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 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.
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.
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.
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
Truenas or unraid
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.
I’m still shuffling some of those.
Don’t forget Limewire and Kazaa
It’s all about the 64kbps .wma’s. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day
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Still fits in a 1 TB sd card… Barely!
A 1TB SD card costs the same as a single vinyl LP right now.
It’s not even a concern.
However, I have a box of CDs that I ripped to 96kbps Vorbis in the early 2000s, and I think this time I’ll go straight to FLAC. Plex will transcode to the flavour-of-the-month codec on the fly when listening with limited bandwidth.
I have my flacs on a 2tb nvme drive in a little usb-c enclosure, kinda like a big USB stick. It’s about half full… Also have a couple hundred records so I’m pretty agnostic on format I guess. Still use foobar2000 too to manage and play lol
Imagine stroring WAVs
I actually tried doing that when I first decided to start archiving my own CDs. I ripped with abcde to flac but kept both copies. The idea was to keep .wav as a sort of “master” original and then copy the flacs to my phone and laptop for listening. That way if something happened I could always go back to my “masters” without having to rip the CD again.
Honestly the wav files aren’t that much bigger than flac and I feel like storage wouldn’t be much of an issue today, but I started this project several years ago when an 8TB hard drive was still $600+ and I quickly ran out of space.
Why would you need “masters” when you use lossless codec anyway?
I guess the idea was that if something happened to flac like new devices stopped supporting it for whatever reason, or if a better lossless format came along, it would be much easier to go back to the wavs and convert them to a different format.
It is easy to convert them back to wav, so…
Converting back and forth, even from lossless to lossless, is a good way to lose or corrupt data. I abandoned the idea years ago anyway, but thanks.
Imagine storing stems and plugins
Jeez why did you have to call me out by name? =(
Hi it’s me!
You mean there’s more of me out there?!
✅ No buffering, music starts instantly
✅ No connection issues
✅ No monthly money drain
✅ No arbitrary access or availability revocation
❌ No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
✅ I’m patient
I need to get a NAS and a sailing hat
Watch out, it’s a slippery slope… You start with a raspberry pi and a USB drive, you end up with a virtualization server and a zfs pool
And the orgasmic pleasure of sticking it to the man.
At least you get to learn along the way
But can you swim in it?
Same for me. I already have SBC with 64gb USB stick, but I could use more. Oh, and I want sailing hat too.
if you have an android phone, check out InnerTune on F-Droid. Youtube music client, native UI, no fees, lets you download music.
So you don’t have no immediate access? That’s not how yes/No checkboxes work.
You know, I considered “fixing” that before hitting reply, but I figured the overall sentiment of my comment would make its way through.
I used a check and an x, to represent positive and negative. I could have gone with ➕ / ➖, so that’s on me.
It’s only a friendly comment, why you have to be mad?
Yes friend, we are one in the same. I still have the last gen iPod I use in my car. It has Bluetooth and I still even use the 3.5mm audio jack instead. I’m old and hate most new music coming out anyway. And if I do want to check something out I still preview it on Apple Music. If nothing else it’s an entirely private and secure way to consume music.
I salute your commitment to the audio jack. I no longer have that luxury, but it is what it is, and I love my phone despite that glaring flaw. Wish it had an FM receiver too, but oh well.
If nothing else it’s an entirely private and secure way to consume music.
Amen to that. I’ve got my weird guilty pleasures that I go to occasionally and there’s no reason anyone else needs to know why I listen to a couple of specific dubstep songs as often as I do. If that theoretical information ever got leaked, would it even matter? Probably not, but I’m able to enjoy the music more if I can listen in my own world with no strings attached.
This is one of the biggest things I’ve enjoyed since I ditched spotify and started building up my own library again. It feels way more personal somehow.
Had a first Gen ipod permanently in my car from 2011 to just last year. Only took it out because head unit died and I put the factory one back in. iPod still works
The head unit in my car is so old it still has a dedicated 30 pin iPod cable that you’re meant to run out to your glovebox. I don’t do that, though. It has an SD card slot (full size) and also a USB port. And it still has a physical volume knob, too. I just chunk a flash drive into it.
No immediate access to any song I want to hear
I have. Arrrr.
I mean… That’s not immediate, but it’s close depending on the music and it’s availability
It takes me no longer to gain immediate access then it does for a stream user to search and play the stream, even with rare or weird songs.
I used to be hot shit back in the day when I could run a BitTorrent client anywhere on my Nokia N900. Nowadays anyone can do it.
No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
WDYM? If you want to listen before full download, there are some FUSE download managers on linux.
I’m very new to Linux so I’ll have to look up what that’s all about. Got Mint on dual-boot, but I keep slipping back into Win10 because it’s easier sticking with what you know, you know?
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Am I too FLAC to get these joke?
The guy on the left has mp3, the guy on the right has aif and the guy in the middle has flac
The owner of the mansion they’re having the party in: wav
What features have been removed from Spotify?
