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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I guess there's no way to own music in these latest formats. Atmos can be shipped on blu-ray discs, and one of the very few examples of this is Mike Oldfield's 50th anniversary release of "Tubular Bells".

But most other artists/labels don't do this, so you can only ever stream it. Streaming is DRM protected, and usually limited to particular platforms or systems.

If you don't want to pay a monthly fee, or if the service just goes away, or they decide to license the rights to someone else for whatever reason, bam, your music is just gone.

Maybe I'm old, but I still like to own my music. Even if it's only in a digital format, I'd rather have a copy saved on a disk somewhere that I know I'll be able to keep playing through my retirement.

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You can get very cheap digital to digital audio hardware that can convert any multi-channel audio stream (DRM or otherwise) to straight multi-channel PCM. I personally, occasionally, use an RME Babyface Pro (not cheap) for this purpose, but there are many options available. You can even do this purely in software. On Windows or Linux look at Jack. On MacOS I guarantee it's available.

As an aside, Atmos is generally lossy. It's actually a terrible format for music distribution. It's only popular due to marketing.

Interesting video from Benn Jordan at https://youtu.be/5Dw3aKbw5Wo

Isn’t atmos not specifically multi channel as in traditional 5.1/ 7.1, but Atmos is positional sound that then generates the correct speaker positioning on the amplifier? For instance my home setup has support for 5.2.4 channels, two bass and 4 risen speakers. Additionally you can adapt the positioning of the rear speakers and the amp will adjust the audio to compensate.

So you could just export atmos to a 5.1 mix, but that is not a copy of atmos tracks.

Yes - Atmos has many "objects", which are effectively individual audio streams with positioning data (which can move around dynamically). The Atmos decoder then mixes these into channels for the specific speaker configuration dynamically.

In broadcast applications, you can ship 3D audio as a MPEG 2 Transport Stream. Because Atmos and their competitors are actually petty close to a config XML and some WAV files in the actual data contained. The XML is then transmitted as just another audio channel so actually, anything that can store multichannel audio can also store those 3D formats.

It's not a technical thing, but purely a business decision.

I discovered SDCD recently. There are many albums mastered in 5.1 channels and they are a joy to listen to.

I have The Black Album remixed in 5.1 and it felt gimmicky and not really thought out. I know Bjork has some of her work SDCD and I could imagine it being excellent if she had a hand in it.

I collect surround sound recordings in 5.1 DTS CD format. I have a big Sony CD changer that takes 300 discs and it is hooked up to my home theater with an SPIDF cable.

Practically there is a lot of great content out there in 5.1 format, and the speaker setup for this is relatively affordable and practical. Atmos needs an insane number of speakers and the trick where they fake the height channel by bouncing it off the ceiling doesn't work everywhere: my main A/V room has a cathedral ceiling for instance.

I'm not sure that the object-based model is really right for music, many of the best surround mixes for music aren't about putting an instrument in a particular place as much as they are about starting with a 2 channel mix and adding ambience. A lot of what is special about sound in space is the way sound reflects off things and and a 5.1 mix can greatly improve and literally "put you in the world's greatest concert halls".

Also Atmos is being pushed for substandard environments such as headphones, smart speakers, etc. I just don't believe Atmos rendered on headphones is going sound as good as a 2-channel mix for headphones.

It doesn't. And to make the matters worse, most of the "Atmos remakes" I listened to are utter trash and disrespect to the original sound designer/team. Some mixes bring out subtle details I haven't heard before, but in most cases even those sound like they're literally due to higher volume/different position.

I have a Hololens 1 and the other day I made a Microsoft Edge window that was hanging in space over my wood stove (scary!) and logged into my Jellyfin and played some music.

The object-based audio on the HL 1 is awesome and unlike any headphone surround system I'd seen, completely convincing. (Usually I'm like "it sounds like I have a head cold, that must mean the sound is above me") I turned my back and moved around the room and always perceived the music as coming from a point where the web browser was hanging.

This isn't a great way to listen to music though because even a very modest stereo music system doesn't sound like it comes from a point but creates some feeling that it fills the space. It's great from the viewpoint of hearing an alert sound and knowing which window it came from (given that I can have a few windows open in different places of my house) but doesn't realize the reality that plain old stereo delivers.

