same problem as nearly every other digital music store that isn't beatport.... and that is that they aren't beatport (or rather, they don't have beatport's catalog)
There's no evidence that more than a very small percentage of humans (if even that) can differentiate between reasonable bit-rate pyscho-acoustic (lossy) compression and the source material.
Double-blind tests have made this abundantly clear.
If you really can hear a difference, you've either got particularly poorly compressed files, or are in a tiny minority of us.
A huge portion of all compressed media files are poorly compressed files. Often these poorly compressed files come directly from music distributor with the wrong compression settings, or with really really bad noise. Remember, many music distributors are working with old systems (unable to upgrade either due to driver/software or licensing issues), outdated software, and plain old junky audio interfaces, etc.
Lossless (when used properly and able to algorithmically guarantee what comes out == what goes into the compression toolchain) avoids the whole issue altogether, and that's what's valuable about it.
Focusing on whether compression captures every nuance of uncompressed sound is the wrong battle. The real battle is against careless distributors and bad artifacts introduced by poor compression settings and often incorrectly coded compression utilities used throughout the music industry.
(ie we on hn might all be using Lame or the Fraunhofer mp3 encoders, but a lot of music producers/distributors will be using custom / closed source encoders, or even audio workstations with the encoder implemented in hardware, and those might or might not be encoding mp3 correctly.)
Poorly compressed files is usually the problem, and when lossless files are relatively low burden (what's a few gb between friends. I'm not storing them on my 64gb ipod anymore), i'd rather just have the lossless ones.
I'm aware of those studies. Nonetheless, the difference to my ears, in my settings, with my equipment, is not slight. It's screaming-in-your-face obvious.
Whether it's because of the math or because of poorly done encoding is only of academic interest. It happens regardless of the cause. Using a lossless encoding resolves the issue entirely.
Interesting - it's a persistent and annoying problem. I assumed that better bit rates would improve the issue but most compressed music I listen to is AAC where it may be better.
It's interesting how easy miscommunication happens. I said it's mainly for one thing, not the other. I didn't say it wasn't for or never used for other purposes. People are misreading that "not the other" as though I used a period instead of a comma. Read it as "not mainly for listening" and you'll read it the way it's intended.
Carry on listening to a format most people use for purposes other than listening if that works for you. I can't stop you with a simple dependent clause. You're safe.
And archiving. Personally I prefer to have the lossless format stored in my digital vault and use a lossy version on my portable devices for storage efficiency.
> downloading an app in order to download a file strikes me as a bit gross
It's impossible to be a casual user of the Apple ecosystem. There are photos on my kids iPads that I'd like to save to the family archive, but I can't muster up the energy to work out how to do it again.
I've done it before but long enough ago that I've forgotten the method but remember the frustration and effort - I know it's going to be less than what my exaggerating memory tells me, but... eughhhh, Apple.
For an online music store with DRM free downloads I like Qobuz. Available quality depends on the album/song, but if something is not on Bandcamp it's a good, no-nonsense alternative.
Just tried them... they make you download individual tracks like they've never heard of a zip file, just to make you try their app out of annoyance. Not really no-nonsense :(.
Oof, that's frustrating and a recent change. There used to be a quality selection at the top and a "Download all" button that would download an archive of the entire purchase.
I actually love watermarks as a solution for DRM-Free media, because they make illegal sharing more cumbersome but don't impede legitimate customers (at least in any way I can think of). In fact, I kind of feel like watermarks add value, lending an authenticity to my purchase which a pirated copy wouldn't have.
No, not for a while. As I understand it they didn't have one at first but after some asshole used it as a backup (since they let anyone upload "music") and made a blog post about it they added one. Quite possibly they wanted to anyway and it was just a convenient excuse.
Thanks for asking, because it turns out I was wrong :(. I should know better than to rely on my memory these days. If you download the same FLAC file twice it won't be the same (possibly unless the two downloads are within a few days) but I just checked and they do decode to the same WAV. I haven't checked multiple accounts but when trying to find the article I thought I remembered I found someone saying they had checked and found them to be the same (not that long ago). I'm not sure if the FLAC or other specific file downloads are ever exactly the same between accounts, possibly not and they record the generation timestamp or such, but it seems the audio itself is not watermarked.
Apple does indeed include the original purchaser in the MPEG-4 metadata. I have no idea whether or not they also do any kind of more advanced watermarking of the actual audio data itself.
Just so you know, Apple and Amazon also offer DRM free music downloads. Obviously, you have to actually buy the individual song or album, not a streaming plan.
In Apple's case you do need to install iTunes to get your DRM-free file (on Windows, I'm not sure what the status is on Mac nowadays), which kind of sucks.