Nothing if you’re a premium user. Being able to pick songs on Free I think.
Being able to pick songs
Christ
Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.
The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It’s exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.
and scrub through the song and rewind
I believe they’ve just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
And being able to look at what’s on a playlist.
What, really?!
Nm I was wrong. I wanted to talk shit and now here I am.
I respect the integrity.
Why would free users expect more stuff for free lol. If that’s Spotify’s biggest complaint then you know they’re doing pretty good.
They took free features away, so yeah, it’s reasonable to assume they’d be upset.
Let’s also remember it’s ad supported. The idea was you got the app as it was with or without ads, but now the app itself is pay walled.
If that’s Spotify’s biggest complaint then you know they’re doing pretty good.
bro really had to Google criticisms of Spotify because he couldn’t think of any other then wanting more free shit lol
Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.
I really thought it would go in the other direction for me: Making more money leading to being ok spending more. But it turns out I just dislike being nickel and dimed.
I was wondering the same. I haven’t noticed anything.
To all the friends I never met:
I am running a homeserver with all my music, videos, books, articles, source, etc. here is how you do it↓
- get a old desktop computer
- install gnu/linux on it
- connect it to your router through ethernet
- install nextcloud
- install samba, create a smb partition on your new server
- mount the drive into your regular computer, phone, laptop, tv. smart-stereo.
- enjoy all your music from anywhere without cluttering your devices with music, movies or books, or articles, or , or, or
- I usually just use vlc to access any media on my smb share :D just works
- get the nextcloud-client for phone and your other devices and access your smb share that way if you like and upload fotos, video or music there. :D
Thank me later (also if you use ALL linux devices you can skip the smb part and just use netdriv
Whips the llamas ass
Not the new worthless app, the original.
Duh. Ver 11? 17? Can’t remember
Version 1.0
It whipped a lama like it was nobody’s ass
Playing NiN on that while trying for Gourangas in GTA.
One word. Geiss
Milkdrop.
Came here to say this!
I’m surprised more folks on here don’t like FLAC… it fits better 😉
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And moreover, there is a debatable gain or quality when you are on mobile with mobile gears/earphones.
The gain of quality is debatable in even the best of circumstances.
If you stream from a personal server you can configure it in most cases to re-encode the music to a lossy format like opus or mp3!
I just don’t hear any difference between ~200kbps VBR mp3 and flac. If you manage a large library, 10x smaller matters a lot, it’s faster to transfer, easier to share on the web, space still costs money.
it fits better
not on my drives!
Yeah, i do 320 mp3s sometimes. Man are FLAC files big sometimes. Maybe get a NAS and some cheap disks?
I like my .opus files.
I did a test some time ago of the diff track against flac, it was just noise at 192k, its awesome
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Fair
2016 was a total gamechanger for me musicly. Spotify opend so many genres for me. I listen to so much music it would be an absolute pain in the ass to collect and manage all that music.
.flac or bust
i have 50gb of music that accumulated over the years. my phone has 128gb drive. no way i would be able to use flacs
I have a collection of flacs but convert them for my phone to something lossless
I assume you mean lossy?
Yes, indeed
Considering it’s going through a junky phone dac or Bluetooth earbud dac, convert them to 320 mp3 and store that on ya phone.
DON’T. Use 160kbps Opus instead, all modern phones should support it. You can halve the size of your library while still enjoying the quality of 320kbps mp3.
How’s the tagging when converting over to Opus?
I assume it supports the basics like Album and Artists but what about tags like embedded lyrics or ReplayGain?
I don’t use embedded lyrics myself, but AFAIK Ogg (and by extension Opus) supports embedding lyrics using OggKate. Whether your player supports lyrics embedded in Ogg, is a whole other topic…
ReplayGain is supported.
I just stick to 320 for mp3s because I’m comfortable with it.
Don’t forget about .ape.
Please do forget about .ape. Proprietary, obscure format. Only advantage is that under some circumstances it can get you higher compression rates than flac. But it’s way more resource intensive to decode so that advantage is really more theoretical. Use flac, forget ape.
Thanks, never realised that. Never encoded to .ape myself, but quite sure that in the past some media sailed in to my hard drive disguised as those naughty monkeys. Perhaps one day I’ll reencode them to the flacs they’d actually like to be.
The Enshittification has forced us to revisit the old way
The old ways must be passed on
It really whips the llama’s ass
Do yourself a favor and get a record player and some records, vinyl if you can. Then sit down and really listen. Don’t do anything else while listening. It pays off, I promise.
I recently started ripping all my Spotify playlists using spotdl to put them on my Plex. Spotdl doesn’t actually download from Spotify but uses it as a source for the metadata to tag the files but it gets the audio by matching to YouTube music and downloading from there. From there I import to lidarr for renaming / organization.
Similar setup here, as a bonus I also connected my jellyfin to Listenbrainz to get recommendations and some sweet stats.
