#lossless audio

[disease]

new SHXCXCHCXSH album in HQ FLAC... 😮‍💨

threaten Santa for a Tidal sub this year.

[captaingimpy]

Thoughts on Cinema: Finding the Middle Ground Between Film and Digital Filmmaking

As someone who has spent a significant amount of time working with audio and video production—and as a long-time moviegoer—I’ve noticed a troubling trend in the film industry: we seem to have fallen into an all-or-nothing mindset when it comes to film versus digital. It’s like there’s this unspoken war between purists who champion celluloid as the only “real” way to make a movie and the…

[theredtours]

Run (Studio Demo) [Snippets 1-4]

[manjaro-official]

Bluetooth earbuds have convinced the public that 'lossless audio' is somehow expensive tech for true audiophiles when literally if you listen to a CD player with wired headphones you're getting lossless audio

[tokitooth]

i always bring up spotify’s lack of lossless streaming as a reason to stop using it and people always respond by saying that most people can’t hear the difference and it always frustrates me because like. i’m not gonna deny that i’m probably more attuned to hearing the difference between lossless and lossy because i took audio engineering classes but it feels like woefully missing the point. it’s not about the streaming quality by itself (barring the fact that while most people can’t hear the difference switching from lossy to lossless, they can hear it switching back from lossless to lossy), it’s about the fact that spotify could be offering an objectively superior product but are simply choosing not to. it’s about the fact that streaming services that have lossless audio are either the same price (deezer) or cheaper (apple music, tidal) than spotify, giving spotify absolutely no excuse to not offer lossless audio. it’s about how the streaming quality setting in spotify is set to low by default and lots of people don’t even know that’s a setting you can change. when you say “people can’t tell the difference anyway” you’re kind of doing spotify’s dirty work for them, which is deliberately not giving your customer base a better product operating on the assumption that the customer doesn’t know there’s better out there. i think it’s shitty as a business practice and also entirely disrespectful to music as an art form

[mafaldinablabla]

I just want to write it down, today was as bad as it hasn't been in years out of nowhere, I literally couldn't fully grip the spoon enough while eating this evening and also had a hard time generally doing the motion from the plate to my mouth with the arm, no joking. I could tell my mom was really scared (I was honestly too focused on not letting the damn thing fall). The nurse at the clinic does keep telling us this flu has gotten many other patients having a worsening of the symptoms and a whole lot of difficulty of getting at the state they were in before getting the flu. And I even had a vaccine! Well, now I'm better already, and I hope tomorrow doesn't suck.

On a brighter note my cat cuddled a lot w me this afternoon, and I had the happy coincidence of starting to read the mardi gras part of witches abroad on fat tuesday! :)))) I love when these things happen

[smute]

nobody asked but if any of you are looking for high quality over-ear bluetooth headphones with active noise canceling, the price of the bowers & wilkins px7 s2 has dropped like crazy. they were released in late 2022 and used to go for €400+ (which believe it or not was already a really good price) but now you can get a new pair for like €130–150. ive had mine for 2 years and they still put every competitor to shame. they're comfy, they feel super premium, and i know some people don't enjoy the monitor-style sound, but if you want something balanced, precise, and super clean-sounding the b&w offer insane value for money

[milfygerard]

rank TtPD for it's anniversary?

oooo ok, im just doing the

so long london

the tortured poets dept

i can do it with a broken heart

florida!!!

but daddy i love him

clara bow

whose afraid of little old me?

guilty as sin?

the smallest man who ever lived

down bad

I can fix him (no really, I can)

fortnight

fresh out the slammer

loml

my boy only breaks his fav toys

the alchemy

the only songs I actively don't like are the last 2, rest of the list is based on a mix of how much ive thought about a song, how often i listen to it, and how actually good I think it is + personal bias

[audio-luddite]

A weird showdown.

I was cruising You Tube and tripped over this person, Dom Sigalas. He self describes as a musician, composer, producer and everything in the chain of making music. OK Fine, way more than I can do. He has lots of gear, and knows how to use it.

