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.
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.
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.)
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 haven't heard every lossy encoding, of course, and there may be an actually good one that escaped my attention.
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.
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.)
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.
Higher bit rates (and probably improved encoders) help though.
It's not a problem in any other codec though. You probably couldn't hear the difference in AAC or Opus.
Do you have a reference for the MP3 issue?
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.
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.
I only buy music on itunes as a last resort, so I don't have a huge sample size.
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.
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.
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.
7Digital is one of those money-losing companies that keeps being passed from owner to owner.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
My hunch; no way Apple and Amazon will not watermark. But that is just based on behavioral inference, not on knowledge or data.
The backup thing did happen, though:
https://medium.com/@__Tux/using-bandcamp-as-a-backup-solutio...
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.