8 ms·

I'm really bummed. I love Bandcamp. It's the only place I can buy music FROM THE MUSICIAN with very little overhead, and download a high-quality lossless track.

I'm really bummed. I love Bandcamp. It's the only place I can buy music FROM THE MUSICIAN with very little overhead, and download a high-quality lossless track. Amazon only lets me buy crap-quality MP3s. Apple is opaque about it, putting either lossy AAC or lossless ALAC in the same M4A containers. >:( The only good alternative is Qobuz, which is frustrating to use and charges absolutely massive overhead. But unfortunately it feels like Bandcamp keeps getting screwed over somehow or another. Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download. :(

dfxm12 3y ago
One can stream on bandcamp, through an app or the browser
- fsckboy 3y ago
  can one stream a mix of music sourced elsewhere and bandcamp music? If people have to keep switching apps, I think that's going to limit the appeal to people who are a bit more serious/intentional about every "listen". There's a lot of those, but it's still a minority.
  - npteljes 3y ago
    While not automatic, YouTube Music can do this. You can basically upload your own music. Create playlists that mix yt songs and songs in your collection. You can upload on one machine, and access the uploaded song from anywhere, so you're basically using their cloud.
    - jbaber 3y ago
      Wait, really? Won't I get accused of pirating my CDs? Is it officially okay to rip my CDs to a cloud provider?
      - npteljes 3y ago
        I can tell you that I wasn't accused, but that it's also for private consumption only, no way to share the songs, so they might not be that strict. No idea though. You can read about the feature here: https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522 https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522
  - komali2 3y ago
    You can deploy navidrome, point it at a hard drive full of your music, and then stream from the frontend or using an app like subtracks.
  - presbyterian 3y ago
    Any time I download music from Bandcamp, I drag it into Apple Music on my Mac and it syncs to all of my devices, sitting in my library like any other album. It’s actually one of the reasons I use Apple Music over Spotify, the process to do this in Spotify is much more convoluted.
    - ascagnel_ 3y ago
      Spotify’s process is that the files need to be locally accessible from any computer playing the music, or they must be synced manually to the mobile app. Lack of a real library is why I ditched Spotify for Rdio years and years ago, and why I switched to Apple Music when that became a thing. And I still run a Plex server, partially for the PlexAmp player.
      - presbyterian 3y ago
        But you still can’t even just add them to your library in Spotify, you have to put them in playlists, and then download that playlist on your phone, and then they’ll be on your phone. At least that was the system last I used it
Pxtl 3y ago
There's also 7digital.... which is now, also owned by Songtradr. Or Amazon, which doesn't sell music in my country. Or Apple. Which seems to resent even still running the itunes music store, they don't even have a web front for it.
- 8note 3y ago
  I miss google music. It did the job of a digital record store really well
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    Ditto. Also GPM was a bit buggier and more bloated feature-wise than YTM, but the ability to clean your ID3 tags in the web browser was wonderful. And now YTM is getting podcasts so everything old is new again... but worse.
winternett 3y ago
Junodownload is where I buy music most. They have a wide variety of options and fair pricing. It's much easier to find and browse music there. Our link: https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings/releases/ https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...
- hondo77 3y ago
  Too bad their prices for lossless downloads for the quick searches I just did are outrageous. Don't even need to get into the very limited catalog.
  - tessierashpool 3y ago
    it's a specialist catalog, but very popular within its niche
  - winternett 3y ago
    I really haven't found any problems in collecting 320k Mp3s as a producer myself. I think if most people knew the real way most modern music is produced and mastered now (on laptops), and how a lot of masters and music catalogues behind the scenes are literally re-encoded from mp3 backups, they'd see that lossless music is not an exact science. Flac is also not universally supported by playback devices, and can become unsupported at any time faster than Mp3, so using more universal formats is not necessarily a bad thing. That being said, I use HD lossless WAV copies for all of our own masters.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Regardless of how good high bitrate MP3s can technically be, my experience with MP3s has been poor. I can't remember the last time I got one that was of good enough sound quality that it didn't annoy me to listen to it. That's why I go with lossless encodings. They aren't a guarantee of good sound quality, but the odds of them being so are much, much higher. Personally, I don't actually care about whether or not FLAC is widely supported across devices. My media center will do on-the-fly conversions and lets me stream to anything, and if I need a different format for some reason, I can just convert from the FLAC to whatever I need.
jtriangle 3y ago
Alot of the time, you can just email their booking email asking to buy their album with cashapp et al and they'll gladly take your money and ship you a zip file of MP3's, assuming the band/artist is small enough.
- egypturnash 3y ago
  There is slightly more friction involved in this scheme. Just a little.
  - jtriangle 3y ago
    Yes, however, if your goal is to give your money to the people you want to give it to, there isn't a better way.
- golergka 3y ago
  And you could replace Dropbox quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
  - colinsane 3y ago
