I wish I could use my physical CD collection as a "pass" to download high quality rips so I can skip the part where I have to do the labor of ripping them myself.
FLAC is 100% identical to the original audio CD sonically, it's a lossless format. See it as a ZIP file for WAV audio files.
I've recently come across that problem at least twice – I learned about a potentially interesting album done by somebody, but it had already disappeared from Bandcamp without so much of trace. In one case it turned out I had missed the album by only two months, because the album page still appeared in Google's search index cache with a corresponding last indexed-date, but of course that's not much use as far as getting the actual music is concerned.
Ultimately, unlike the OP I luckily found at least the one album I was most interested in "elsewhere", though it's still a bit of a shame that it's no longer regularly available and it'd absolutely would have merited paying for it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130825015207/http://dombrovski...
> plays the right version and track listing
If you really want the right version and track listing, you'll have to preserve it yourself.
Anyhoo, the official site had all the songs (5) for download so I forged my age to access the mp3s and I still listen to them, to this day.
I just wish I knew more about music formats back then, I have no idea if there were FLAC versions available. My annual pleas to the Tanqueray and Music Beast Twitter accounts remain ignored.
Alas.
In each instance I've come across this problem (mainly various Bob Dylan albums so far), it turned out that on the actual CDs, the affected portion had been mastered as part of the pre-gap (i.e. the bit where a hardware CD player will show a negative timecode counting back up to 00:00), so as silly as it sounds, it almost feels like they themselves simply ripped the CDs in order to upload them for digital downloads and streaming, and somehow managed to mess up the process and discard the pre-gap bits.
Though unlike your example at least in that case the CDs are still in print, so for now you're not completely stuck there…
why do you feel that sounds silly, as it sounds exactly like what I would expect them to have done. it was probably some intern tasked with the job as well. it's not like they were going to go back to some mastering format to have the streaming files created for the entirety of the back catalog.
I bought this album on Google Music, which got shut down and I didn't copy it off in time. Now I can't find it online.
https://www.hackster.io/mark-hank/sonos-spotify-vinyl-emulat...
and I think I found that via:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/who-needs-vinyl-records-whe...
As long as someone is not “distributing” (AKA uploading to any user. AKA torrents are off the table.), then an argument can be made that the user is format shifting using the internet as the format-shifting tool.
Even though the US (and now other countries) are a bit of a nightmare for fans of copyright works, I always thought we’d end up with more tools that “read” a physical item, then download the bit-perfect copy.
I cannot unhear the Flintstones now...