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There Is No CD Revival

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Re: There Is No CD Revival

#151

Post by Melatonic »

masklinn wrote: post #148
Melatonic wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage of storing in FLAC though is that if you do want to encode to a more lossy format later you are not going to make the file worse than if you were to originally go from say .wav to mp3. Or if you wanted to manipulate the file later for use in a movie or something. Given that tons of players do FLAC these days and storage is relatively cheap I don't really see any advantage to using AAC.

> storage is relatively cheap Server storage is relatively cheap, mobile storage is a different kettle of fish, and even with a lot of storage, if you have a large music collection it's much easier to blow way past with FLAC as it's at least an order of magnitude larger than even high-quality lossy tracks. I can't put my entire collection on my phone even after having converted it to a lossy format, putting the lossl…

Thats sort of exactly what I was talking about - keep your FLAC files on a desktop at home and then compress as needed for a phone

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#152

Post by dfxm12 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #47
mtts wrote: post #27

The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income Why? That ship has sailed. In 2022, as in 1922, 1822, 1722 etc musicians will have to earn their income by playing live.

The thing with CDs today is that they are merchandise, as with cassettes or vinyl or whatever. You don't buy them to listen to them, but to have them. I think this understanding is crucially necessary for musicians hopping on this "trend". Like they could make action figures or mood rings or whatever. What the fans want are buying is a tangible thing , a keepsake. So first they need an actual fan-base that may be int…

CDs (and tapes and records) have some Hollywood accounting [0] around them, just as movies do. I'm sure the band would much rather you buy their t-shirt or poster or something else that their label had nothing to do with. All this depends on the band and their deal, of course, but just as well, they'll probably make the most profit off a t-shirt anyway.

0 - https://www.techdirt.com/2010/07/13/riaa-accounting-why-even...

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#153

Post by musicale »

thisisjasononhn wrote: post #128
whoisthemachine wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few good providers of lossless audio files, so you can get still get a lossless, DRM free version of your music to own forever without having to have a printed CD. The two that I frequent are: - bandcamp.com - mostly indie, but I've actually purchased a few more "mainstream" artists from here in the last couple years. - hdtracks.com - have a wide selection, but tend to be pretty pricey.

I'm worried about bandcamp.com after being purchased by Epic Games. BC's terms of service and privacy policy were updated to reflect this change, mostly legal ownership and related stuff, but I feel they're going to do the regular acquisition process: wait a year or so, make a detrimental change to the service, piss off a lot of people.

"Thanks for accompanying bandcamp on this incredible journey..."

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#154

Post by throwaway894345 »

usefulcat wrote: post #121
throwaway894345 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, you seem to (understandably) take great pride in the legal ownership of your CDs, but on the other hand, you're almost certainly breaking the law by ripping them. How do you feel about that? I have the same conflict with DVDs/BluRay. I want to play by the rules and pay for the media I enjoy, but it's absurd that it's illegal for me to rip the content that I've lawfully purchased for my own consumptio…

If you're ripping CDs that you purchased and only for your own personal use (i.e. not distributing the ripped files), then IMO the far more relevant question is an ethical one: does what you're doing in any way harm the artists or the copyright holders of the works you are copying?

No, no one is harmed when one uses content for which one has an appropriate license. Of course, some people might make less money, but that doesn't constitute "harm" in any meaningful way (they also make less money than if I donated my entire disposable income, but no one would argue that this is "harm" [although I don't want to give the RIAA any ideas...]) and indeed they should be pricing that into the sales of any given media (it's already insane that we give copyrights for 70 years after the lifetime of the artist).

On the other hand, the DMCA harms me by limiting my right to use content for which I legally hold the appropriate license.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#155

Post by ChrisLomont »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #50
ChrisLomont wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CD format doesn't support DRM. Extremely few CDs tried to fiddle to add it by adding errors, but modern readers aren't stopped from reading the audio. CDs are pure audio data with error correction.