    funny thing: i recently happened into the solution to that age-old question of "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room". i now run an anonymous FTP server on my laptop, open to the LAN. prior to this Dropbox _was_ one of the solutions, but recently i've used that FTP server for the job several times with both Linux and Windows users. yet, you jest.
    - jtriangle 3y ago
      Samba also works just fine for that job.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Sometimes I’ll just throw up python -m http.server In a directory as a lazy way to transfer a file (especially to my phone). It is not encrypted, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if it was also vulnerable in some ways, but it sure is easy (and it is only for lan, and pretty brief).
shmerl 3y ago
Apple just can't get over their NIH obsession and support FLAC like a normal store.
- hondo77 3y ago
  I have my music download stores set to give me ALAC so that's a normal store for me. :-)
  - thirdsun 3y ago
    To be fair it really doesn't matter since it's quite easy to convert between lossless files. I prefer ALAC too since I use iOS devices. However let's not pretend that Apple supporting FLAC wouldn't make things easier.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Bandcamp provides ALAC as one of their format options, too.
dzhiurgis 3y ago
> Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download To each their own. For me Soundcloud wins hands down because of social network effect and gets me continuous stream of mixes. I really don't care what was the authors journey to releasing an album. A lot of music soon going to be generated anyway. I really despise Apple Music for its album centric view and lack of good playlists. Spotify is somewhere in the middle.
- Yodel0914 3y ago
  It's funny; this is the polar opposite of how I listen to music. I only listen to albums, and 95% of playlists I listen to are my own and just contain a series of albums.
avitous 3y ago
I too loved Bandcamp for its sane approach to acquiring new music; unlike "most people" I refuse to use the streaming-only services, and insist upon buying albums and listening to exactly those selections I choose (and I prefer to listen to albums in their entirety, even today). Perhaps I'm just old and set in my ways, but choices made by others, especially algorithmically generated "options maximizing my engagement", hold no attraction for me whatsoever. Losing such freedom of choice would be painful in the extreme.
- DocKitKat 3y ago
  I too listen to albums in their entirety and don’t interact too much with autogenerated content. But I was on Apple Music and now I’m on Spotify. The amount of new albums I get to listen to would put a massive dent in my bank account if I was buying them as I go. I still purchase Vinyl and the odd CD, but that is reserved for my top must have records. A flat rate for music just makes sense to me, and allows me to check out and discover so many more new artists than in the old days, where my music taste was much narrower and confined to more mainstream “classic” rock and the like.
  - waveBidder 3y ago
    bandcamp is still pretty generous with streaming. I own maybe a third of the music on bandcamp that I listen to.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    Sounds like Bandcamp is perfect for you. You can stream full albums for free, then buy and download the odd ones that you really like.
    - DocKitKat 3y ago
      I WANT for bandcamp to work for me. But…… For the few albums that are there sure, it works. Unfortunately the vast majority of the time there isn’t anything there. Most artists just aren’t on bandcamp. Or the artist is on there but only a subset of their albums are. Even if I started using it more, it would be so rare, as I’d need to go use Spotify or my own physical/digital collection most of the time, which means when the album ends I’m more likely to keep listening on the current platform, not think to switch back to bandcamp to see once again if the newest Metric album is suddenly there, or if any albums apart from one are there etc. Also the amount of similarly named artist/albums that are tributes or fan “sequels” or straight up just the same named artist a a little bit of friction to make search. Bandcamp exists in an odd space where unless I’m willing to have my music choices heavily restricted it then it loses out to traditional a-la-carte purchasing of albums whether physically or on digital storefronts, or to just using a streaming service. If I was a young kid in primary school again, it would still lose out to pirating music as well I think.
shagie 3y ago
(dig, dig, dig... where did I get that... music... found it!) http://magnatune.com http://magnatune.com (correct, there is no 's' there... that's odd in today's world) > Since 2003, we've found and recruited the very best independent musicians and shared revenue 50/50 with them. Much of our music is exclusively available here. Nobody has spent the time to curate a collection like we have. They've got some interesting licensing (as in lack of royalties)... Though... Not entirely sure anymore about this. It feels like it is just running as a zombie site that's paid up (no news in the past decade)... but it's still running and streaming.
- mortos 3y ago
  Funny to see Magnatune mentioned, HN is probably the only place I would ever see that. You got me out of lurking as I had to share. The founder and CEO of Magnatune is John Buckman. Per his Linkedin he is still the CEO of Magnatune, in addition to some of his other projects like BookMooch and iLicenseMusic. Magnatune is certainly in zombie mode, as Buckman started an espresso machine company that really took off and gave him notoriety, Decent Espresso. It uses an Android tablet to control and the app he wrote is written in Tcl/Tk. It's a fascinating project and how I became familiar with him and his previous endeavors.
proxiful-wash 3y ago
Seriously avoid any product with tencent before its too late.
elric 3y ago
I hope this won't result in Bandcamp going to shit, but I have to say I'm pretty worried. It's the only place I buy music. Band releases album -> I buy it. When I'm looking for new music, I typically look at the collections of other people who bought an album I enjoyed.
dbeley 3y ago
On top of Qobuz (which is great) there is also Ototoy (mostly for japanese indie music).

