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It's not very well known but very surprisingly, it's the only legal place I found (for a US customer) to buy FLAC albums of obscure metal bands. Yes you read th
by d1zzy 8y ago
It's not very well known but very surprisingly, it's the only legal place I found (for a US customer) to buy FLAC albums of obscure metal bands. Yes you read that right, we're not talking about current pop stars. For example, try finding a legal way to purchase FLAC versions in the US for the following:
Korova - A kiss in the charnel fields
Dissection - Storm of the light's bane
Bishop of Hexen - The nightmarish compositions
Things that I already considered before I found Tidal:
1. Buying the physical disc and ripping it to FLAC works except it's generally (for those albums above) significantly more expensive than getting the FLAC from Tidal. discogs.com market is the best place for obscure metal CDs but most ship from Europe and the shipping costs are considerable.
2. 7digital.com has all those albums (in FLAC) for customers in Canada or the UK, not on the US marketplace...
3. bandcamp, my favorite FLAC source, doesn't have any of that (it's mostly for recent indie artist releases and not a good resource for music released a few decades ago)
- mehrzad 8y agoDid you do a frequency analysis to check if it is truly lossless? I feel like for some more obscure music there's really no guarantee that the artist ever released in anything higher quality than MP3. I know that Bandcamp requires uploading lossless files but even those are often from laptop mics recording on GarageBand (especially if you listen to bedroom pop).
- d1zzy 8y agoVery good question and something I worried about too. I actually verified this in audacity against some lossless samples of the same albums I already had and the decompressed wav were bit identical for what I checked (interesting enough, they were at a slightly different offset, I had to use audacity, zoom in to the numerical sample values and shift the waveform until they matched identically). There's also the issue that if Tidal were selling FLAC copies (which cost twice the MP3 version) that are just FLAC encoded MP3s I imagine there'd be a lot of complaining and/or lawsuits.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoWell they likely did at least a CD if old enough. The question is whether the FLAC was sourced from one.
- Rjevski 8y agoOn the other hand, even a laptop mic would be better than MP3 wouldn't it? Granted, the quality of the recording would be bad, but the point of FLAC is to get an authentic reproduction of the original recording (however bad it may have been), without extra compression artifacts.
- meowface 8y agoFrom my experience, Tidal has been good with this. They don't do transcodes. If they don't have an actual lossless version of a track, they indicate it in the UI.