Orpheus for torrents, Usenet gets like 90% of the stuff out there though. And don’t forget to sort your favorites bands but buying their albums when they provide them as FLAC.
Nah, I won’t pay for music, unless it’s a signed record, because the bands get pretty much no money from the sale, so it’s more of a fuck you to the labels. But I will travel to go to concerts and buy merch to support them.
I guess I should get around to figuring out how to use usenet, though.
This was more true when the labels were running everything. Now you can get a lot of the material more-or-less directly from the artists on various platforms. Instead of artists getting 5% of the $$$, they can get 70%+.
Just saying that not everything you listen to is necessarily by a band signed to a label. A lot of newer talents have gotten wise to the scam the labels have been running (for the same reasons you articulated - who would knowingly sign up for that?) and are putting things out themselves instead.
Ah, that makes sense, but I only listen to the same artists I have been for 20 years (or artists that I’ve discovered that have been active for that long), so not much has changed with the labels for me specifically.
Usenet is way better than torrenting. I had heard about it for years and finally checked it out a month ago. I bought a few lifetime memberships to trackers (but just nzbgeek might be enough) and subscribed to news hosting. The reliability and speeds are so much better. Plus the traffic is encrypted and it’s much less common than torrenting so also safer
I made a XSPF format list of lossy versions, imported into qobuz and deezer using soundiiz, and downloaded from there using qobuz-dl and deemix, fwiw. Got about 1.2 TB this way
I use FLAC for albums I love and mp3s for everything else (including copies of the flacs in mp3). It’s a nice balance.
Fucking love my collection of music. I use Spotify as well, but nothing can compete with literally owning a music collection of my own I can listen to without the Internet
I did and failed. I don’t want to waste that many hours of my life trying again. So they lose out on an amazing seeder and I lose out on good access to music.
I have a whole pipeline of recording my vinyl as 96kHz 24bit wav. Before people start greefing me about storage/overkill, I work in media production. I can’t walk into my closet without tripping over 5 TB of hard drives. Storage is not a problem and I like using the best encoding on my H6.
I cut the recordings up into record “sides,” then render them out as flac and MP3s. MP3s go on my phone, flac on my Plex server. I have 110 or so sides done, and probably 30 or 40 in the pipeline that need to be edited. I just need to carve out some time!
hahahaha it’s been really fun! I run my Technics 1200 Mk II -> Numark mixer (nothing special but solid, from my college DJing days) -> Zoom h6 (left and right channels get their own inputs) -> bring into editing software, combine the two channels, chop off the beginning and end as well as silence/dead air between sides, then run it all through Compressor to create “sides” as described above.
Despite vinyl’s technical inferiority, it was those same limitations that meant vinyl actually sounded better than CD throughout a specific period. Vinyl cannot be too loud or the needle will jump off the track, making the vinyl unplayable. This prevented vinyl from dealing with the loudness wars, and brick wall dynamic range compression. So especially for the early 2000s, the masters used for the vinyl mix were often significantly better.
And, a clean record played on clean and properly set up equipment can sound really pristine, especially if copied to a digital format early in its life. You wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s vinyl.
+1 to all you said. I collect vinyl for a number of reasons and none of them are because it is technically superior (it isn’t) however, many (most?) people have never heard just how good vinyl can actually sound when it’s in good condition and played on a good setup. I personally cannot tell the difference between even a 33 and CD, let alone a 45, and I have a decently high end setup.
My ears like to trick me and tell me I can hear a difference between a 33 and 45 but I’m pretty sure this is a lie.
Not to mention, psychoacoustics don’t really give a damn about fidelity, so if your goal is “I want it to sound good to me” moreso than “I want it to reproduce sounds accurately” then there’s arguments for vinyl, tube amplifiers, vintage speakers, etc.
Hell I have a friend who specifically uses one of the earliest CD players because it had a 14 bit DAC and no oversampling vs 16 bit DAC, and for those few albums he really likes the digital distortion that comes with it because that’s how he first heard it.
I do a pretty robust cleaning/digitization process for my vinyl but you can definitely tell it’s vinyl. There’s just no way you won’t get a little wow/flutter on quieter stuff, and there’s always that distinct background sound/cracks and pop somewhere.
But yes the quality can be incredibly high. That’s just part of the fun!
Compared to CD? If you have to compare it to a lossy compressed format to make it look good in comparison, then maybe it’s not that good overall. You may have noticed it’s no longer the early 2000s and CDs are not ubiquitous, nor even very common at all anymore.
