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Of a similar nature, my weekend project last week:

Does much the same thing, but it unpacks the zips and tracks the directories. It can run as a docker container which syncs your collection on a daily timer. The use case is to download your purchases to local directories for use with Jellyfin/Plex/etc. You can just buy music and it'll appear on your local media server automatically within a day.

didn't want to create an issue on github for this but just looked at it and seems to have a duplicated PUID setting (the 2nd should be PGID I guess) in entrypoint.sh

Thanks! Fixed in v0.3.3. Feel free to open an issue for stuff like that.

> 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.)

> 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.

Lossless is mainly for mixing/remixing, not listening.

I disagree. As a listener, the lossy encodings I've heard are fairly annoying, especially in the higher frequencies.

I haven't heard every lossy encoding, of course, and there may be an actually good one that escaped my attention.

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.

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.

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.)

Why are you encoding MP3 at all in 2023? It's at least two generations behind the times. (AAC and then Opus)

I'm not encoding mp3's, but a lot of music is sold as mp3's :)

Disappointed Amazon still only offers mp3...

I think you overestimate the median encoding.

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.

Those bad mp3 cymbals and the wash of noise...

Higher bit rates (and probably improved encoders) help though.

Cymbals in MP3 sound bad due to fundamental limitations of MP3; even high bitrates can't fix that.

It's not a problem in any other codec though. You probably couldn't hear the difference in AAC or Opus.

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.

Do you have a reference for the MP3 issue?

https://web.archive.org/web/20120222124415/http://www.mp3-te...

The highest frequency band doesn't have its own quantization level meaning it's hard to control the bitrate when there's detail in it.

Higher bit rates do help some, but not enough.

And transcoding and archiving.

Totally not true. Lossless is for listening!

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.

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.

I really wonder if you can do this in a double blind, ABX test.

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.

That type of processing is super common in DJing, but the understanding of how it interacts with lossy files is not.

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.

then you should check out SongTradr's other recent acquisition, 7digital.com... not only do they have flac, but many have 16 and 24bit available.

There's no difference in the data that will be delivered to you DAC using flac or whatever the non-compressed version was.

flac is a lossless format. If it started as 24 bit wav, nothing is lost when you get the flac version of that. it's just smaller.

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.

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.

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.

It's not a binary decision, there are different dithering algorithms with different noise frequencies.

FLAC is a lossless encoding. You can reverse it and get a bit-for-bit identical WAV file.

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).

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)

that's interesting, sounds like they're on a bit of a buying spree too?

7Digital is one of those money-losing companies that keeps being passed from owner to owner.

7digital also removes content occasionally, so be sure to download and archive what you've bought.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Basically: Start clean, stay clean, and move on.

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).

> 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.

Select them, hit the share icon, and send them wherever you want?

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.

Also watermark free?

Is bandcamp watermark free?

I don't know. It was a genuine question.

My hunch; no way Apple and Amazon will not watermark. But that is just based on behavioral inference, not on knowledge or data.

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.

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.

Do you have a link?

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.

The backup thing did happen, though:

https://medium.com/@__Tux/using-bandcamp-as-a-backup-solutio...

What is the problem with watermarks?

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.

> In Apple's case you do need to install iTunes to get your DRM-free file

Another laughable requirement from the land of 'it just works'.

Bandcamp just packages the album in a simple ZIP file that can be opened anywhere, desktop or mobile.

> 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.

Don't forget Qobuz: https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop

They not only have streaming plans but also let you buy the music files directly.

Amazon has always let me download the entire album as mp3, I've made cd's and copied to usb/phone just fine.

Good to know, thanks!

Things I have paid for have disappeared from store but I can still download them. Is there another level of “disappear”?

Well, there's what can happen if SongTradr decides to change the download policy.

There is, I have some older purchases where there's no longer a download link at all and it just asks you to contact the artist directly

> That said, if they fix the outright removal of paid things problem, and start treating “artist” as first class instead of “label” in searches and links, I’ll be singing their praises.

I had paid things removed from my bandcamp collection a few years ago. The only recourse provided by band camp was to contact the artist(al things were from the same artist). If the experience of another user that responded to you about being able to download removed things that were paid for... well that is much better than the bandcamp experience since I can not download things that were removed.

> One negative thing about bandcamp is that artists/labels/bandcamp can remove anything at anytime for any reason, so things you paid for can straight up disappear.

That seems borderline illegal.. I can't imagine Valve removing a Steam game from someone's library if they already bought it without the Internet giving them a lot of bad press, they'll just delist the item from being purchased.

Given that Bandcamp does allow downloading your purchases (indeed, I've only ever used them that way), I suppose they could argue that anything beyond a download immediately after purchase was only ever just a convenience feature.

If they get a lot of customers that effectively treat them as a streaming service, tough, I suppose I can see that there might be a certain impedance mismatch of expectations there.

Bandcamp, 7digital, rarely CDs (but I do still have a USB DVD recorder so I can still rip). And honestly, if I find that something is no longer available (like Spirogyra's "Bells, Boots & Shambles") and the composer is no longer living, I'll take it off something like YouTube if there's a decent quality rip available there. In some cases, original recordings aren't great quality anyway.

In case you have troubles exporting cookies, I made a simple extension for that:

https://github.com/cookiengineer/me-want-cookies

(Uses Netscape cookie format)