8 ms·
FLAC 1.3.2
- shmerl 10y agoI wish more stores would offer music in FLAC. That's the reason I prefer to buy music on Bandcamp.
- jcpst 10y agoYep, same here. I always find it disappointing when I can't buy an album with a download in a lossless format.
- rm999 10y agoHave you seen murfie.com? They have reasonable prices and will "sell" you a physical CD but just digitally deliver you the FLAC. Of course the fact that they even have to do it this way is so anachronistic. Audiophile quality digital audio is one of the places where piracy - specifically a few invite-only music torrent sites - have completely surpassed (and arguably innovated beyond) anything legal.
- shmerl 10y agoInteresting, thanks for the pointer.
- hackuser 10y agoWhat are the standards and innovations (not just high-quality FLAC?) in those places?
- shmerl 10y agoDRM-free lossless audio. That's all you need. Not anywhere new or novel, but lacking in many places. So anyone who offers it is innovative ;)
- hackuser 10y agoWhat bit-depth, frequency, etc. is considered to meet the highest standards. Years ago I read 24 or 32 bits and ~96 KHz, but maybe those aren't even the specifications that matter any more.
- masklinn 10y ago> Years ago I read 24 or 32 bits and ~96 KHz These are useful to record and produce, they're of no use whatsoever to listeners[0]. 16/48 is the highest standard. 24b (let alone 32) is completely pointless and just wasteful, and 192kHz can actually be detrimental due to ultrasonics. [0] https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
- Wildgoose 10y agoIn theory you are correct - but not in practise. The "Loudness Wars" means that we don't actually get the full 16 bits, in which case I would argue that anything up to the 24/96 standard may well be an improvement.
- pimeys 10y agoI was thinking the same, until I read this article about different qualities: http://tweakheadz.com/16-bit-vs-24-bit-audio/ http://tweakheadz.com/16-bit-vs-24-bit-audio/ TLDR: 16/44.1 is enough for listening purposes.
- masklinn 10y ago> The "Loudness Wars" means that we don't actually get the full 16 bits, in which case I would argue that anything up to the 24/96 standard may well be an improvement. You'll get the exact same loudness issue at thrice the storage requirements. Fight for better mastering (and ubiquitous requirement of loudness checker or across-the-board audio normalisation as iTunes Radio does), not for worthless and detrimental gimmicks. Incidentally, loudness has been trending down (very very slowly) on lossless sources since its 2005 peak: http://www.tristancollins.me/computing/dynamic-range-analysis/ http://www.tristancollins.me/computing/dynamic-range-analysi...
- nitrogen 10y agoProbably community discussion, vast catalogs, and extensively curated metadata.
- feld 10y agoEven it's a duplicate CD in their catalog they still have to rip it. I'm not sure if they're allowed to store the digital copy with deduplication, but if someone sends in 50 of the same CD they have to pay someone to rip each one. It's a ridiculous way to skirt around the law.
- shmerl 10y agoIf the law requires such workaround to buy digital goods - the law itself is ridiculous.
- joshschreuder 10y agoThere was a similar concept for DVDs but the Kickstarter was cancelled https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1151191861/movieswap-join-us-to-freethemovies/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1151191861/movieswap-jo...
- pimeys 10y agoThese stores sell either FLAC or some other lossless format: - http://qobuz.com http://qobuz.com - http://bleep.com http://bleep.com - http://boomkat.com http://boomkat.com - http://hardwax.com http://hardwax.com - http://junodownload.com http://junodownload.com If all these fail, I usually try to get a used CD from Amazon or Discogs, wait a week for the packet and rip the music to my collection. Sometimes digital downloads can be almost double the price what you need to pay for a CD, but maybe that's what you pay for not needing to wait.
- TylerE 10y agoDon't forget iTunes. ALAC is lossless.
- shmerl 10y agoIt's not mandatory there as far as I know, so a lot of times it's not available. Besides, why can't they offer FLAC as well? Typical Apple NIH if you ask me.
- dhess 10y agoCan you provide a link to an iTunes Music Store release that is available in ALAC format? I am not aware of any.
- george_perez 10y agoYou're right, the iTunes Store does not sell in ALAC format. They sell a "Mastered for iTunes" format though, which is encoding the 256Kbps AAC file from a high quality source.
- symlinkk 10y agowhich is not lossless and is completely irrelavent
- george_perez 10y ago
- Veratyr 10y agoThere just doesn't seem to be much interest in the west, though it's quite popular in Asia, largely it seems due to Sony pushing it. A bunch of FLAC stores have been mentioned but here's a couple more (and other lossless formats), courtesy of Sony: https://www.sony.com/electronics/hi-res-audio-music-services https://www.sony.com/electronics/hi-res-audio-music-services: - http://prostudiomasters.com http://prostudiomasters.com - This one in particular seems to be the only one with many of the more "mainstream" albums. It seems to be the only place that has the soundtracks for most of the recently released movies for example. - https://www.onkyomusic.com/ https://www.onkyomusic.com/ - http://store.acousticsounds.com/superhirez http://store.acousticsounds.com/superhirez - http://bluecoastrecords.com/ http://bluecoastrecords.com/ - http://itrax.com/ http://itrax.com/ - https://www.nativedsd.com/ https://www.nativedsd.com/ - http://www.classicsonlinehd.com/ http://www.classicsonlinehd.com/ And in Japan: http://www.sony.jp/high-resolution/ http://www.sony.jp/high-resolution/ And Korea: http://www.sony.co.kr/electronics/hi-res-audio-music-services http://www.sony.co.kr/electronics/hi-res-audio-music-service...
