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I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, b

I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, but I find it very difficult to buy modern music anymore. Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Is there a way to still buy the same kind of music that is on streaming platforms, and actually get the audio files?

cdrini 2y ago
I've been doing this, and here in Canada https://ca.7digital.com/ https://ca.7digital.com/ is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s, would highly recommend. I've been able to get modern albums without a hitch, but don't know about modern singles. I think in the US Amazon let's you buy MP3s, but not sure there. For the price of a Spotify subscription, I can usually buy a new album every month! Which is great; and I love slowly growing my album collection.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  While it’s more of a treasure hunt, I really enjoy browsing for and buying physical CDs, especially second hand. Albums are often $1, they sound as good as when they were released and they’re easily convertible to any other audio format, including lossless, 16-bit, 44.1khz formats. The only thing better is SACD, but finding that is like a diamond in the rough and ripping it is its own challenge unless you have the right equipment. People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient.
  - ethagnawl 2y ago
    A few years back, I did an apples-to-oranges test of an album I had on vinyl and CD. The vinyl version probably sounded better (usual BS about warmth and whatnot) but the CD sounded very, very good and it was way closer than I was expecting. It had been ~15 years since I'd listened to a CD on a real stereo and I'd totally forgotten how good they can sound. I'd certainly been swayed by the vinyl enthusiasts in the interim, too. The CD was so clean and clear but not in a robotic way. (I don't think this album had fallen victim to the loudness war either, fwiw.) Whereas the record sounded "warm" but also a little muddy and quiet (not in a good way) in comparison. I know there could be any number of reasons for this but that's also part of the problem. Was my setup dialed in and this is how it was supposed to sound? Or, was the table not flat? Was the needle dirty? Was the tracking force off? Yes, it's fun to tweak these variables but ... it's also fun to just listen to music that sounds excellent with zero effort. I've started buying CDs again (to my spouse's chagrin) and have no regrets. I do need to start ripping them before discrot comes for them. For anyone in the market, library sales are an excellent option to, essentially, buy CDs by the pound. They also often have rare compilations and anthologies that you won't find in thrift stores.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Disc rot is not a thing for factory pressed CDs, assuming normal storage. Cheap CDRs from ~2000 or so did have the issue. My CDs from the 80s and CDRs from the 90s are working fine.
      - Brian_K_White 2y ago
        disc rot is a thing for every disc that's made with aluminum, which is all but a very few super special ones like mobile fidelity sound lab made with gold. Oxygen permeates through both the polycarbonate base and the clear coat top, maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but always.
        ssl-3 2y ago
        Always? As in... Eventually? Sure, I'll buy that: Aluminum and oxygen are great friends that love eachothers' company, and on a long-enough timeline here in Earth's atmosphere they'll always be reunited. But how does that timeline compare to that of a human? Or even of the compact disc itself (a bit over 42 years old now)? I mean: At least anecdotally, I have never discovered rot on any of my CDs that did not also have other contributing condition issues. I haven't even experienced the once-reported issues of air-dried, solvent-based (instead of UV-cured) inks. (And although my sample set is not infinite, it is also not particularly small.)
        Brian_K_White 2y ago
        As a laserdisc collector, I am particularly aware of disc rot and in those it is far more present by now. Practically all discs have some level by now even the good ones, and even if they look clean to the eye. There are people that say the same thing there, that there are good discs that don't have rot and bad ones that do. But that is not true, there are only better and worse examples, faster and slower progress. cds are both younger and built better, so they will not only last to a later absolute date, they will last longer relative to their manufacturing date, but cds have a few other things that mask rot even when it starts, which is both that they are digital and the player has buffering and interpolation, and also that the data format includes redundant data for error correction. (ld is analog and has neither, later better players do add some digital processing but it can't do the kind of good job with a 6mhz analog fm ntsc video signal that a cd player can with a simple audio bitstream) A cd with the same rot that is visible on a ld (visible in the output not visible to the eye on the physical disc) will appear to play perfectly even in the cheapest junk player. So, it will take longer, but I see no reason to treat "longer" as "indefinite". There is no specific time, but it is inevitable and I don't think it's in the 100's of years but in the 10's of years, and the 10's of years, especially when many are already 30 years old, is not very many more 10's of years left. And if that turns out to be pessimistic and they last another 50 or more? That's just a bonus. Lucky future rippers who get a chance to rip with even better tech later. Tangentially I do also assume that some day long before the polycarbonate disintigrates, there will be a practical way to read even fully oxidized discs with a different frequency laser or even a camera or microscope-based head, or even a bulk scanner that just rasterizes the whole surface without even bothering to read the track in a spiral until after the fact purely in software. As time goes on, tools get both better and more accessible, so in 1995 it would not be possible for a person to make their own laser head, but today it probably is, and in only a few more years will just get easier and easier, and probably at a rate that outruns the rate at which the discs fully degrade.
  - elevaet 2y ago