Lossy compressed format? Where? Are you talking about CD? The format famous for using uncompressed PCM audio perfectly specified to cover 100% of a human’s hearing range?
Because if that’s what you mean, you’ve got some studying to go do.
Are you using an off the shelf NAS or a DIY? I’m looking for around that much space but the consumer/prosumer grade stuff I’ve seen doesn’t really do what I want (full disk encryption, Linux, ability to customize and host a few applications).
I originally figured I’d just cram 5x12TB drives in a case, RAID5, with my Linux flavor of choice… Then I learned how bad RAID5 is with big disks.
I don’t need mirroring or high throughput (home NAS - other device backups and local streaming) but would preferably like a little redundancy… As a treat.
I’m using a Synology, and I love it. I have most of my self hosted servers running on it in docker containers, and I can use the Surveillance Station to locally store and view my camera setup.
I’ll probably buy actual server hardware at some point, but I need to do my network build out first.
What do you think of the Asustor flashtor NAS drives which have 6-12 m2 slots…I think you can run any OS on it if their own software doesn’t check all the boxes for you
Listen up, all you young whippersnappers and your FLAC collections, we downloaded our lossy but ‘high enough quality’ 128kbps mp3s from those IRC DCC Fserves back in the 90s using our dialup internet and we didnt complain!
Unless of course someone picked up the house phone and caused our internet to disconnect.
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.
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 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.
Go FLAC or go home.
I fucking love my 100gb flac collection
Do you know a reliable tracker? I have lidarr set up to find lossless versions, but it’s pretty terrible at it.
Im using Soulseek
Orpheus for torrents, Usenet gets like 90% of the stuff out there though. And don’t forget to sort your favorites bands but buying their albums when they provide them as FLAC.
Nah, I won’t pay for music, unless it’s a signed record, because the bands get pretty much no money from the sale, so it’s more of a fuck you to the labels. But I will travel to go to concerts and buy merch to support them.
I guess I should get around to figuring out how to use usenet, though.
I’m pretty sure they are getting money at their merch tables, but I could be wrong.
This was more true when the labels were running everything. Now you can get a lot of the material more-or-less directly from the artists on various platforms. Instead of artists getting 5% of the $$$, they can get 70%+.
Just saying that not everything you listen to is necessarily by a band signed to a label. A lot of newer talents have gotten wise to the scam the labels have been running (for the same reasons you articulated - who would knowingly sign up for that?) and are putting things out themselves instead.
Ah, that makes sense, but I only listen to the same artists I have been for 20 years (or artists that I’ve discovered that have been active for that long), so not much has changed with the labels for me specifically.
Usenet is way better than torrenting. I had heard about it for years and finally checked it out a month ago. I bought a few lifetime memberships to trackers (but just nzbgeek might be enough) and subscribed to news hosting. The reliability and speeds are so much better. Plus the traffic is encrypted and it’s much less common than torrenting so also safer
Can you recomend me some trackers? I’ve been considering usenet for a few months now but never pulled the trigger
I’m using nzbgeek, nzbplanet, and miatrix
I’ll check these out, thanks!
I made a XSPF format list of lossy versions, imported into qobuz and deezer using soundiiz, and downloaded from there using qobuz-dl and deemix, fwiw. Got about 1.2 TB this way
Where does one begin to find flac? I am taking the first steps beyond “finding a movie to play for free”
hdtracks.com and Bandcamp are some sources.
Tidal + Tidal-dl or Soulseek
I use FLAC for albums I love and mp3s for everything else (including copies of the flacs in mp3). It’s a nice balance.
Fucking love my collection of music. I use Spotify as well, but nothing can compete with literally owning a music collection of my own I can listen to without the Internet
This is the way. Also, FLAC for high bit rate audiophile vinyl rips.
I literally got goosebumps reading that. Take my Iron Maiden collection for example:
I have mp3 versions of all albums. Different release versions of FLACs and then a vinyl FLAC collection as well.
It’s nice exploring the difference in sound, but somehow, vinyl always makes me feel the best.
Man I miss what.cd.
I miss Oink’s :(
That too :(
Interview for redacted.
I did and failed. I don’t want to waste that many hours of my life trying again. So they lose out on an amazing seeder and I lose out on good access to music.
