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Did 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 relea
by mehrzad 8y ago
Did 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.