    > People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient. I feel like I might be punished for stepping out of line here but CDs sound better than vinyl too.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      This should be objectively true, but the limitations on vinyl prevent some of the abuses in the production processes (the loudness wars). Often vinyl is better anyway just because the engineers had to go back to make a good mix (mostly this is mastering not mixing) for vinyl - if the vinyl mix had been put on CD the CD would be objectively better. Vinyl does theoretically have a better s/n ratio, but you can only see this in perfect setups, including a new needle in your player. Even then after just a handful of plays and vinyl is worn enough to be worse (I've heard of laser based vinyl plays which don't wear the media - I have no idea if they are real or how they compare to CDs, but I need to acknowledge them because they might be different enough to matter)
      - BizarroLand 2y ago
        I don't think the S/N ratio of vinyl approaches that of CDs. If you give vinyl a perfect literally flawless $10 million dollar setup and freshly carve a new disc from a fresh press plate and play it, even though analog has no reasonable bounds on how loud it can get from a physics perspective, there are dozens of things that in reality will get introduce noise into the system that are not present in CD Audio. It will likely sound at least just as good as a similarly treated CD, but I doubt that it will approach the S/N ratio of a properly mastered CD. CD has by default a perfect 0 noise floor, whereas vinyl will never have that, and typically has a pretty high noise floor, meaning that even a good vinyl press will never have the same noise floor as the same recording placed on CD. I said all of that to say, to me vinyl is appreciable for its flaws compared to CD. Vinyl is mastered to a different spec than CDs are (when its done properly), and it can sometimes add to the experience because the mastering and pressing process focuses on different frequencies. Aside from that, the fact that each time you listen to a vinyl record it changes in subtle ways, bits of dust get moved around, atomic scratches get worn into the surface, meaning that every listen is completely unique, ever so slightly different than any other time that album or any other similar pressing has been played. That is one of the thoughts I enjoy when listening to vinyl that makes it likeable, a little more special to me when it crosses my mind. Digital is almost always the same. Analog is always different.
  - sam29681749 2y ago
    CDs are smaller, cheaper, sound great, and have longer playtime. I think they're the superior medium. I get people prefer the sound of vinyl, though.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  If the store of your choice offers FLAC as an option (and I think they all do), you can simply make your own MP3s from the FLAC files. That's one of the biggest advantages of lossless audio. (The improvement in audio quality is actually pretty minimal, for most people.) You can also keep the FLAC files to convert them to some future format later, or even do something really wild like burn them to a CD or something.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    I did that for a while, but all the tools seem to have been unmaintained for the last decade. The command line ones still work, but the GUIs to make them easy still depend on qt3 or other such obsolete things. (streaming servers like jellyfin do this on the fly easy, but other workflows for offline use don't work anymore even though they are still sometimes useful)
    - skydhash 2y ago
      Most people weite scripts with said tools which can keep going for a long time. I have a couple laying in my library directory to add replay gain metadata, convert to aac, and backup.
    - LeoPanthera 2y ago
      Mac users can use XLD: https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html Free, still maintained, and supports every format around.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > ...is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s I just went to Amazon and found what's advertised as "mp3" for a recent Taylor Swift album.
  - cdrini 2y ago
    That's not an option here in Canada, alas!
  - Ageodene 2y ago
    IIRC those are only 256 kbps. I get that MP3 is a lossy format, but still, they could at the very least offer 320 kbps. I was under the impression Amazon wasn't short on server space.
    - dehrmann 2y ago
      Can you hear the difference? Even with mp3, it gets hard at high bitrates.
afranchuk 2y ago
I've enjoyed the selection on Qobuz, which is all DRM-free and allows mp3 or lossless flac formats.
- Night_Thastus 2y ago
  I like Qobuz too, but have a couple issues with it: * The prices are a lot higher there than anywhere else * They don't remember my payment information. I would opt-in to this if it's a legal concern. It's so annoying every single time having to enter it in all over again. I'd do PayPal but they charge a fee these days. * Their tar'd up download format sucks, and requires me doing a lot of re-naming and re-foldering things to get it to a sane format. * They started removing some of the things I PAID FOR from my account. Not cool. It's fine if you have to remove it from sale but removing it from my account should not be legal. * Many popular tracks from otherwise not-so-popular albums are locked so you can't buy just that song, you need to buy the whole album * If you've bought a few songs from an album, you don't get an appropriate discount if you later decide to buy the whole album - which some digital stores are good about.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    I never trust online platforms to keep my library. I download stuff and back it up.
whereistimbo 2y ago
iTunes?
Mainsail 2y ago
I use a mix of Qobuz and Bandcamp and have been happy with them. https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop https://bandcamp.com/ https://bandcamp.com/
- Springtime 2y ago
  Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts. Hopefully their catalog remains strong as it's about the only online-only store with lossless that has a wide variety of mainstream artists. I'll also mention: Bleep.com, Boomkat, Ninja Tune (label that directly sells), Junodownload.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    Yep, "Pink Martini - A Retrospective" was removed after I bought one song from it, when I click on the track in my library the error toast states "It's impossible to play this track. Thank you for trying another playback format." But that's the whole point of buying it, mp3 is safely on my SD card, plays just fine
  - netr0ute 2y ago
    > Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts. What was the deal with this?
    - Springtime 2y ago
      It wasn't explained officially. I assume some distribution arrangement changed but the artists/releases were so varied and from various labels that I can't determine the relationship. I'd bought a handful of releases there and all of them were affected.