- shmerl 10y ago> There just doesn't seem to be much interest in the west, though it's quite popular in Asia, largely it seems due to Sony pushing it. Interesting thanks. I wonder why though? It's not like it's hard to do it.
- Veratyr 10y agoWarning: Pure speculation ahead. I think it might be because in Japan at least, there's a very different approach to music consumption. In the west we basically moved from CDs to iTunes to Spotify but in Japan, online streaming and digital purchase never really took off. CDs are still, even today, the biggest music medium in Japan, accounting for 85% of all music sales in 2014 [1]. I think the Japanese tendency to own physical media, the lack of a good way to stream physical media you own and the insane prices of storage for mobile phones may have led to Japan sticking to MP3 players rather than moving to their phones like we have. So after they stuck to MP3 players and competing in that market became important, I think to differentiate their product, Sony started pushing higher quality audio. I'm not sure how true this is but it feels to me like Sony is the Apple of Japan in that Japanese will typically eat up whatever Sony sells them. Sony sells higher quality audio, Japanese buy higher quality audio. People want higher quality audio, labels start to publish it. It could also be that since CD purchase is so entrenched, online stores needed something to make their product more desirable than a physical disk and the way they found to do that was higher quality audio (note that I'm referring to the "Hi-Res" audio, which is typically 96kHz + 24-bit). [1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2014/09/21/85-percent-of-music-sales-in-japan-are-cds/#3dcdd1f229a2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2014/09/21/85-perce...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- BuuQu9hu 10y agoI wish they would offer music in multitrack form, like NIN did: http://remix.nin.com/ http://remix.nin.com/ http://www.nin.wiki/Multitracks http://www.nin.wiki/Multitracks http://www.ninremixes.com/multitracks.php http://www.ninremixes.com/multitracks.php
- wishinghand 10y agoI agree. This is invaluable for various music students, so they could isolate their preferred instrument and work on playing that part.
- nathancahill 10y agoThis was the main reason What being shut down was so distressing. Only source for a lot of music in FLAC.
- mrinfinite 10y agoI think that when a band uploads content in mp3 (on bandcamp), the flac download is still mp3 quality (in a flac format) (maximum quality) if you know what i mean(am i right?). I always wanted to analyze soundfiles to better see quality of file.
- detaro 10y agoYou can not upload MP3 to Bandcamp, they only take lossless formats. I mean, you could take an MP3 and convert that to WAV or FLAC, and then upload, but I hope not many musicians do stuff like that, and Bandcamp is pretty clear about it in their documentation.
- flacfan 10y agohttps://www.7digital.com https://www.7digital.com (next in line after Bandcamp for me): - available in many countries, including the US - has a bunch of major label music - reasonable prices for 16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC http://tidal.com/store/ http://tidal.com/store/ (yep, they sell downloads too): - all or nothing, can't buy individual tracks from an album - if you manage to find a song you want being sold as a single it'll cost you $2.98...
- shmerl 10y agoTidal says "streaming". Can you actually download music there DRM-free?
- flacfan 10y agoYep. Here's an example I clicked on from the store page: http://tidal.com/us/store/album/67237700 http://tidal.com/us/store/album/67237700. You can choose MP3 or FLAC and then hit the DOWNLOAD button to take you to a checkout page.
- cornstalks 10y agoIt's great to see an update to this project! I'm really hoping more updates come, particularly at the bitstream level. Michael Niedermayer (from FFmpeg fame) has said he would like to work on improving FLAC's compression rate[1]. Unfortunately that work wouldn't make it into CELLAR (but that's probably a good thing; broadening CELLAR's charter would probably just delay things). I'm hoping Michael gets time/encouragement to follow through with his interest (heck, even if it's a whole new codec it'd be really neat to see what improvements he could make!). [1]: https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cellar/current/msg00713.html https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cellar/current/msg0071...
- niftich 10y ago> Add FLAC in MP4 specification docs This intrigued me, so I went looking. Apparently this effort was launched earlier this year [1], with Monty authoring the initial spec basing it off of the Opus-in-MP4 spec, and developed quite rapidly. Meanwhile Mozilla immediately incorporated these features into Firefox and their Rust mp4 parser [2]. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1286097 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1286097 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1303888 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1303888
- nfriedly 10y ago* earlier last year ;)