Hacker News Reader

Bandcamp in my mind is just about the only company in this space I want to buy things from (including Spotify, Youtube Red, Amazon Music, whatever else). It:

- supports the artists (and lots of them, not just the biggest ones)

- gives me instant, irrefutable ownership of the music I've bought

- gives great download format choice

If an artist is on bandcamp, it is a no-brainer for me to throw them their minimum + 1/2 dollars and buy an album. I can't say everyone thinks this way, but the feeling that I'm supporting the artists is felt more directly than on any other platform, and it feels good. To me, it's worth the price increase from free (to a point).

If I could buy all my music on bandcamp I would. The only thing better than bandcamp would be a distributed/federated network of direct-from-band merch and album stores with (somehow) good discovery features written in a way that made it easy for bands to set up payment distribution (ex. stripe integration, shipping fulfillment integration, etc) -- but bandcamp is close enough.

Bandcamp is my preferred way of buying music these days. The only advantage of physival media is the record cover. But I am really pissed if I can't download the album or if I am just able to download a shitty MP3 of the music I've bought.

So Bandcamp works great for me. It offers all the options I want (FLAC) and I like that a band can set the price to 0$ so you can download it from Bandcamp for free but you can give them money if you want to. Awesome experience all around. And with the music I like most of the bands are on Bandcamp.

What do you find so shitty about MP3, are you morally opposed to it's origin/licensing?

Quality wise for listening you aren't going to tell the difference between a -v0 MP3 and FLAC even if you think otherwise. For anyone that wants to claim otherwise, unless you've had someone setup an A/B test with a significant amount of cases you're falling victim to placebo.

I say this as a professional audio engineer, who long ago would always seek out FLAC. Now, unless I need to edit or re-encode a file the MP3 is just as good, far from shitty.

Reminds me of one of my favorite articles about HDMI cables where they had a bunch of supposed audiophiles try to tell the difference between a $2,000 cable and one made from a bent coat hanger. Surprise surprise, they couldn't.

Back when I ripped CDs, I encoded my MP3s with variable bitrate with the quality set to high. They average around 192 kbps. I was never able to tell the difference between the CD and the MP3 at that rate.

Not HDMI, apparently. https://gizmodo.com/363154/audiophile-deathmatch-monster-cab...

A good coat hanger is actually a damn fine wire for speaker cable. Most of what you want there is ability to handle big current spikes. I made 'audiophile style' cables using simple house cable solid-core, wrapped in opposite directions around a polystyrene tube core, so the conductors keep crossing at right angles (the point of that shenanigan).

Works fantastic. Sounds a lil' better than zip-cord, and of course at these levels it's a game of countless 'lil better' choices wherever possible.

I guess you could pay $2000 to have the conductors made out of silver and yak hair, but the 'heavier conductors and cable geometry' parts don't require any of that.

"Placebo" describes the audio scene people pretty well in my experience.

I did that MP3/FLAC A/B/X test back in my audio engineer days after catching a ton of condescending comments due to my listening of 'terrible sounding' MP3s.

Either my ears are garbage, or the difference is so subtle that even with solid headphones in a dead quiet room, the absolute best you could hope to be able to detect is that one is "different." getting all the way to "shitty" sounds near impossible to me.

Also, to my surprise, if you burned someone a cd from an MP3 source, but told the person it was Flac, it'd still "sound really smooth". Hm.

> "Placebo" describes the audio scene people pretty well in my experience.

Agreed. See also: relative cable quality (for electric instrumentalists).

Cable quality can make a difference for instruments with passive pickups, especially with long cable runs. A guitar pickup can have >10Kohm output impedance, so it doesn't take much cable capacitance to get audible high frequency loss. You can solve this problem with a buffer amplifier close to the instrument, but that's one more device that can break or run out of battery charge.

It's not just passive pickups, it's all analog signals. Analog signals can degrade quite a lot of a run of shitty cable.

I was of the same opinion - but I've recently noticed (because youtube-dl, I think, automatically downloads music at a fairly high quality) that I enjoy some music substantially more when it's not compressed to hell. Classical music especially seems much juicier with a high quality recording.

What do you mean by compressed? Classical music is usually cited with regards to "compression" in the context of dynamic range compression, not data compression.