lmm 2y ago
Amazon music still sells the mp3 downloads, though they definitely nudge you away from them as much as they can.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  This is a great way to use those digital rewards Amazon gives if you delay/combine shipping if you haven't dropped Amazon yet.
coryd_dev 2y ago
Bandcamp, 7Digital and (extremely reluctantly) Amazon. The bigger the label the harder it is to buy music digitally.
- pier25 2y ago
  also Bleep
- Zambyte 2y ago
  Heh, I commented this exact list in order before reading your comment :D
- Pxtl 2y ago
  Amazon hates Canada (no Amazon music store, no Household plan) so here the tool of last resort is iTunes Music Store (it still exists, apparently).
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  As an equally reluctant option one side or the other to Amazon, Apple's "iTunes Store" still exists and is "mostly" DRM free, if you don't mind AAC and friends (MP4 Audio) rather than MP3. It's getting harder and harder to find those Buy buttons, especially if you start from an Apple Music link/the Apple Music app, but it's currently no worse than Amazon as Amazon and Apple seem deep in direct competition on how hard they make it to find Buy buttons.
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paxys 2y ago
iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.
- reaperducer 2y ago
  iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy. Nope. Not even remotely. Only if your taste in music is very narrow. Just this weekend I tried to buy some Christmas songs that were popular and common on the radio in the 80's. I could only find about half of them on Amazon or Apple Music. Most had some version available, but not the canonical one I grew up with. Some didn't exist at all.
  - paxys 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - recursive 2y ago
      > were popular and common on the radio in the 80's You're grossly mischaracterizing this. > recorded a track in their garage in 1977 and sold a few cassettes to their friends
      - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
        > You're grossly mischaracterizing this. To be fair, so was Reaperducer, with the "Only if your taste in music is very narrow" bit.
    - nobody9999 2y ago
      >The volume of music available for an average person anywhere in the world to purchase today is many orders of magnitude greater than any era in the past. You are 100% correct. But not for the reasons you imply. Music recording is just barely 120 years old, and mass market music media sales are, perhaps 75-80 years old. And since many of those recordings are still around, with more music being recorded every year, it's no wonder there's more music available now than there ever has been. That said, Sturgeon's Law[0] applies to music as well as everything else. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
JamesLeonis 2y ago
I have the most luck going to the artist websites or social media. They often have links to different storefronts to buy physical and digital copies. The majority are on Bandcamp, but larger groups also release on Amazon.
reaperducer 2y ago
Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Analog hole. It takes a bit of time, but if you really care about the music, it's worth it. Note: I suspect that the streaming services watermark the songs. I have some from Apple Music that it refuses to sync over its cloud service. Doesn't bother me, though, because I primarily sync via wire.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  They don’t have to watermark them to do that. They can just do the regular content ID thing YouTube does.
  - reaperducer 2y ago
    But it works fine for songs ripped from vinyl. It's only things from streaming that gum up the works.
jamesponddotco 2y ago
Personally, I have a TIDAL subscription, download everything I like from there, and then store everything on a Plex server. While not legal, having the subscription fix any moral problems I’d have with the idea.
- carlgreene 2y ago
  How are you downloading from Tidal?
  - plausibility 2y ago
    Tidal has lots of downloader clients you can install due to its often technical but niche user base. May I suggest Tidal-Media-Downloader[0]? Now if only there was a way to download things from YouTube Music with a Premium subscription. It's practically impossible to search for "YouTube Music download" without falling into the 'youtube-dl YouTube mp3 audio tracks!' SEO hole. Vague naming on Google's part. [0]: https://github.com/yaronzz/Tidal-Media-Downloader https://github.com/yaronzz/Tidal-Media-Downloader
    - sphars 2y ago
      You can 100% download higher quality audio tracks from YouTube using yt-dlp. You have to use session cookies from a browser that you've logged into your premium account with to get the higher quality tracks. There are options with yt-dlp to help with this.
      - plausibility 2y ago
        This is kind of the confusion I mean. Sometimes YouTube Music has audio tracks that you are seemingly different to the "X Artist - Topic" videos you can find on YouTube proper. I'll have to revisit this again to see if it's all the same now, because the last time I was looking into it a few years ago not everything I had organised in playlists on YTM was available via regular YouTube playlists I could rip with yt-dlp.
  - deleted 2y ago
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_r4nc 2y ago
When I moved country and updated my credit card in Spotify to my card from the new country Spotify also changed my “region”. As a result there are so many songs I have “starred”/“added”/“liked” (whatever fucking language they’re using for it now) are just greyed out and unplayable. Anyway as for actually getting copies of the music I listen to I think we should just pirate it completely unashamedly.
- eleveriven 2y ago
  That sounds really frustrating! It’s one of those cases where it feels like the system is actively working against the listener
- amatecha 2y ago
  some time ago when I canceled spotify, they show this special playlist like "we'll miss you" or whatever, and each of the song names, in order, spell out this little goodbye message. Ironically one of the songs in that playlist was greyed out and unplayable. Like, great job reminding me why I'm canceling :)
- verisimi 2y ago
  It's probably not Spotify's fault though, but it's actually on account of being able to finely control legal ownership of licensed songs. This is all insane imo, but legally sound. Welcome to the future.
Night_Thastus 2y ago
Bandcamp and Qobuz have been my only options for anything in lossless quality. Everything else is shitty compressed MP3s.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Beatport generally has more mainstream stuff and offers it in WAV and AIFF.