I have no idea how you're even supposed to legitimately decode Atmos from Apple Music. Does an Apple TV support Apple Music, and if so does it deliver multichannel sound over HDMI?

I've sought out some "Atmos" versions of popular music on Apple Music with my Mac, and listened with headphones through a good D/A converter, and the results are bad. Entire parts (background vocals, for example) are sometimes drastically suppressed and transients (like drum hits) are sometimes accompanied by extraneous sound. These artifacts vary widely by recording (although it's possible that they're often present but I only discern them on songs I know well).

> Does an Apple TV support Apple Music, and if so does it deliver multichannel sound over HDMI?

Yes, yes.

You can also connect a multichannel DAC to any Mac or iOS device.

Thanks. I guess it makes sense that you can send it out of a Mac through a USB-C DP-to-HDMI adapter.

Oh wait, I have an M1 MBP now with the restored HDMI port...

Stop listening to artists who don’t make music available as downloads?

Not to mention the resurgence of vinyl (not that I have any interest in that personally).

Even better, skip streaming services entirely and own your music. This directly puts your money where you want it, as physical media sales increase while streaming revenue decreases.

Streaming services can be nice to discover new artists, or get reminded of artists who dropped off of your radar.

Yep, discovery is really the primary point. It's hard to discover new music now otherwise.

This is what I do. Use Spotify and YouTube Music (but mostly Spotify) for discovery, keeping up with releases and previewing music, while actual listening happens locally with files purchased from Bandcamp et al. Artists that don't sell their music in this way tends to get a skip.

I am friends with a music band and they told me that Bandcamp is scammy and takes insane fees on digital music sold. I was surprised because I like Bandcamp as listener and thought I support musicians directly

They insisted that "80% to the artist" is a lie and those special Friday promos are somehow even worse. However they said they get almost all money from physical goods sales on Bandcamp so merch is a good way to support them.

Any professional artist (aka music sales is your income) can confirm?

Interesting to know, thank you! Do your friends use any other service, say iTunes, to sell their music, and can compare between the two?

And I’d be interested in a link to their Bandcamp if possible!

Not the person you replied to, but apparently Deezer is waaay nicer with paying out artists than Spotify/Apple music. It's apparently due to how revenue is distributed (paying per total minutes played vs share of user-minutes or something, I'm not very clear.) Essentially with Spotify the vrey popular Tailor Swifts get a much nicer payment whereas if you listen exclusively to indie artists on Deezer they actually see more of your money.

Fun fact, Deezer started off as a piracy website that grew big enough to turn legitimate when sued :)

Since you mention "per minutes played", not sure it compares with Bandcamp... If you like to buy HQ files instead paying for streaming.

Could be that Bandcamp is ripe to be disrupted by someone more friendly to artists.

Edit: good to know, I'll have to take a look at it.

Deezer offers both a way to purchase and a way to stream music. They have a monthly subscription plan to stream their catalog alongside the ability to purchase outright and download in standard formats.

Deezer has definitely caught my eye in the past! Them paying artists better is an even sweeter deal.

And I love piracy-turned-legitimacy stories. For instance, Crunchyroll, originally an anime piracy streaming site, turned legit and eventually overtook a monolith in the US anime industry with Funimation. Funimation and Crunchyroll were both bought by Sony, and Funimation’s brand identity was deemed weaker (something unthinkable back during their 90s/00s peak) and had everything renamed to Crunchyroll.

Unfortunately though I can’t recommend Crunchyroll, as last I was aware they heavily underpaid their subtitler staff.

They did mention Spotify is pretty bad too (worse?). I want to ask them later about the details and if they make any money from digital music. Sounded like they don't and it's mostly from merch, concerts and regular jobs.

Hardly a pro, but I've sold exactly three copies of the one track I put on BC. I got a reasonable payout. BC definitely take a fee, but it's not "insane".

I'm fairly confident that selling via BC gives artists a significantly higher % per item than selling through a label or physical media through bricks & mortar. The artist gets to keep 100% of copyright this way, too. The artist probably has less reach and lower volume of sales this way unless they're great with self promo or can get in with DJs/tastemakers in a scene.

Happy to be schooled if I'm in error, but "scummy" isn't a word I'd use for BC.

> I'm fairly confident that selling via BC gives artists a significantly higher per item than selling through a label or physical media through bricks & mortar.

