#flac

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

The Sisters Of Mercy - Walk Away

[sandybrett]

I have a strange question.

Lossy audio compression formats work by cutting out frequencies that are difficult for humans to hear. Most humans cannot easily hear the difference between a medium-quality mp3 and a lossless audio file. But cats can hear higher frequencies than we can, so to them, even a high quality lossy file could sound quite different from the original.

I do not currently have a cat, but I hope to have cats someday, and I want to play some songs from my music collection for them to see what they think. My music collection is rather large and I would prefer not to have too many FLAC files.

Does anyone have any idea which lossy audio format(s) would create the best potential listening experience for a cat?

[neververy4]

I have finally downloaded AND ORGANIZED all my current BandCamp music onto my PC.

.flac file format, as it's lossless and I can always compress it later myself if I have to

I have 160 different albums from 53 artists totaling 1,316 songs

[llycorys]

finally got Clementine to run on my '08 imac so i nyow got a p good flac player on there!

(this took hrs to get working and in the end most of it was useless xD)

ofc i had to test with Blaqk Audio

(i can do cds on itunes just fine, i tested with Oxidizer by Chemlab obvi)

[dumbfunshit]

New Music Friday!! Every Friday I buy a few tracks for my Walkman, in an effort to start to own what is in my Apple Music Library. It will probably take the rest of my life, lol (I am quite the hoarder) but maybe one day I'll win the lottery and buy it all! This week: The Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow, Imma Be & I Gotta Feeling Black Buddafly - Bad Girl Black Sheep - The Choice is Yours

[skeletonfumes]

bandcamp friday again, if you feel like supporting bandcamp has waived all their fees for the day. Could us anything atm, kind of desperately lol.

[penniesinthealley]

Car Seat Headrest - Impossible Soul (cover)

[movemyfeet]

[shihlun]

Alan Silva

- Inner Song - Pieces For Bass And Voice

1974

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

The Sisters Of Mercy - Blood Money

[arctic-hands]

This doesn't have any relevancy to my life rn because my mp3 player only supports, well, mp3s (allegedly it can support audible's proprietary .aax files but not without problems), but exactly is FLAC and how does it compare/contrast to mp3?

[flachighend-flash]

uptown.

[sonicmusic]

CD Title: Vandalize - Mini album About: Contains the song “Vandalize” by “ONE OK ROCK”. This mini album contains 3 different versions of the song: An explicit version, the Japanese version and the regular version.  Track list: pastebin Mediainfo: pastebin Download: OneDrive Password hint: The blog’s creation date in the following format: dd/mm/yy You will need to look at the blog page for this. Size: 189 MB for the FLACs.  Source: These songs were given to me by Windii (Thank you so much). 

[33bowls]

An open letter to Tidal Streaming

I am both an artist ( 33 Bowls ) with material on Tidal and a satisfied, so far, customer. I know what my music sounded like and sounds like, and can state unequivocally that MQA is closer to the real thing than even hi-res HD PCM; the nuances, the textures, the relaxed ease of listening, the details, the space, the timing, the soul of the music are present with MQA in ways that, as good as HD PCM can sound, are simply not quite there with HD PCM (erroneously referred to as HD FLAC, more on that later). Compared to MQA, PCM (including “HD” high bit rate PCM) also has a glare, zing, edge that on some systems can sound brighter and therefore be mis-interpreted as better --- when in fact that is an artifact of PCM sampling that MQA uniquely ameliorates. When you listen to a good MQA demo at a salon, studio or show, you will understand why major players in the music biz have enthusiastically embraced MQA, with 20 Million tracks to date mastered in MQA.

It is understandable but not commendable for Tidal’s new management to hedge their bets on MQA. However, such a backtrack away from the customer base that Tidal built their reputation upon is not necessarily the brightest business strategy. Is Tidal management counting on very short term memory of the existing customer base when backtracking away from the millions of MQA mastered and remastered tracks described by Tidal as this?

“Master. Authenticated files from mastering process. Studio quality. Unrivaled clarity and depth.”