  - Night_Thastus 2y ago
    Not FLAC? I mean I guess I can run them through something to convert them, but I'm surprised.
    - Gigachad 2y ago
      It’s because up until very recently, PioneerDJ gear only supports MP3, WAV, and AIFF.
      - Night_Thastus 2y ago
        What is PioneerDJ?
- 71bw 2y ago
  >Everything else is shitty compressed MP3s. Check your supposed lossless files in Fakin The Funk or manually in Spek and become horrified at how many of them are complete garbage.
toastercat 2y ago
The most sustainable way to "buy" music IMO, is to pirate it, and then buy merch from the artist as support. Or just buy off Bandcamp if its an option.
- orblivion 2y ago
  I Don't Have Spotify should add Bandcamp support. Bandcamp is great for just playing the music too.
  - Syonyk 2y ago
    It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them. Buy it, download as FLAC, put in your preferred local infrastructure to play. Plex/Plexamp works well, as does local file storage and a good command line music client if you're less GUI-friendly or don't have the resources for running them.
    - meeb 2y ago
      Downloading large collections can be a pain though, one at a time and in zips. I made this to help though https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync Bandcamp is the only place to sensibly buy music you can own these days which is pretty depressing.
      - prmoustache 2y ago
        what about online music shops like bleep.com and 7digital?
        hatsix 2y ago
        "Fun Fact", 7digital is owned by the same parent company as Bandcamp.
      - tempfile 2y ago
        I always wanted this, thank you!
glitchc 2y ago
I still buy CDs. It's true a number of modern artists do not release on physical media, although vinyl is making a comeback.
- variaga 2y ago
  Same. Especially for backfilling your collection, used CDs are incredibly cost effective and DRM free. Try BookOff, yard or estate sales, or "friends of the library" events. You will burn some time searching, but the hunt can be fun on its own.
  - CHB0403085482 2y ago
    >CDs are incredibly cost effective and DRM free I got one that wasn't; the music CD was published by SONY JAPAN. Had to do some shenanigans to play it on a PC drive. Decided it was best to rip it just in case.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  As someone approaching 50, the return of Vynil is quite strange feeling. I now see record stores so full of Vynil that it feels like I timetraveled back to my teenage years when CDs started to being sold, alongside laser discs on a little store corner.
Zambyte 2y ago
I look for music on bandcamp, 7digital, and then amazon music in that order. All offering drm free mp3 and flac files. I don't think there has been something I wanted that I havem't been able to find yet.
- precompute 2y ago
  Bandcamp is the way to go. Artists get paid and I get to keep my data.
devmunchies 2y ago
I recently learned about buying Mp3s on Amazon. Most CD purchase pages have a "purchase options" and you can do Mp3s. I do that for mainstream things for my kids that aren't on bandcamp (such as music from a kids TV show). I'm actually working on a IoT device where one of the main goals was selfhosting audio content for my kids. Uses AI for the user interface. Similar to Alexa but battery powered. Still in private beta (orders are closed right now) but here is the link for anyone curious. https://heycurio.com/ https://heycurio.com/
- cdrini 2y ago
  What a beautiful website! Absolute joy to explore it.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  It exploded. I get only server errors now.
  - devmunchies 2y ago
    What do i even pay Vercel for?! gah
- vunderba 2y ago
  Ah. AG Talking Bear meets LLM. I started working on something similar a year back - but tried to keep it restricted to offline which made it more challenging since inference on CPU of raspberry PI limits you to very small models. Sending voice clips of children to an always listening server is just a bit too dystopian for me.
- eleveriven 2y ago
  Seems like a smart setup
nunez 2y ago
iTunes and record stores still exist!
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eleveriven 2y ago
I know that some artists sell their music directly from their own websites. I prefer to buy CD versions actually...
- Pxtl 2y ago
  I can never justify it to myself if the shipping cost is more than 25% of the product price.
hakfoo 2y ago
Used CDs are dirt cheap. Local thrift stores here tend to price them at $1-$1.50 each. Of course, the dedicated "record" stores tend to be closer to $6-10, but they're more likely to have things other than thousands of country albums.
antihero 2y ago
Bandcamp and Soulseek.
pjmlp 2y ago
Some artists sell them directly either from the site, or at their concerts, the German region I live on still has several stores, and so far I also managed to get several MP3 albuns. I don't use streaming platforms other than being aware of new musicians in YouTube, which I eventually buy their albums.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself... Qobuz. For a start they only do lossless: no mp3. We're soon a quarter of a century into the 21st: gone are the Napster days of needing to stream mp3s. Then Qobuz often has albums in higher quality than 44.1 kHz / 16-bit stereo. Not that you'll hear the difference: but artists/sound engineer going to the trouble of offering higher sample rate / bit depth typically do care about producing good sounding music so there's that. Then Qobuz allows you to do precisely what you want: you can buy individual tracks or full albums to download, no DRM. I've got both a collection of audio files I ripped myself from my own CDs (which I keep too), in a 100% bitperfect / lossless way (verified with an online DB of people who also ripped their CDs) and a Qobuz subscription. The one criticism about Qobuz would be that music discovery ain't the best out there: the UI is actually quite bad. But it's good stuff for people who care about quality and who love to own their music. Most network streaming devices now support Qobuz: for example I've got a fully integrated Yamaha amp that contains a network streamer (Yamaha R-N1000A) and MusicCast (Yamaha's music streaming app, like Sonos I guess but Yamaha) supports Qobuz (and Tidal and Spotify). You don't just rent temporary access to an online service that may disappear under your feet or remove songs you used to listen to: you can actually buy and own individual tracks. Check the plans they have: depending on how many songs you buy, one may be better than the other. IIUC Spotify, under the pressure of both Tidal and Qobuz, announced they'll be moving to lossless streaming. It's 2024. At fucking last.