dfxm12 3y ago

One can stream on bandcamp, through an app or the browser

fsckboy 3y ago
can one stream a mix of music sourced elsewhere and bandcamp music? If people have to keep switching apps, I think that's going to limit the appeal to people who are a bit more serious/intentional about every "listen". There's a lot of those, but it's still a minority.
- npteljes 3y ago
  While not automatic, YouTube Music can do this. You can basically upload your own music. Create playlists that mix yt songs and songs in your collection. You can upload on one machine, and access the uploaded song from anywhere, so you're basically using their cloud.
  - jbaber 3y ago
    Wait, really? Won't I get accused of pirating my CDs? Is it officially okay to rip my CDs to a cloud provider?
    - npteljes 3y ago
      I can tell you that I wasn't accused, but that it's also for private consumption only, no way to share the songs, so they might not be that strict. No idea though. You can read about the feature here: https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522 https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522
- komali2 3y ago
  You can deploy navidrome, point it at a hard drive full of your music, and then stream from the frontend or using an app like subtracks.
- presbyterian 3y ago
  Any time I download music from Bandcamp, I drag it into Apple Music on my Mac and it syncs to all of my devices, sitting in my library like any other album. It’s actually one of the reasons I use Apple Music over Spotify, the process to do this in Spotify is much more convoluted.
  - ascagnel_ 3y ago
    Spotify’s process is that the files need to be locally accessible from any computer playing the music, or they must be synced manually to the mobile app. Lack of a real library is why I ditched Spotify for Rdio years and years ago, and why I switched to Apple Music when that became a thing. And I still run a Plex server, partially for the PlexAmp player.
    - presbyterian 3y ago
      But you still can’t even just add them to your library in Spotify, you have to put them in playlists, and then download that playlist on your phone, and then they’ll be on your phone. At least that was the system last I used it

Pxtl 3y ago

There's also 7digital.... which is now, also owned by Songtradr. Or Amazon, which doesn't sell music in my country. Or Apple. Which seems to resent even still running the itunes music store, they don't even have a web front for it.