Similar experience. I did the blind tests as well, and surprisingly often chose 320 kbps mp3s that I thought were FLACs because they sounded "crisper" (I mostly listen to electronic club tunes). I did and also witnessed other DJs play out tracks I know for sure were 192kbps mp3s on huge sound systems (sadly no other version ever exported), the place went 100% wild because it's all about the music in the end...that said, would be great to ditch mp3s for OPUS in streaming and have catalogues in FLAC/AIFF.

Edit: a LOT if not most of new music at this point contains samples ripped from Youtube. Something to consider also.

My library is all FLACs. You can sometimes definitely tell the difference on high-enough fidelity gear, not so much in the sound itself, but being able to hear production flaws more, often you can't, but the point is, I don't care if I can tell the difference. If I am paying the same amount, I want the same quality as I'd get on a CD, if MP3s were cheaper, it'll be a different story.

I wonder if another reason to prefer FLAC to MP3 is if you ever want to convert the MP3s to another lossy format (perhaps multiple times), is there a loss of quality associated with converting one lossy format to another multiple times?

It's nice to have a lossless format because you can always get lossy from it, but you can't do the opposite.

That's more or less my argument. At least by my own standards, local storage space is really cheap, and the argument that I'd get 100,000 songs instead of 20,000 songs in the same amount of space just isn't that compelling.

Arguments about sound quality are in my experience largely doomed to failure; they usually end up devolving into meta-arguments about testing methodologies. (And invariably mocking audiophiles about $2000 USB cables or whatever, an argument I've grown really, really weary of seeing despite agreeing such things are profoundly silly.)

This is exactly my point of view also. I have 1,100+ CDs all of which are ripped to WAV[1]. In my car I have a duplicate copy of the collection converted to MP3s, as that's what my car audio system will read. When I used a portable music player, that was also MP3. However if I get a new car or a new music player, that prefers ogg, or some other codec, I can go back to my source library of WAVs and create a whole new set of lossy tracks in that new codec.

As far as people saying 320k MP3s vs Uncompressed WAV or FLACs sound no different, then they simply are not using good enough audio equipment. Throw into the mix the Hi-bitrate audio files that are becoming quite common (and you really can tell the difference between standard CD audio and hi-bitrate) and MP3s start to look completely unsuitable for long term music storage.

Also... don't get me started on the rubbish quality of streaming and DAB radio.

---

[1] I started with WAV 10+ years ago, and kinda stuck with it - storage is cheap; I feel no need to change formats just yet.

As another professional audio engineer, I've done it, and to do it I tuned in on 'personality' aspects of the sound, knowing that the rough frequency response would be pretty much taken care of.

The degradation is much like what you'd get running the mix through a generic digital EQ imposing some subtle but high-order filters, or going through the mix buss of an unexceptional DAW that's doing a lot of bit-shuffling to get to the output, perhaps with some unnecessary gain changes.

These are shitty if you have seriously good monitoring and care about ambience and soundstage depth and subtle emotional cues or shades of texture. Sooo… not exactly 'OMG, super obvious on earbuds through iTunes with the aural exciters on'. That stuff will wreck the sound MUCH worse than -v0 mp3, no argument there.

If you're working on gear where you'd be able to tell the difference, and you have experience with listening for the specific objectionable qualities of lossy audio, then you can hear the lossy audio even at its best.

Otherwise, the cure for bad sounding mp3s is to do 'em 320K and call it a day. Throwing more bits at it does definitely help. It's not hard to get mp3 over the threshold where other parts of the playback system harm the sound worse.

Even if you can tell, the question is, why fixate on it? As you say, the changes are far more subtle than getting a cheap set up. Most people do not live or commute in anechoic chambers. For myself, I'm happy to 128k opus or -v1 lame it, which arguably may still be overkill

Some people got this thing called sensory overexcitability, it makes sensory things be more intense and detailed for them, and it probably makes some of them really appreciate the extra quality in FLAC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexcitability

Not many people got sensory overexcitability so a/b testing with random selection might not show those peoples opinions.

Its like saying most of humanity can't read JavaScript code so JavaScript is a completely shit programming language that are only used by stupid uninformed mindless coders who don't understand real programming, and that they are too lacking in intellectual ability to realize that and move over to a real programming language.

And also some music just does not work in low quality, it just turns into noise.

A rare condition probably shouldn't be compared to something which can be learnt and practiced. Given how people can form strong opinions derived from what other people say, I would wager that most audiophiles do not fall into this category. Citing an exception doesn't invalidate the common case.

While it may be the case that the direct parent of my post may have this, they still pointed out the differences were minor compared to pretty much every other technical factor at play in the digital to ear pipeline.