cdrini 2y ago

I've been doing this, and here in Canada https://ca.7digital.com/ https://ca.7digital.com/ is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s, would highly recommend. I've been able to get modern albums without a hitch, but don't know about modern singles. I think in the US Amazon let's you buy MP3s, but not sure there. For the price of a Spotify subscription, I can usually buy a new album every month! Which is great; and I love slowly growing my album collection.

jonhohle 2y ago
While it’s more of a treasure hunt, I really enjoy browsing for and buying physical CDs, especially second hand. Albums are often $1, they sound as good as when they were released and they’re easily convertible to any other audio format, including lossless, 16-bit, 44.1khz formats. The only thing better is SACD, but finding that is like a diamond in the rough and ripping it is its own challenge unless you have the right equipment. People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient.
- ethagnawl 2y ago
  A few years back, I did an apples-to-oranges test of an album I had on vinyl and CD. The vinyl version probably sounded better (usual BS about warmth and whatnot) but the CD sounded very, very good and it was way closer than I was expecting. It had been ~15 years since I'd listened to a CD on a real stereo and I'd totally forgotten how good they can sound. I'd certainly been swayed by the vinyl enthusiasts in the interim, too. The CD was so clean and clear but not in a robotic way. (I don't think this album had fallen victim to the loudness war either, fwiw.) Whereas the record sounded "warm" but also a little muddy and quiet (not in a good way) in comparison. I know there could be any number of reasons for this but that's also part of the problem. Was my setup dialed in and this is how it was supposed to sound? Or, was the table not flat? Was the needle dirty? Was the tracking force off? Yes, it's fun to tweak these variables but ... it's also fun to just listen to music that sounds excellent with zero effort. I've started buying CDs again (to my spouse's chagrin) and have no regrets. I do need to start ripping them before discrot comes for them. For anyone in the market, library sales are an excellent option to, essentially, buy CDs by the pound. They also often have rare compilations and anthologies that you won't find in thrift stores.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Disc rot is not a thing for factory pressed CDs, assuming normal storage. Cheap CDRs from ~2000 or so did have the issue. My CDs from the 80s and CDRs from the 90s are working fine.
    - Brian_K_White 2y ago
      disc rot is a thing for every disc that's made with aluminum, which is all but a very few super special ones like mobile fidelity sound lab made with gold. Oxygen permeates through both the polycarbonate base and the clear coat top, maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but always.
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        Always? As in... Eventually? Sure, I'll buy that: Aluminum and oxygen are great friends that love eachothers' company, and on a long-enough timeline here in Earth's atmosphere they'll always be reunited. But how does that timeline compare to that of a human? Or even of the compact disc itself (a bit over 42 years old now)? I mean: At least anecdotally, I have never discovered rot on any of my CDs that did not also have other contributing condition issues. I haven't even experienced the once-reported issues of air-dried, solvent-based (instead of UV-cured) inks. (And although my sample set is not infinite, it is also not particularly small.)
        Brian_K_White 2y ago
        As a laserdisc collector, I am particularly aware of disc rot and in those it is far more present by now. Practically all discs have some level by now even the good ones, and even if they look clean to the eye. There are people that say the same thing there, that there are good discs that don't have rot and bad ones that do. But that is not true, there are only better and worse examples, faster and slower progress. cds are both younger and built better, so they will not only last to a later absolute date, they will last longer relative to their manufacturing date, but cds have a few other things that mask rot even when it starts, which is both that they are digital and the player has buffering and interpolation, and also that the data format includes redundant data for error correction. (ld is analog and has neither, later better players do add some digital processing but it can't do the kind of good job with a 6mhz analog fm ntsc video signal that a cd player can with a simple audio bitstream) A cd with the same rot that is visible on a ld (visible in the output not visible to the eye on the physical disc) will appear to play perfectly even in the cheapest junk player. So, it will take longer, but I see no reason to treat "longer" as "indefinite". There is no specific time, but it is inevitable and I don't think it's in the 100's of years but in the 10's of years, and the 10's of years, especially when many are already 30 years old, is not very many more 10's of years left. And if that turns out to be pessimistic and they last another 50 or more? That's just a bonus. Lucky future rippers who get a chance to rip with even better tech later. Tangentially I do also assume that some day long before the polycarbonate disintigrates, there will be a practical way to read even fully oxidized discs with a different frequency laser or even a camera or microscope-based head, or even a bulk scanner that just rasterizes the whole surface without even bothering to read the track in a spiral until after the fact purely in software. As time goes on, tools get both better and more accessible, so in 1995 it would not be possible for a person to make their own laser head, but today it probably is, and in only a few more years will just get easier and easier, and probably at a rate that outruns the rate at which the discs fully degrade.
- elevaet 2y ago
  > People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient. I feel like I might be punished for stepping out of line here but CDs sound better than vinyl too.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    This should be objectively true, but the limitations on vinyl prevent some of the abuses in the production processes (the loudness wars). Often vinyl is better anyway just because the engineers had to go back to make a good mix (mostly this is mastering not mixing) for vinyl - if the vinyl mix had been put on CD the CD would be objectively better. Vinyl does theoretically have a better s/n ratio, but you can only see this in perfect setups, including a new needle in your player. Even then after just a handful of plays and vinyl is worn enough to be worse (I've heard of laser based vinyl plays which don't wear the media - I have no idea if they are real or how they compare to CDs, but I need to acknowledge them because they might be different enough to matter)
    - BizarroLand 2y ago
      I don't think the S/N ratio of vinyl approaches that of CDs. If you give vinyl a perfect literally flawless $10 million dollar setup and freshly carve a new disc from a fresh press plate and play it, even though analog has no reasonable bounds on how loud it can get from a physics perspective, there are dozens of things that in reality will get introduce noise into the system that are not present in CD Audio. It will likely sound at least just as good as a similarly treated CD, but I doubt that it will approach the S/N ratio of a properly mastered CD. CD has by default a perfect 0 noise floor, whereas vinyl will never have that, and typically has a pretty high noise floor, meaning that even a good vinyl press will never have the same noise floor as the same recording placed on CD. I said all of that to say, to me vinyl is appreciable for its flaws compared to CD. Vinyl is mastered to a different spec than CDs are (when its done properly), and it can sometimes add to the experience because the mastering and pressing process focuses on different frequencies. Aside from that, the fact that each time you listen to a vinyl record it changes in subtle ways, bits of dust get moved around, atomic scratches get worn into the surface, meaning that every listen is completely unique, ever so slightly different than any other time that album or any other similar pressing has been played. That is one of the thoughts I enjoy when listening to vinyl that makes it likeable, a little more special to me when it crosses my mind. Digital is almost always the same. Analog is always different.
- sam29681749 2y ago
  CDs are smaller, cheaper, sound great, and have longer playtime. I think they're the superior medium. I get people prefer the sound of vinyl, though.
LeoPanthera 2y ago
If the store of your choice offers FLAC as an option (and I think they all do), you can simply make your own MP3s from the FLAC files. That's one of the biggest advantages of lossless audio. (The improvement in audio quality is actually pretty minimal, for most people.) You can also keep the FLAC files to convert them to some future format later, or even do something really wild like burn them to a CD or something.
- bluGill 2y ago
  I did that for a while, but all the tools seem to have been unmaintained for the last decade. The command line ones still work, but the GUIs to make them easy still depend on qt3 or other such obsolete things. (streaming servers like jellyfin do this on the fly easy, but other workflows for offline use don't work anymore even though they are still sometimes useful)
  - skydhash 2y ago
    Most people weite scripts with said tools which can keep going for a long time. I have a couple laying in my library directory to add replay gain metadata, convert to aac, and backup.
  - LeoPanthera 2y ago
    Mac users can use XLD: https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html Free, still maintained, and supports every format around.
dehrmann 2y ago
> ...is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s I just went to Amazon and found what's advertised as "mp3" for a recent Taylor Swift album.
- cdrini 2y ago
  That's not an option here in Canada, alas!
- Ageodene 2y ago
  IIRC those are only 256 kbps. I get that MP3 is a lossy format, but still, they could at the very least offer 320 kbps. I was under the impression Amazon wasn't short on server space.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    Can you hear the difference? Even with mp3, it gets hard at high bitrates.