I have a whole pipeline of recording my vinyl as 96kHz 24bit wav. Before people start greefing me about storage/overkill, I work in media production. I can’t walk into my closet without tripping over 5 TB of hard drives. Storage is not a problem and I like using the best encoding on my H6.
I cut the recordings up into record “sides,” then render them out as flac and MP3s. MP3s go on my phone, flac on my Plex server. I have 110 or so sides done, and probably 30 or 40 in the pipeline that need to be edited. I just need to carve out some time!
I literally salivated.
hahahaha it’s been really fun! I run my Technics 1200 Mk II -> Numark mixer (nothing special but solid, from my college DJing days) -> Zoom h6 (left and right channels get their own inputs) -> bring into editing software, combine the two channels, chop off the beginning and end as well as silence/dead air between sides, then run it all through Compressor to create “sides” as described above.
Gotta use that lossless format so you can pick up all the sound artefacts caused by an imperfect physical format.
Despite vinyl’s technical inferiority, it was those same limitations that meant vinyl actually sounded better than CD throughout a specific period. Vinyl cannot be too loud or the needle will jump off the track, making the vinyl unplayable. This prevented vinyl from dealing with the loudness wars, and brick wall dynamic range compression. So especially for the early 2000s, the masters used for the vinyl mix were often significantly better.
And, a clean record played on clean and properly set up equipment can sound really pristine, especially if copied to a digital format early in its life. You wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s vinyl.
+1 to all you said. I collect vinyl for a number of reasons and none of them are because it is technically superior (it isn’t) however, many (most?) people have never heard just how good vinyl can actually sound when it’s in good condition and played on a good setup. I personally cannot tell the difference between even a 33 and CD, let alone a 45, and I have a decently high end setup.
My ears like to trick me and tell me I can hear a difference between a 33 and 45 but I’m pretty sure this is a lie.
Not to mention, psychoacoustics don’t really give a damn about fidelity, so if your goal is “I want it to sound good to me” moreso than “I want it to reproduce sounds accurately” then there’s arguments for vinyl, tube amplifiers, vintage speakers, etc.
Hell I have a friend who specifically uses one of the earliest CD players because it had a 14 bit DAC and no oversampling vs 16 bit DAC, and for those few albums he really likes the digital distortion that comes with it because that’s how he first heard it.
I do a pretty robust cleaning/digitization process for my vinyl but you can definitely tell it’s vinyl. There’s just no way you won’t get a little wow/flutter on quieter stuff, and there’s always that distinct background sound/cracks and pop somewhere.
But yes the quality can be incredibly high. That’s just part of the fun!
Compared to CD? If you have to compare it to a lossy compressed format to make it look good in comparison, then maybe it’s not that good overall. You may have noticed it’s no longer the early 2000s and CDs are not ubiquitous, nor even very common at all anymore.
Lossy compressed format? Where? Are you talking about CD? The format famous for using uncompressed PCM audio perfectly specified to cover 100% of a human’s hearing range?
Because if that’s what you mean, you’ve got some studying to go do.
BUY ME BIGGER STORAGE BROTHER
looks at his 42TB NAS
That’s a lot of hip-hop 😂
Are you using an off the shelf NAS or a DIY? I’m looking for around that much space but the consumer/prosumer grade stuff I’ve seen doesn’t really do what I want (full disk encryption, Linux, ability to customize and host a few applications).
I originally figured I’d just cram 5x12TB drives in a case, RAID5, with my Linux flavor of choice… Then I learned how bad RAID5 is with big disks.
I don’t need mirroring or high throughput (home NAS - other device backups and local streaming) but would preferably like a little redundancy… As a treat.
Got any pointers?
I’m using a Synology, and I love it. I have most of my self hosted servers running on it in docker containers, and I can use the Surveillance Station to locally store and view my camera setup.
I’ll probably buy actual server hardware at some point, but I need to do my network build out first.
Truenas or unraid
What do you think of the Asustor flashtor NAS drives which have 6-12 m2 slots…I think you can run any OS on it if their own software doesn’t check all the boxes for you
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-i-installed-truenas-on-my-new-asustor-nas
Listen up, all you young whippersnappers and your FLAC collections, we downloaded our lossy but ‘high enough quality’ 128kbps mp3s from those IRC DCC Fserves back in the 90s using our dialup internet and we didnt complain!
Unless of course someone picked up the house phone and caused our internet to disconnect.
Don’t forget Limewire and Kazaa
I’m still shuffling some of those.
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.
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.
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.