Going after a minority of customers from a smaller competitor while alienating existing customers will “bite you in the butt” eventually. Don’t alienate your existing customer base. All it will take is one streaming competitor, larger or smaller, hosting the millions of MQA tracks that already exist. It would behoove Tidal to pay attention to actual current long term Tidal customers who are the customer base and word of mouth that Tidal has built the business upon, and ignore haters and trolls who are not actually current Tidal customers.

Adding more customer choices, in this case, formats, is usually a good thing, however, excluding an existing customers’ preference as a default option is just plain short sighted.

See, if instead of being swayed by a small but shrill group of sock puppet trolls, haters, and shills, if you actually listen to a good MQA demo at a salon, studio or show, you will understand why major players in the music biz have enthusiastically embraced MQA as evidenced by 20 Million tracks to date mastered in MQA.

Unlike the hodge poge of so called “hi-res” HD PCM and DSD formats vying for attention as incremental improvement at an exponential cost of bandwidth and file size; with no standardized conjugate reconstruction filters, that all to varying degrees have inherent audible time smear aka temporal blur from gibbs phenomena pre and post ringing on transients; while providing no authentication --- no other format or process can do what MQA does: elegantly, efficiently and accurately reproducing all of the music end to end; being backwards compatible with existing equipment and infrastructure, and being able to clean up existing digital masters.

As to the misnomer of “specialized decoder” --- not needed. As MQA is backwards compatible, MQA files can play back with improved fidelity on legacy 1fs 44.1/48 DACs and decoders with no USB driver issues. So called hi-res HD PCM “FLAC” files are not plug and play, and do actually need specialized drivers, hardware and software. For instance, Tidal Desktop with MQA software decoding, aka first unfold enabled, feeding an R2R DAC can sound quite nice. Such an option as default needs to remain in future updates of Tidal Desktop, Android and Apple apps.

It’s ludicrous that this needs to be explained again: FLAC is a container, not the contents. When streaming bit perfect PCM material, whether CD quality 44.1/16, or so called hi-res HD PCM, or authenticated MQA, bit perfect lossless bit packing that FLAC uses was invented by the same Bob Stuart who also happens to be a co-developer of MQA. So, he wrote the book on that. He knows what he is doing. More here:

https://www.tumblr.com/33bowls/714450718525947904/mqa-faq

https://www.aes.org/journal/online/JAES_V67/5/

In summary: the internet is full of obnoxious sock puppets, trolls, haters, shills. You should know better than to listen to or be swayed by them. There are good reasons why top recording engineers, producers, mastering engineers prefer MQA as closer to the source than other formats and processes. Take good care of MQA, as MQA has taken good care of you, and will continue to do so, if you are up for it.

Update: 

It appears that at least some of the tracks that Tidal is now claiming are HD PCM “Tidal max” are likely up-sampled MQA 44.1k or 48k folded tracks. One label states that their streamed tracks, directly or via aggregator, are all MQA, and that none have been resubmitted as 96k or 192k HD PCM. Unlike MQA’s inclusion of embedded proof of provenance coded and buried in the dither, to indicate that the bitstream is bit for bit perfect from the studio, the flac container has no such provision for authentication. So, HD PCM “Tidal max” files could be upsampled versions of folded MQA sources, and there is no way to prove or disprove that assertion, except to perform real time FFTs of the files. And, there is more to MQA than just sample rate: correct conjugate filtering with minimal time smear or dispersion on transients also known as de-blurring is a perceptually significant feature of MQA, which is ruined when an MQA file is up-sampled rather than unfolded. Max, as HD or high bit rate PCM delivered via FLAC container as a “preferred” default is a step backwards compared to the excellent sonics of MQA, also delivered via FLAC container.

What say, Tidal?

What are the sources of your streamed files?

[netscapenavigator-official]

I spent the last three days converting my music library from Apple Music to a 700+ file FLAC collection. It was miserable. But on the bright side, I’ve rediscovered music that I haven’t listen to in years.