afranchuk 2y ago

I've enjoyed the selection on Qobuz, which is all DRM-free and allows mp3 or lossless flac formats.

Night_Thastus 2y ago
I like Qobuz too, but have a couple issues with it: * The prices are a lot higher there than anywhere else * They don't remember my payment information. I would opt-in to this if it's a legal concern. It's so annoying every single time having to enter it in all over again. I'd do PayPal but they charge a fee these days. * Their tar'd up download format sucks, and requires me doing a lot of re-naming and re-foldering things to get it to a sane format. * They started removing some of the things I PAID FOR from my account. Not cool. It's fine if you have to remove it from sale but removing it from my account should not be legal. * Many popular tracks from otherwise not-so-popular albums are locked so you can't buy just that song, you need to buy the whole album * If you've bought a few songs from an album, you don't get an appropriate discount if you later decide to buy the whole album - which some digital stores are good about.
- skydhash 2y ago
  I never trust online platforms to keep my library. I download stuff and back it up.

whereistimbo 2y ago

iTunes?

Mainsail 2y ago

I use a mix of Qobuz and Bandcamp and have been happy with them. https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop https://bandcamp.com/ https://bandcamp.com/

Springtime 2y ago
Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts. Hopefully their catalog remains strong as it's about the only online-only store with lossless that has a wide variety of mainstream artists. I'll also mention: Bleep.com, Boomkat, Ninja Tune (label that directly sells), Junodownload.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Yep, "Pink Martini - A Retrospective" was removed after I bought one song from it, when I click on the track in my library the error toast states "It's impossible to play this track. Thank you for trying another playback format." But that's the whole point of buying it, mp3 is safely on my SD card, plays just fine
- netr0ute 2y ago
  > Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts. What was the deal with this?
  - Springtime 2y ago
    It wasn't explained officially. I assume some distribution arrangement changed but the artists/releases were so varied and from various labels that I can't determine the relationship. I'd bought a handful of releases there and all of them were affected.

lmm 2y ago

Amazon music still sells the mp3 downloads, though they definitely nudge you away from them as much as they can.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
This is a great way to use those digital rewards Amazon gives if you delay/combine shipping if you haven't dropped Amazon yet.

coryd_dev 2y ago

Bandcamp, 7Digital and (extremely reluctantly) Amazon. The bigger the label the harder it is to buy music digitally.