There's the whole Sony rootkit fiasco that shows that record labels have tried to put DRM on CD's. I have no idea how many continued to try, but if they did bypassing it is a crime, even if it's trivial to bypass. The DMCA is dumb.

That was adding an executable for a PC, it had nothing to do with the audio, which was and is still perfectly copyable.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#156

Post by ChrisLomont »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #125
ChrisLomont wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CD format doesn't support DRM. Extremely few CDs tried to fiddle to add it by adding errors, but modern readers aren't stopped from reading the audio. CDs are pure audio data with error correction.

CDs do have copy protection flags. This is unrelated to the intentionally corrupt pressed discs meant to subvert CD-R recorders.

And it's so difficult to find any hardware anywhere that respects that flag that hacker forums are filled with questions asking if anyone ever saw such a device.

Every modern copy or backup program ignores it, and it looks like none ever used it.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#157

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #156
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDs do have copy protection flags. This is unrelated to the intentionally corrupt pressed discs meant to subvert CD-R recorders.

And it's so difficult to find any hardware anywhere that respects that flag that hacker forums are filled with questions asking if anyone ever saw such a device. Every modern copy or backup program ignores it, and it looks like none ever used it.

It was used on standalone audio recorders.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#158

Post by Elidrake42 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #115
greggman3 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had ~1100 CDs in 2000. Now I have close to 0. I don't even own a device I could play a CD in nor rip it. None of my 4 PCs (3 Macs, one Gaming Windows Box) have a CD (nor DVD nor Bluray) player. Instead I have about 9000 mp3 files. I find streaming services frustrating because their recommendation algorithm suck. I tried playing "Swing" and it gave me "Volare" by Dean Martin. (that's not Swing), I pick Prince Radio…

You can't control the quality of purchased music files. More significantly, you can't be sure that gapless playback has been encoded correctly into anything sold by the track. I continue to purchase music on CDs but they get used once while being ripped then go into storage.

> You can't control the quality of purchased music files

Sure you can, hdtracks has been around for nearly 15 years now, and even offers the same redbook data you'd find on a CD if you don't trust their FLAC encoding.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#159

Post by warner25 »

Jaruzel wrote: post #45

I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me. I can enjoy the contents legally until I'm dead, all for a single one-off payment with no-expiry. However, my households use of streaming media (mainly Spotify) has increased for 'casual' listening, so I think there is a balance, and I hope that buying physical media for music wont disappear completely any ti…

Nobody can take them away, but the problem that I've found with with physical DVDs (I can't comment so much on CDs) is that they deteriorate after just a few years. For a while in 2010, my wife and I routinely borrowed DVDs from a library, but we gave up when it seemed like half of them were unplayable; sometimes from the beginning, sometimes freezing an hour into the movie. Over the next five years, we found that our own small collection of DVDs was becoming unplayable even though we rarely handled them. Now we have only a few DVDs left for our kids to watch in our minivan's DVD player, and I've ripped them so that I can burn new copies every year or two when the previous copies wear out. Replacing our favorites from our old collection with Amazon video purchases seemed like the best option.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#160

Post by toastedwedge »

andjd wrote: post #117
dusted wrote: post #2

Many times, buying the CD and ripping it to FLAC* is the only way to legally acquire* music for use with your computer. * It must be lossless and high quality. * It must work offline.

Have you done a blind test comparing a 256 or 320 kbps AAC file to a FLAC one? At that bitrate, the AAC file is lossy in the sense that you can't recreate a bit-for-bit perfect copy of the original, but most humans shouldn't hear any difference. A decent proxy to know that this is true is that at those bitrates, a FLAC file is often smaller than the AAC one. Yes, this makes you wonder why you'd want to use an lossy f…

I know thit is about personal entertainment value, but to hopefully add a different perspective: FLAC means being able to use it for mixing/mastering in DJ sets or compilations due to losslessness.

Besides, the quality of 256 VBR won't be the same as 256 CBR, but with FLAC, there's only different compression sizes.

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