You mean there’s more of me out there?!
✅ No buffering, music starts instantly
✅ No connection issues
✅ No monthly money drain
✅ No arbitrary access or availability revocation
❌ No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
✅ I’m patient
Go FLAC or go home.
I fucking love my 100gb flac collection
It’s all about the 64kbps .wma’s. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day
FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don’t prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don’t avoid non-lossless albums either.
Um, .wav is a lossless format. It’s just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it’s stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.
The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent.
I would disagree with this. It isn’t really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.
What I’ve noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.
I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.
Bandcamp, Supraph Online, Ototoy, Uta 573, Steam and GOG’s OSTs and Apple’s iTunes store have been my to-go options. No DRM, no worries. Just avoid Apple’s music subscription, as it is DRM’d.
Am I too FLAC to get these joke?
I recently started ripping all my Spotify playlists using spotdl to put them on my Plex. Spotdl doesn’t actually download from Spotify but uses it as a source for the metadata to tag the files but it gets the audio by matching to YouTube music and downloading from there. From there I import to lidarr for renaming / organization.
The Enshittification has forced us to revisit the old way
If I really like something, I get my own copy. Because I don’t like corporations deciding what I’m allowed to enjoy.
Yall may hate on em, but Spotify has not only made my life easier in that I don’t have to first pirate then sort all my music, but has also got me through some difficult times by recommending music that I would have never found otherwise. I’ve found groups that I love that have maybe 2000 monthly listens. Went to concerts in places I’ve never been for bands I never would have found. It’s more than just listening to your own music. The Monday and Friday discover playlists have been more beneficial to me than most anything else on this planet.
MULLVAD! Wireguard configuration! Quantum resistant encryption! Multi-hop!
ProtonVPN!
Qbittorrent!
Sorry…there I go again with my Tourette’s syndrome, spouting off the names of random software.
You should never pirate things! How are billionaires supposed to afford their colossal mansions on huge plots of land in the most expensive areas of the world if we pirate things?!
Billionaires had to step on and fuck over so many people to get where they are now! If we pirate things, they won’t be able to afford their platinum toilets covered in diamonds! Or their $50,000 watches. or their $5000 designer suits that they wear once and throw away every day.
*torrents syndrome
It’s harder to find (legal) downloadable music anymore too. 7Digital has been pretty alright for me, but I just stopped bothering with Spotify and Pandora and such. Youtube used to be great for discovery until they started mega cracking down on adblock again.
How often people are just getting rug-pulled left and right by streaming services is ridiculous.
Uh, yes, Youtube trying to Anti-Adblock… pops up once or twice a year, then I click on “Update uBlock” and be done with it…
Y’know most of us audiophiles are managing actual libraries… but they’re not mp3. Mines mostly flac.
My library is competing with Spotify.
I wonder if I still have my Creative Nomad Jukebox somewhere… came out in 2000. Was the size and shape of a portable CD player so it fit in the same kind of cases. Took normal AA batteries. Had a 6 GB capacity, which was insane in 2000. I had a huge number of MP3s on it. Many radio dramas. I wish I still had them elsewhere.
Classmate of mine had a similar device, but blockyer. So many mp3’s (Argos Jukebox)
I wanted mine to be pocketable, but i could not yet afford a real iPod. So i spent 150 euro on a 256 flash stick from MSI. 1 or 2 albums plus some spares… Later I had an iPod and many headaches dealing with iTunes. The device was so great but iTunes already felt bloated to me back then.
The Jukebox predated the iPod by a couple of years. I didn’t mind the size and I had a backpack with a built-in case for a CD player with a little portal for the headphone wire, so I could put it right in there while I was walking to class (I was in college at the time).
I also got a second gen iPod for free as part of a pyramid scheme that went totally wrong. You had to sign up for a service to get a code and if you got enough codes, you got a free iPod. But you could cancel the service right away. More importantly, the codes could be used by multiple people and the system would accept it due to whatever crappy coding they did. So people would share their codes and I was one of the people near the top of the pyramid that got enough codes to do it before they figured it out.
I also had the trendy mp3 player pre-iPod, the Diamond Rio.
Looking back on it, I have no idea why I had so many mp3 players.
Well, the players were often dirt cheap. I got at least four for free on trade shows. Including an Ultra-Rare “Sun Microsystems” MP3 player, handed over to me by the founder of Star-Office which later became Open Office and Libre Office. Back when Sun was not totally uncool.
.flac or bust
Don’t forget about .ape.
Please do forget about .ape. Proprietary, obscure format. Only advantage is that under some circumstances it can get you higher compression rates than flac. But it’s way more resource intensive to decode so that advantage is really more theoretical. Use flac, forget ape.
What features have been removed from Spotify?
I believe they’ve just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.
Nothing if you’re a premium user. Being able to pick songs on Free I think.
Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.
The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It’s exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.
FLAC master race check in.
FLAC on a NAS for self-hosted streaming.
I don’t really notice a difference it just takes up storage
You’d probably notice it with better audio gear.
Absolutely.
I had gone awhile without buying any albums on cd. Icky Thump by the White Stripes came out, I downloaded it and had been jamming it in the car every day.
I took a friend out shopping and seen a copy and thought, “You know what? I want the album art.”
I took my burned cd out of the player and put the actual release on there.
“Boodoodwiddle dah boom boom boom boom boom boom boom, bah dah bow!!!”
I couldn’t believe how powerful it sounded.
I only fucked with flac after that.