pier25 2y ago
also Bleep
Zambyte 2y ago
Heh, I commented this exact list in order before reading your comment :D
Pxtl 2y ago
Amazon hates Canada (no Amazon music store, no Household plan) so here the tool of last resort is iTunes Music Store (it still exists, apparently).
WorldMaker 2y ago
As an equally reluctant option one side or the other to Amazon, Apple's "iTunes Store" still exists and is "mostly" DRM free, if you don't mind AAC and friends (MP4 Audio) rather than MP3. It's getting harder and harder to find those Buy buttons, especially if you start from an Apple Music link/the Apple Music app, but it's currently no worse than Amazon as Amazon and Apple seem deep in direct competition on how hard they make it to find Buy buttons.

deleted 2y ago

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paxys 2y ago

iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.

reaperducer 2y ago
iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy. Nope. Not even remotely. Only if your taste in music is very narrow. Just this weekend I tried to buy some Christmas songs that were popular and common on the radio in the 80's. I could only find about half of them on Amazon or Apple Music. Most had some version available, but not the canonical one I grew up with. Some didn't exist at all.
- paxys 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - recursive 2y ago
    > were popular and common on the radio in the 80's You're grossly mischaracterizing this. > recorded a track in their garage in 1977 and sold a few cassettes to their friends
    - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
      > You're grossly mischaracterizing this. To be fair, so was Reaperducer, with the "Only if your taste in music is very narrow" bit.
  - nobody9999 2y ago
    >The volume of music available for an average person anywhere in the world to purchase today is many orders of magnitude greater than any era in the past. You are 100% correct. But not for the reasons you imply. Music recording is just barely 120 years old, and mass market music media sales are, perhaps 75-80 years old. And since many of those recordings are still around, with more music being recorded every year, it's no wonder there's more music available now than there ever has been. That said, Sturgeon's Law[0] applies to music as well as everything else. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

JamesLeonis 2y ago

I have the most luck going to the artist websites or social media. They often have links to different storefronts to buy physical and digital copies. The majority are on Bandcamp, but larger groups also release on Amazon.

reaperducer 2y ago

Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Analog hole. It takes a bit of time, but if you really care about the music, it's worth it. Note: I suspect that the streaming services watermark the songs. I have some from Apple Music that it refuses to sync over its cloud service. Doesn't bother me, though, because I primarily sync via wire.

Gigachad 2y ago
They don’t have to watermark them to do that. They can just do the regular content ID thing YouTube does.
- reaperducer 2y ago
  But it works fine for songs ripped from vinyl. It's only things from streaming that gum up the works.

jamesponddotco 2y ago

Personally, I have a TIDAL subscription, download everything I like from there, and then store everything on a Plex server. While not legal, having the subscription fix any moral problems I’d have with the idea.

carlgreene 2y ago
How are you downloading from Tidal?
- plausibility 2y ago
  Tidal has lots of downloader clients you can install due to its often technical but niche user base. May I suggest Tidal-Media-Downloader[0]? Now if only there was a way to download things from YouTube Music with a Premium subscription. It's practically impossible to search for "YouTube Music download" without falling into the 'youtube-dl YouTube mp3 audio tracks!' SEO hole. Vague naming on Google's part. [0]: https://github.com/yaronzz/Tidal-Media-Downloader https://github.com/yaronzz/Tidal-Media-Downloader
  - sphars 2y ago
    You can 100% download higher quality audio tracks from YouTube using yt-dlp. You have to use session cookies from a browser that you've logged into your premium account with to get the higher quality tracks. There are options with yt-dlp to help with this.
    - plausibility 2y ago
      This is kind of the confusion I mean. Sometimes YouTube Music has audio tracks that you are seemingly different to the "X Artist - Topic" videos you can find on YouTube proper. I'll have to revisit this again to see if it's all the same now, because the last time I was looking into it a few years ago not everything I had organised in playlists on YTM was available via regular YouTube playlists I could rip with yt-dlp.
- deleted 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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_r4nc 2y ago

When I moved country and updated my credit card in Spotify to my card from the new country Spotify also changed my “region”. As a result there are so many songs I have “starred”/“added”/“liked” (whatever fucking language they’re using for it now) are just greyed out and unplayable. Anyway as for actually getting copies of the music I listen to I think we should just pirate it completely unashamedly.

eleveriven 2y ago
That sounds really frustrating! It’s one of those cases where it feels like the system is actively working against the listener
amatecha 2y ago
some time ago when I canceled spotify, they show this special playlist like "we'll miss you" or whatever, and each of the song names, in order, spell out this little goodbye message. Ironically one of the songs in that playlist was greyed out and unplayable. Like, great job reminding me why I'm canceling :)
verisimi 2y ago
It's probably not Spotify's fault though, but it's actually on account of being able to finely control legal ownership of licensed songs. This is all insane imo, but legally sound. Welcome to the future.

Night_Thastus 2y ago

Bandcamp and Qobuz have been my only options for anything in lossless quality. Everything else is shitty compressed MP3s.