Physical media is probably rounding error these days right? But from what I heard BC is good for selling physical merch including CDs and stuff, apparently it's transparent and most money goes to the artist.

But surprisingly not with digital tracks. So I stopped promoting BC as a place to buy music to friends for now.

The band I know now use some "distributor". From what I understood, distributor does a bunch of stuff mainly including promotion. What their distributor does, it seemed like a label to me but they say it's not a label... Again I have no idea but perhaps pros will know the difference.

By the way what's your BC if you are OK disclosing? I might buy the track if it's good (as I mentioned I use BC and if you say it works for you...)

I don't want to own most of the music that I listen to. If I wanted to buy all the stuff that's in my spotify "liked songs" playlist - it would cost me thousands of euros.

Until relatively recently you could only buy whole albums not single songs. I don't want to buy the whole album if it only contains 1 or 2 songs that I actually like.

> Until relatively recently you could only buy whole albums not single songs.

Uh?

Singles have always been a thing, and most if not all digital platforms allow buying by the track. You’d need a very specific artist demand to avoid this unbundling.

In fact, singles were the original way to buy music. 78rpm records could only hold up to 5min or so of audio after all.

Not all songs are released as singles, and it's silly to buy a CD with only one song in it. So people just sailed the high seas.

Maybe my "liked" playlist is not too big in Spotify, but if I paid $4 for each song, that'd be ~$2400, not at all unreasonable considering that's songs collected since 2015 (so 75 songs per year or ~$300 per year).

Of course, it's OK not to want to own the music you listen to. Personally, after 8 years of trying to use Spotify (and lately YouTube Music), the amount of graveyard playlists I now "posses" made it so I basically had to revert to buying music again as I want to be able to listen to the playlists I create years in the future too.

Quick look (~20% of my total playlists), around 10% of my playlists contain more than half songs that are no longer available. That's just unacceptable in my personal case.

Another problem I've stumbled across is that with a number of live albums by a certain well-known artist, the recording company managed to mangle the uploads by cutting out the between-tracks-transitions. (Which means that a) there are sometimes noticeable cuts between tracks and b) you're missing out on the full concert atmosphere and some stage banter).

On the CDs those bits had been mastered as part of the pre-gap (i.e. the bit between tracks where a CD player will show a negative time counting upwards), so it almost feels as if they simply ripped their own discs for digital distribution and managed to accidentally configure the ripping program to discard the pre-gap material instead of appending/prepending it to the adjacent track.

Unfortunately that means that all official music services are affected, both for streaming and downloading, and buying the CD version is the only way of getting a proper version (buying the CD is also the only way of getting the liner notes – unless you're lucky and somebody uploaded them to Discogs or so – though that is a separate problem).

$2400 is like 25 years of Spotify subscription. I sure as hell can listen to way more that 600 songs during that time. With no ads. Available on any device. And with discovery service included. I don't even listen to most stuff that I listened to 10-20 years ago.

Sure, the costs are different, but so is availability. As someone who listened to music for a good while and still listen to songs I first heard 30 years ago, I rather pay more and know it's 100% available anytime I want to hear in the future, than worrying about it ever disappearing from my library because some Spotify<>Label deal expired.

> Until relatively recently you could only buy whole albums not single songs.

What is "relatively recently" here? The iTunes store had a per-song price since, like, 2003 or so. And I'm pretty sure I recall Amazon selling mp3s individually since at least 2005 - I listen to grindcore, and I was amused at the per-song offering when Nasum's Grind Finale came out with 152 tracks. At £0.79 a track... no sale.

But its expensive. Bob Dylan songs alone is 300 million $.

I don't think vinyl supports Dolby Atmos yet.

A lot of vinyl comes with a download code included at no extra charge.

The only person who loses in that scenario is the person boycotting.

The artist will still have fans, the label will still get paid, but you will miss out on the art.

I would argue the only option is to acquire and store the music using technology not officially supported by the industry (stream downloaders, then torrents, etc)

Apple sells ALAC files for some of their Atmos encoded music and include the Atmos mix data in the ALAC file (if you can figure out how to buy rather than stream, there are some interesting dark patterns in Apple Music/iTunes Store today promoting streaming over ownership). The majority of ALAC files downloaded from Apple are alleged to be DRM-free, as well.

