321–328 of 328 posts
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Do they publish their roadmap? I'd imagine they consider what they have is good enough considering the backwards compatability issue it'd likely introduce.
They don't publish their roadmap, but there have been threads on their community forums suggesting this, and an official "Not Right Now" response: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Music-Use-Opus-C...
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> it might sound better cut to vinyl There's nothing extra in a 192kHz signal that would help with the vinyl mastering process. You could make a technical argument for the benefits of a 24-bit source, but in practice even those benefits would be utterly swamped by the SNR of vinyl.
You're completely misunderstanding. No, there's nothing extra in the 192kHz signal that would help, but that's not the point. Just remastering it for vinyl, which has certain limitations, might make it sound better than the digital format. As I said, you cannot just cut CD audio to vinyl; the medium won't allow it. You'll probably have the needle bouncing out of the track. So remastering for vinyl might actually make…
And you might even have a point, as long as you acknowledge that “remastering for vinyl” doesn’t actually necessitate distributing on vinyl, and what you describe as “the sound of modern CD audio” is entirely the fault of human decisions and not the CD format itself.
Also, you’d need to acknowledge that your description of what “sounds better” is a subjective assessment. It is fair to say that vinyl sounds better to you if what you like is that RIAA processed, variable noise floor sound.
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Yeah, I'm aware, I just feel like FLAC is the more popular, more multi-platform friendly/preferred option, definitely seems to have more momentum behind it, it's easier to buy FLAC then ALAC for one.
Buying options shouldn‘t be a concern at all as long as they are lossless - you simply convert them to the lossless format of your choice. There won‘t be any quality lost. Lossless to lossless is still lossless. Your format of choice should be dictated by your mobile platform - if you use iOS device or simply like iTunes, go for ALAC. Any decent player will handle FLAC and ALAC, but Apple requires ALAC. If Apple isn‘…
Absolutely, but it's an extra step that to me brings little practical benefit, since FLAC is already the source format & is more widely used practically everywhere outside Apple's ecosystem.
> Your format of choice should be dictated by your mobile platform - if you use iOS device or simply like iTunes, go for ALAC. Any decent player will handle FLAC and ALAC, but Apple requires ALAC. If Apple isn‘t a concern for you, there‘s no reason to use anything but FLAC.
I use iOS as my smartphone platform for now, (waiting for the Librem 5), but Linux on the desktop, so that's why I prefer FLAC. It's worth noting however that iOS itself does support FLACs perfectly well, just iTunes doesn't, (I prefer not to deal with iTunes at all, so not a concern for me), but if you use something like Airsonic, you're set.
I do have a set of AirPlay speakers however, since I wanted something wireless, but still lossless, which kind of means AirPlay is the only option & that does transcode my FLACs to ALAC on the fly, so there's definitely an area where I use ALAC, even if indirectly.
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I'm considering which online backup service to use for my music collection, is there a particular one you'd recommend, other than the obvious players like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive? Preferably not hosted in the US, for privacy/bandwidth reasons.
Backblaze no question about it. Use encryption and you won't have to worry about privacy. It's expensive to recover your data, so you'll need other backup methods too unless you're made of money.
For now, I've decided on pCloud, in addition to an on-site copy on my NAS and a copy on a portable drive that I store at work and update semi-regularly. A couple of rsync scripts take care of everything.
I know it's a cloud storage service and not a an actual proper backup service, but they offer 15 days of rewind as standard, and you can get a full year of rewind as an add-on, which I am considering. That should hopefully protect me from accidental deletes, and give me enough time to restore if my house burns down.
The thing that has really sold me on pCloud is that their Linux client is absolutely amazing. Compared to the barely functional Dropbox client and the non-existent Google Drive client[¤], it is an absolute joy to use. At the moment it's an Ubuntu-only AppImage, but they're working on an improved Electron version.
One additional nice thing is that pCloud is a Swiss company, so their privacy laws (and the GDPR) apply. They do host their servers in the US, so you're not completely free from theoretical NSA/PRISM snooping, but in my case I'm primarily storing my music library. They can go ahead and snoop through the tags of 300+GB of music for The Anarchist's Cookbook or whatever.
[¤]InSync is pretty nice, and I did buy a license for it a while ago, but it's still not as good as pCloud's client.
Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120). The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy ear…
Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120). The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy ear…
I have just downloaded "Radiohead - The bends" and "Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon_collie_and_the_infinite_sadness", both apparently from vinyl and in highest quality but I don't hear any difference from the CDs I bought and ripped years ago (using headphones "Beyerdynamic DT 770 pro" directly connected to a Lenovo P71 notebook).
Maybe you meant some more modern music or something else...? Thx
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You are putting words in my mouth. I am telling what I actually verified. Amplifiers with lower THD and IMD often sound worse than those with less impressive meausured parameters. Ergo, the measured parameters are not relevant. We need to find the actually important paramters and measure them.
But “sounds worse” in this case is relevant only to your preferences and to the preferences of some N of listeners, where N is totally unknown. The parameters you believe amp manufacturers should measure are therefore only relevant to your idea about them. THD, SNR, frequency response and many other metrics are easy: they define either accuracy or precision. If you want more than that, add external affects hardware o…
You seem to be highly inexperienced in the subject, THD, IMD etc are parameters that are measured on highly artificial signals - singke sine waves or mix of small numbers of sine waves. Real music signals more resemble white noise than clean sine waves, and there might be hundreds of different very subtle modes of distortion, that are very difficult to measure but which have very significant influence on the precepted quality of the sound.
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But “sounds worse” in this case is relevant only to your preferences and to the preferences of some N of listeners, where N is totally unknown. The parameters you believe amp manufacturers should measure are therefore only relevant to your idea about them. THD, SNR, frequency response and many other metrics are easy: they define either accuracy or precision. If you want more than that, add external affects hardware o…
It is relevant to a very large number of people, and that is why it is reflected in the price of the equipment. A very well known engineer, who has not ever peddle snake oil, Nelson Pass, sells his rather primitive audio equipment at high prices. Jusdging You seem to be highly inexperienced in the subject, THD, IMD etc are parameters that are measured on highly artificial signals - singke sine waves or mix of small n…