8note 3y ago
I miss google music. It did the job of a digital record store really well
- Pxtl 3y ago
  Ditto. Also GPM was a bit buggier and more bloated feature-wise than YTM, but the ability to clean your ID3 tags in the web browser was wonderful. And now YTM is getting podcasts so everything old is new again... but worse.

winternett 3y ago

Junodownload is where I buy music most. They have a wide variety of options and fair pricing. It's much easier to find and browse music there. Our link: https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings/releases/ https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...

hondo77 3y ago
Too bad their prices for lossless downloads for the quick searches I just did are outrageous. Don't even need to get into the very limited catalog.
- tessierashpool 3y ago
  it's a specialist catalog, but very popular within its niche
- winternett 3y ago
  I really haven't found any problems in collecting 320k Mp3s as a producer myself. I think if most people knew the real way most modern music is produced and mastered now (on laptops), and how a lot of masters and music catalogues behind the scenes are literally re-encoded from mp3 backups, they'd see that lossless music is not an exact science. Flac is also not universally supported by playback devices, and can become unsupported at any time faster than Mp3, so using more universal formats is not necessarily a bad thing. That being said, I use HD lossless WAV copies for all of our own masters.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Regardless of how good high bitrate MP3s can technically be, my experience with MP3s has been poor. I can't remember the last time I got one that was of good enough sound quality that it didn't annoy me to listen to it. That's why I go with lossless encodings. They aren't a guarantee of good sound quality, but the odds of them being so are much, much higher. Personally, I don't actually care about whether or not FLAC is widely supported across devices. My media center will do on-the-fly conversions and lets me stream to anything, and if I need a different format for some reason, I can just convert from the FLAC to whatever I need.

jtriangle 3y ago

Alot of the time, you can just email their booking email asking to buy their album with cashapp et al and they'll gladly take your money and ship you a zip file of MP3's, assuming the band/artist is small enough.

egypturnash 3y ago
There is slightly more friction involved in this scheme. Just a little.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  Yes, however, if your goal is to give your money to the people you want to give it to, there isn't a better way.
golergka 3y ago
And you could replace Dropbox quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
- colinsane 3y ago
  funny thing: i recently happened into the solution to that age-old question of "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room". i now run an anonymous FTP server on my laptop, open to the LAN. prior to this Dropbox _was_ one of the solutions, but recently i've used that FTP server for the job several times with both Linux and Windows users. yet, you jest.
  - jtriangle 3y ago
    Samba also works just fine for that job.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Sometimes I’ll just throw up python -m http.server In a directory as a lazy way to transfer a file (especially to my phone). It is not encrypted, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if it was also vulnerable in some ways, but it sure is easy (and it is only for lan, and pretty brief).

shmerl 3y ago

Apple just can't get over their NIH obsession and support FLAC like a normal store.

hondo77 3y ago
I have my music download stores set to give me ALAC so that's a normal store for me. :-)
- thirdsun 3y ago
  To be fair it really doesn't matter since it's quite easy to convert between lossless files. I prefer ALAC too since I use iOS devices. However let's not pretend that Apple supporting FLAC wouldn't make things easier.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Bandcamp provides ALAC as one of their format options, too.

dzhiurgis 3y ago

> Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download To each their own. For me Soundcloud wins hands down because of social network effect and gets me continuous stream of mixes. I really don't care what was the authors journey to releasing an album. A lot of music soon going to be generated anyway. I really despise Apple Music for its album centric view and lack of good playlists. Spotify is somewhere in the middle.