When you go from SD to HD video it's hard to go back. Same again when you go to 4K. Same again when you start eating higher quality foods. Same again when you start driving nicer cars.

I'm sure there's a technical name for it, but for a significant number of people, once you get used to the higher quality it's harder and harder to go back down a level.

I disagree. It's all about adaptation. Sure, if you step down to SD from HD, it will be hard. But if you are forced to watch SD always, you will eventually adapt to it again.

And why would I ever want to do that? Sounds pointless when I don't have to.

I would counter that once someone goes from a common, well engineered brand to a less common, expensive, and equally well engineered brand, they'd have a hard time going back. You only need to look at clothing brands to see this everywhere. Not all differences are functional in the way that you have drawn the comparison.

I remember having a copy of "busdriver imaginary places", where he does a lot of fast rapping, once I got the CD it was suddenly much easier to understand him.

Not sure if they were 320k though.

I try to always find the highest quality version of the media I'm consuming because I enjoy archiving it. If I'm going to keep an archived copy and storage is so cheap, why not opt for the best possibly quality?

I'd agree that for most music I can't tell the difference. But there are some tracks where the difference is noticeable, even if it's minor. I've tested myself thoroughly by running automated ABX tests.

Sorry if this triggered somthing in you, but I really meant "shitty MP3s".

I don't have got anything against MP3s in general, but back when I was buying MP3s (Amazon or Downloads when you are buying a record) sometimes I got 256kbps MP3s or even worse. I think one time I even got a 192kbps MP3. And that's my problem.

When I am buying music digitally I would like to have a very very good (or even perfect) digital copy of the music - not something that saves download bandwith and space on the hard drive(for me these days are over).

I am fine with 320kpbs MP3s - but if I pay for it I prefer FLAC.

> The only advantage of physival media is the record cover.

I would add that for long-term archiving purposes, vinyl has many advantages over digital formats. I'll admit this is probably not a concern for most people, but once I own something on vinyl it feels much more like I own a permanent copy of the music.

How is vinyl more durable as far as physical media goes than a CD (digital format)? Vinyl can easily warp when improperly stored, degrades every time it is played, and even a small scratch result in audible imperfections. A CD at least can be scratched heavily and still be identical to the original thanks to forward error correction by Reed-Solomon codes.

All good points. Personally, for daily listening I am using online digital streaming options almost exclusively now. My vinyl gets pulled out maybe once a year, and I am very aware that overuse can degrade them physically.

As for cd's, I am no expert on this by any means, but I wonder how prevalent disc rot will become as some discs age to 30, 40, 50+ years old in the near future:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

As far as I know vinyl doesn't have a comparable risk of degradation while sitting at rest in climate controlled storage. But I agree that the downsides are major concerns.

I would say from a technical point of view vinyl is one of the worst for archiving purposes. It degrades every time you play it, it can warp, playing it back is error prone...

The advantage of vinyl is in your last sentence: "once I own something on vinyl it feels much more like I own a permanent copy of the music".

That's totally fine for me if you feel this way, but I don't. I feel better with multiple digital copies of the music on multiple places.

> though I do think about applying to work with them from time to time.

It’s evident that they are a small team. They need some work. For example I accidentally bought all work from an artist AND and individual album in the same checkout and I couldn’t undo it. So I double purchased an album. Support never responded.

I've release most of my music on bandcamp and it really is great. It's low barrier of entry, the tools they have are pretty good, and they've given me more visibility than I've gotten on any other platform.

Most of my listening comes from streaming and buying records but bandcamp has a special place in my heart. Especially since they still haven't gotten greedy and started inserting ads everywhere. (maybe they're mining our data? I dunno).

One of my favorite features of Bandcamp is how you're allowed to listen for free and after a certain number of listens to a track you're prompted to purchase the music, since you've obviously been enjoying it.

Interesting. My band mates and I decided not to turn on that feature. It seemed like it would be rather annoying.

Great advice and also don’t sleep on wfmu.org for music discovery and all around refreshingly non-corporate experience

What setup do you use for listening to vinyl? I've been thinking about purchasing the AT LP120

I used to have a couple of Technics SL-1210, but sold those after I stopped DJ'ing about a decade ago. Stanton ST150 is my preferred choice these days.

http://www.stantondj.com/stanton-turntables/st150.html

Nice one, Pete. Signed up, following you, and I've already found gold.