(I have never figured out how to get iTunes Store to correctly tell me if a download will be DRM-free or not. I'd probably love pointers on how to do that, because I would probably buy more music from Apple if I was less afraid of accidental DRM, which has been the case too many times for me.)

ALAC is an open-source codec supported by a number of decoders today and isn't necessarily just trapped in Apple's walled garden. (I've heard some reports that ALAC Atmos decoding/playback can even sometimes be better in non-Apple software.)

> Maybe I'm old, but I still like to own my music.

Maybe. Good idea nonetheless.

Remember when we had to listen to Neil Young through the Eat Pray Love soundtrack because Neil pulled all his music from Spotify because Joe Rogan said some stuff about covid?

Even Blu Ray isn’t DRM free unfortunately. Hard to own movies at all.

True, but it's not like you have to rip it every time you watch or listen to it. And even if you do need to rip it again, it's not like they can go back and re-encrypt the data on a physical disc that you possess.

While true, the DRM has been long broken, so I don't mind buying them because making an unencrypted rip is trivial.

actually, strong disagree, bluray drm is just as broken as streaming "widevine" (or other) drm. neither has been cracked, the algorithms are just well understood and in both cases people have figured out how to exfiltrate the keys needed from devices with them. in practice, its a very similar set of technical steps for both.

this is distinguished from DVDs where one can brute force it without starting with a key.

the only distinguishing thing between bluray and streaming drm is an end user simplicity thing, but thats more of a "product" / end user technical ability distinction than anything else.

I own blurays that a) can't be played in any of my physical nor software players anymore (players flat out reject it ever since their decryption keys got updated, which I did to play other blurays that needed the update; physically they're fine, everything points to encryption-level errors) and b) can be decrypted but it takes ages and ludicrous amounts of space to rip + reencoding properly is a very manual process (back of the envelope calculation told me ripping my small collection would take several years)

It's so outstandingly unpractical that I consider that "unplayable". It certainly is for the layperson.

So I've turned to getting these from "that other source" and keeping the blurays as tokens of ownership.

theres little reason to transcode a bluray. an 8TB disk can hold 200+ 1:1 bluray images. it costs ~$100ish on the low end for a usb drive (i.e. very minor price relative to cost of buying all the discs originally). therefore its just an issue of time. If one can decrypt 1 a day (say overnight to not waste ones time babysitting it) thats a few hundred a year (not a small collection imo). and if one can do more (say kick off one before going to work, kick off one when come home before eating dinner + the one overnight) one has now passed 1K discs a year (+a few hundred in hard drive storage needs)

800+ movies at 40GB a pop and we're looking at around 32TB. That is not including shows, which run over multiple discs.

Movies can be sourced second hand (or sometimes even new if you wait a bit) for around 5€, for 800 that's 4K total. 8TB is more like 150€ around here, closer to 200 if one goes CMR. Adding a 4 (or 8 to add shows) disk enclosure to that significantly adds to the bill, which tallies around 1k, and double that if you add redundancy for ZFS to repair bitrot which at these scales starts to statistically matter. But even then, 1k is certainly not minor compared to bluray price.

$/byte will inevitably come down, but we're still quite a few years away from crossing such a rounding error threshold. Re-encoding cuts that down by a factor of 5 to 10 with minimal impact on quality.

25% is somewhat minor to me. i.e. one can view it as each bluray costing you 6.25 euro instead of 5.

reencoding takes time and effort. i.e. lets say an encoded movie could be stored for free (not true but useful for argument). that means if it costs you 200 euro to store 200 simply decrypted movies, it means if you would spend more than 1 euro of your time, energy ... on each movie, its better economically to not reencode it. from my experience, one ends up spending a decent amount of time per disc.

edit: the above is just my logic for why the added cost isnt much to me and something i think others should consider. there might be good reasons why it doesnt apply in specific situations, but i still think everyone should think long and hard about it.

Why would you want to own a movie? I rarely watch movies more than once.

Plenty of people watch movies more than once, and I’d prefer to not pay over and over.

I buy movies that I know I’ll watch repeatedly, e.g. LOTR extended editions, Alien anthology, The Matrix, Die Hard is a Christmas movie tradition, etc.

And, some people enjoy collecting movies.

Same with music.

there's still that thing where you talk like a...

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