You mean there’s more of me out there?!
✅ No buffering, music starts instantly
✅ No connection issues
✅ No monthly money drain
✅ No arbitrary access or availability revocation
❌ No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
✅ I’m patient
deleted by creator
Still fits in a 1 TB sd card… Barely!
Go FLAC or go home.
I fucking love my 100gb flac collection
It’s all about the 64kbps .wma’s. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day
FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don’t prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don’t avoid non-lossless albums either.
The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent.
I would disagree with this. It isn’t really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.
What I’ve noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.
I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.
Um, .wav is a lossless format. It’s just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it’s stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.
The guy on the left has mp3, the guy on the right has aif and the guy in the middle has flac
Bandcamp, Supraph Online, Ototoy, Uta 573, Steam and GOG’s OSTs and Apple’s iTunes store have been my to-go options. No DRM, no worries. Just avoid Apple’s music subscription, as it is DRM’d.
The Enshittification has forced us to revisit the old way
I recently started ripping all my Spotify playlists using spotdl to put them on my Plex. Spotdl doesn’t actually download from Spotify but uses it as a source for the metadata to tag the files but it gets the audio by matching to YouTube music and downloading from there. From there I import to lidarr for renaming / organization.
If I really like something, I get my own copy. Because I don’t like corporations deciding what I’m allowed to enjoy.
Am I too FLAC to get these joke?
Yall may hate on em, but Spotify has not only made my life easier in that I don’t have to first pirate then sort all my music, but has also got me through some difficult times by recommending music that I would have never found otherwise. I’ve found groups that I love that have maybe 2000 monthly listens. Went to concerts in places I’ve never been for bands I never would have found. It’s more than just listening to your own music. The Monday and Friday discover playlists have been more beneficial to me than most anything else on this planet.
It’s harder to find (legal) downloadable music anymore too. 7Digital has been pretty alright for me, but I just stopped bothering with Spotify and Pandora and such. Youtube used to be great for discovery until they started mega cracking down on adblock again.
How often people are just getting rug-pulled left and right by streaming services is ridiculous.
Uh, yes, Youtube trying to Anti-Adblock… pops up once or twice a year, then I click on “Update uBlock” and be done with it…
Y’know most of us audiophiles are managing actual libraries… but they’re not mp3. Mines mostly flac.
My library is competing with Spotify.
MULLVAD! Wireguard configuration! Quantum resistant encryption! Multi-hop!
ProtonVPN!
Qbittorrent!
Sorry…there I go again with my Tourette’s syndrome, spouting off the names of random software.
You should never pirate things! How are billionaires supposed to afford their colossal mansions on huge plots of land in the most expensive areas of the world if we pirate things?!
Billionaires had to step on and fuck over so many people to get where they are now! If we pirate things, they won’t be able to afford their platinum toilets covered in diamonds! Or their $50,000 watches. or their $5000 designer suits that they wear once and throw away every day.
*torrents syndrome
They complain about profit margin, when the margin is it costs 3 billion to make 3.5 billion. I mean, after everything is paid off, they are only left with 500 million. Can’t you see that it cost them 3 billion to make that 500 million? They just paid 3 billion for that.
I really wonder if they think that sometimes.
But then they get free money from the government in the form of “subsidies”
When disabled and poor folks need money it’s “GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS!” and “WELLFARE!” But when billionaire scammers get money from the government it’s “subsidies” and “pumping liquidity in the form of quantitive easing”
Oh, don’t get me started on all the bailouts and the companies that are too big to let fail. And what about the free market? What’s supposed to happen in a free market? Even Adam Smith, the person coined the term capitalism, believes unregulated capitalism will not work.
Even Adam Smith, the person coined the term capitalism, believes unregulated capitalism will not work.
Yeah, but the only regulations we have are written by the billionaires. If regulations were written by someone more like FDR or what Bernie Sanders pretended to be. Then we’d be living in a utopia
What features have been removed from Spotify?
Nothing if you’re a premium user. Being able to pick songs on Free I think.
Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.
The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It’s exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.
I believe they’ve just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.
.flac or bust
Don’t forget about .ape.
Please do forget about .ape. Proprietary, obscure format. Only advantage is that under some circumstances it can get you higher compression rates than flac. But it’s way more resource intensive to decode so that advantage is really more theoretical. Use flac, forget ape.