Yodel0914 3y ago
It's funny; this is the polar opposite of how I listen to music. I only listen to albums, and 95% of playlists I listen to are my own and just contain a series of albums.

avitous 3y ago

I too loved Bandcamp for its sane approach to acquiring new music; unlike "most people" I refuse to use the streaming-only services, and insist upon buying albums and listening to exactly those selections I choose (and I prefer to listen to albums in their entirety, even today). Perhaps I'm just old and set in my ways, but choices made by others, especially algorithmically generated "options maximizing my engagement", hold no attraction for me whatsoever. Losing such freedom of choice would be painful in the extreme.

DocKitKat 3y ago
I too listen to albums in their entirety and don’t interact too much with autogenerated content. But I was on Apple Music and now I’m on Spotify. The amount of new albums I get to listen to would put a massive dent in my bank account if I was buying them as I go. I still purchase Vinyl and the odd CD, but that is reserved for my top must have records. A flat rate for music just makes sense to me, and allows me to check out and discover so many more new artists than in the old days, where my music taste was much narrower and confined to more mainstream “classic” rock and the like.
- waveBidder 3y ago
  bandcamp is still pretty generous with streaming. I own maybe a third of the music on bandcamp that I listen to.
- n4r9 3y ago
  Sounds like Bandcamp is perfect for you. You can stream full albums for free, then buy and download the odd ones that you really like.
  - DocKitKat 3y ago
    I WANT for bandcamp to work for me. But…… For the few albums that are there sure, it works. Unfortunately the vast majority of the time there isn’t anything there. Most artists just aren’t on bandcamp. Or the artist is on there but only a subset of their albums are. Even if I started using it more, it would be so rare, as I’d need to go use Spotify or my own physical/digital collection most of the time, which means when the album ends I’m more likely to keep listening on the current platform, not think to switch back to bandcamp to see once again if the newest Metric album is suddenly there, or if any albums apart from one are there etc. Also the amount of similarly named artist/albums that are tributes or fan “sequels” or straight up just the same named artist a a little bit of friction to make search. Bandcamp exists in an odd space where unless I’m willing to have my music choices heavily restricted it then it loses out to traditional a-la-carte purchasing of albums whether physically or on digital storefronts, or to just using a streaming service. If I was a young kid in primary school again, it would still lose out to pirating music as well I think.

shagie 3y ago

(dig, dig, dig... where did I get that... music... found it!) http://magnatune.com http://magnatune.com (correct, there is no 's' there... that's odd in today's world) > Since 2003, we've found and recruited the very best independent musicians and shared revenue 50/50 with them. Much of our music is exclusively available here. Nobody has spent the time to curate a collection like we have. They've got some interesting licensing (as in lack of royalties)... Though... Not entirely sure anymore about this. It feels like it is just running as a zombie site that's paid up (no news in the past decade)... but it's still running and streaming.

mortos 3y ago
Funny to see Magnatune mentioned, HN is probably the only place I would ever see that. You got me out of lurking as I had to share. The founder and CEO of Magnatune is John Buckman. Per his Linkedin he is still the CEO of Magnatune, in addition to some of his other projects like BookMooch and iLicenseMusic. Magnatune is certainly in zombie mode, as Buckman started an espresso machine company that really took off and gave him notoriety, Decent Espresso. It uses an Android tablet to control and the app he wrote is written in Tcl/Tk. It's a fascinating project and how I became familiar with him and his previous endeavors.

proxiful-wash 3y ago

Seriously avoid any product with tencent before its too late.

elric 3y ago

I hope this won't result in Bandcamp going to shit, but I have to say I'm pretty worried. It's the only place I buy music. Band releases album -> I buy it. When I'm looking for new music, I typically look at the collections of other people who bought an album I enjoyed.

dbeley 3y ago

On top of Qobuz (which is great) there is also Ototoy (mostly for japanese indie music).