Gigachad 2y ago
Beatport generally has more mainstream stuff and offers it in WAV and AIFF.
- Night_Thastus 2y ago
  Not FLAC? I mean I guess I can run them through something to convert them, but I'm surprised.
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    It’s because up until very recently, PioneerDJ gear only supports MP3, WAV, and AIFF.
    - Night_Thastus 2y ago
      What is PioneerDJ?
71bw 2y ago
>Everything else is shitty compressed MP3s. Check your supposed lossless files in Fakin The Funk or manually in Spek and become horrified at how many of them are complete garbage.

toastercat 2y ago

The most sustainable way to "buy" music IMO, is to pirate it, and then buy merch from the artist as support. Or just buy off Bandcamp if its an option.

orblivion 2y ago
I Don't Have Spotify should add Bandcamp support. Bandcamp is great for just playing the music too.
- Syonyk 2y ago
  It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them. Buy it, download as FLAC, put in your preferred local infrastructure to play. Plex/Plexamp works well, as does local file storage and a good command line music client if you're less GUI-friendly or don't have the resources for running them.
  - meeb 2y ago
    Downloading large collections can be a pain though, one at a time and in zips. I made this to help though https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync Bandcamp is the only place to sensibly buy music you can own these days which is pretty depressing.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      what about online music shops like bleep.com and 7digital?
      - hatsix 2y ago
        "Fun Fact", 7digital is owned by the same parent company as Bandcamp.
    - tempfile 2y ago
      I always wanted this, thank you!

glitchc 2y ago

I still buy CDs. It's true a number of modern artists do not release on physical media, although vinyl is making a comeback.

variaga 2y ago
Same. Especially for backfilling your collection, used CDs are incredibly cost effective and DRM free. Try BookOff, yard or estate sales, or "friends of the library" events. You will burn some time searching, but the hunt can be fun on its own.
- CHB0403085482 2y ago
  >CDs are incredibly cost effective and DRM free I got one that wasn't; the music CD was published by SONY JAPAN. Had to do some shenanigans to play it on a PC drive. Decided it was best to rip it just in case.
pjmlp 2y ago
As someone approaching 50, the return of Vynil is quite strange feeling. I now see record stores so full of Vynil that it feels like I timetraveled back to my teenage years when CDs started to being sold, alongside laser discs on a little store corner.

Zambyte 2y ago

I look for music on bandcamp, 7digital, and then amazon music in that order. All offering drm free mp3 and flac files. I don't think there has been something I wanted that I havem't been able to find yet.

precompute 2y ago
Bandcamp is the way to go. Artists get paid and I get to keep my data.

devmunchies 2y ago

I recently learned about buying Mp3s on Amazon. Most CD purchase pages have a "purchase options" and you can do Mp3s. I do that for mainstream things for my kids that aren't on bandcamp (such as music from a kids TV show). I'm actually working on a IoT device where one of the main goals was selfhosting audio content for my kids. Uses AI for the user interface. Similar to Alexa but battery powered. Still in private beta (orders are closed right now) but here is the link for anyone curious. https://heycurio.com/ https://heycurio.com/

cdrini 2y ago
What a beautiful website! Absolute joy to explore it.
Aeolun 2y ago
It exploded. I get only server errors now.
- devmunchies 2y ago
  What do i even pay Vercel for?! gah
vunderba 2y ago
Ah. AG Talking Bear meets LLM. I started working on something similar a year back - but tried to keep it restricted to offline which made it more challenging since inference on CPU of raspberry PI limits you to very small models. Sending voice clips of children to an always listening server is just a bit too dystopian for me.
eleveriven 2y ago
Seems like a smart setup

nunez 2y ago

iTunes and record stores still exist!

deleted 2y ago

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eleveriven 2y ago

I know that some artists sell their music directly from their own websites. I prefer to buy CD versions actually...

Pxtl 2y ago
I can never justify it to myself if the shipping cost is more than 25% of the product price.

hakfoo 2y ago

Used CDs are dirt cheap. Local thrift stores here tend to price them at $1-$1.50 each. Of course, the dedicated "record" stores tend to be closer to $6-10, but they're more likely to have things other than thousands of country albums.

antihero 2y ago

Bandcamp and Soulseek.

pjmlp 2y ago

Some artists sell them directly either from the site, or at their concerts, the German region I live on still has several stores, and so far I also managed to get several MP3 albuns. I don't use streaming platforms other than being aware of new musicians in YouTube, which I eventually buy their albums.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself... Qobuz. For a start they only do lossless: no mp3. We're soon a quarter of a century into the 21st: gone are the Napster days of needing to stream mp3s. Then Qobuz often has albums in higher quality than 44.1 kHz / 16-bit stereo. Not that you'll hear the difference: but artists/sound engineer going to the trouble of offering higher sample rate / bit depth typically do care about producing good sounding music so there's that. Then Qobuz allows you to do precisely what you want: you can buy individual tracks or full albums to download, no DRM. I've got both a collection of audio files I ripped myself from my own CDs (which I keep too), in a 100% bitperfect / lossless way (verified with an online DB of people who also ripped their CDs) and a Qobuz subscription. The one criticism about Qobuz would be that music discovery ain't the best out there: the UI is actually quite bad. But it's good stuff for people who care about quality and who love to own their music. Most network streaming devices now support Qobuz: for example I've got a fully integrated Yamaha amp that contains a network streamer (Yamaha R-N1000A) and MusicCast (Yamaha's music streaming app, like Sonos I guess but Yamaha) supports Qobuz (and Tidal and Spotify). You don't just rent temporary access to an online service that may disappear under your feet or remove songs you used to listen to: you can actually buy and own individual tracks. Check the plans they have: depending on how many songs you buy, one may be better than the other. IIUC Spotify, under the pressure of both Tidal and Qobuz, announced they'll be moving to lossless streaming. It's 2024. At fucking last.