He did a showdown between vinyl, cassette, reel to reel tape, and two streaming platforms against the original master of one of his tracks. Here is a quick version of his thing, there is a much longer version.

First I credit him for finding things he liked in most of the formats. One was not clearly the best.

I read many comments from the long version that were critical and generally of the form "you should have used a better, Tape, cassette machine, or turntable." For my part the vinyl bit was played on an absolute crap thing called an AT Sound Burger. Accept the fact that all of the non-streaming things were not high end, or even close. Oh and no CD, though that would be just another digital file. CDs are dead you know.

Also note that all the tracks played were digital recordings of the signal from the various formats. Oh and if you have even a bit of experience with digital music editing (I actually do!) you will see that the "master" track is very heavily compressed. Still everything sounded different. Apparently some of the media may have decompressed the master a bit, including the R2R tape.

I thought it cool that in his work he sometimes uses digital filters to mimic an alternate media or even routes his work through say his TEAC tape deck as an effect.

And if you find the long form video you will note he still credits each of the physical media he used with the usual sound characteristics like warmth etc they are often described with. Even the crap turntable.

One interesting thing for me was he did the mastering for the Apple Lossless and saw it was different than his original master recording. It sounded different, and looked different in the file display. It was different, so lossless lost something?

His work is prominent enough for it to be on Apple and Spotify and published on vinyl.

So does this mean anything?

I suppose one could do a similar comparison with better hardware to play the real media. Yet would it make a difference to the end result? No doubt people who like -insert the media type here- will complain about some shortcoming or other or even that the better stuff was not better enough.

I cannot say loud enough or enough times that preference is just what you like more for whatever reason. Arguments for and against each media are just rationalizations for decisions you have already made.

I think streaming is convenient but lacks something. I miss something in the sound. Though I wonder if I could pick it out blind. I think I could.

I like vinyl as my system was built around vinyl and sounds best to my ear through that. I have dozens of high end LPs.

I like CDs as the best of those are damn good and can do things that vinyl cannot as in stupid levels of dynamic range. Those best in my collection are TELARCs and Mercury Living Presence mastered by Mrs Wilma Fine.

And we have not even mentioned (until now) vacuum tubes.

I suppose the best strategy for a newbie would be to make friends with a person who has a good system and listen to that. Then find someone who has a different system and repeat. Every piece of the chain has an impact.

My son-in-law is pretty satisfied with the system I loaned him (gave him?). It is second string compared to mine, but still really good. If this were the 1970s it would be pushing high end. It can be better of course. I sorta hope the bug bites him, then we could play. But he has other things to do like help raise my grandchildren.

[solymn]

Things are Happening. I gotta finish setting up my vgen but thatll be a thing soon AND i got my hands on the (sorta) limited ultrakill/keygen church vinyl

[saturnismo]

Dios para qué me compro auriculares si spotify SUCKS ASSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

[audiofoolosophy]

OK Foobar2000 su Windows ma... In ambiente macOS che si fa?

Le statistiche del blog mi continuano a ricordare che gli articoli dedicati a Foobar2000 sono quelli più consultati di sempre; sono arrivato alla conclusione che potrebbe essere utile cercare di scrivere qualcosa di analogo anche per la riproduzione musicale in ambiente macOS. È da un po’ che lo voglio fare e sto raccogliendo idee e materiale per farlo. I player interessati saranno: Apple…

[stellophiliac]

how to build a digital music collection and stuff

spotify sucks aaaass. so start downloading shit!!

file format glossary

.wav is highest quality and biggest

.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality

.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality

.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know

downloading the music

doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.

i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)

i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)

of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download

file conversion

if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.

.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion

if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done

this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.

soulseek

another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.

you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known

it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row

tagging & organizing your music

tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display

if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it

i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me

basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)

there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity

how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:

artist > album > track # track

using a music player

the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)

you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with

i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)

don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here

click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS

syncing

if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this

you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify

you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)

disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!

if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server

afterword

i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment

[patricia-taxxon]

when you're hella tired and music starts sounding faster, you are accessing a kind of lossless audio time remapping impossible to achieve with hardware or software