Spotify - Tidal - How do you get your Music?

If you want some free easy tagging, mp3tag works great. I really like dbpoweramp but that one isn’t free

I really love foobar lol

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I use spotify premium and generally purchase my FLAC from hdtracks.com. I have a Cayin N3 DAP, but am becoming more fascinated with MQA and DSD, but dont know a thing about either format…want to expand my horizons.

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Personally I think a regular 44.1 16 bit flac sounds better than mqa imo

I really like MQA. There’s something so natural sounding about it. I imagine the MQA filter is doing something similar to the sound that Chord’s filters are doing. It’s greatly based on correcting timing errors. Pretty fascinating stuff, imo.

I really need a crash course with something like MQA & DSD for dummies, lol.


RZA begs to differ

Maybe chord has got it down, but every mqa setup I have heard so far sound pretty lifeless imo compared to a true lossless file (same master of course)

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Living in Denmark Qobuz is not an option (I can use software to act like I am in the US, but that doesn’t help my DAP); Tidal is… well not that userfriendly and as we have a familly sub for Spotify, that is the one I use the most.
Spotify has a wast catalouge and the quality is okay. And then ofc my own flac collection as well.

[quote=“donjklassen, post:103, topic:1598”]
Just a friendly reminder that streaming doesn’t pay artists much and this is especially tough for artists who aren’t well known or very popular…
[/quote

Napster - one of the first online music platforms, is one of the best providers in the industry. With its impressive payment of $ 16.82 for 1000 streams, the company paid royalties for its artists with 70% of the subscription profits.

Apple Music - Apple product users quickly become paid subscribers. This makes the actors’ profits of $ 7.83 for 1,000 streams possible.

Amazon - the online shop giant also offers its musicians good conditions starting at $ 7.40 per 1000 streams. Thanks to Amazon Prime’s 30 million subscribers, the platform has yet to expand its listening streaming experience.

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Isn’t RZA still busy with his Wu-Tang Financial portfolios? :wink::laughing:

That is great information btw, was completely unaware of the actual amounts.

Definitely the fact that they’re remasters plays a huge part in SQ.

Yeah that would make a fairly large difference, I would rather listen to a better master on mqa vs a not as good one on regular lossless, but with the same master, the lossless file tends to pull ahead for me

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I was speaking more towards lesser known artists who aren’t as popular. Streaming is a gamechanger for sure but buying albums on something like bandcamp is still more beneficial. And you get the flac dl :wink:

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My entire library is composed of cd qualiy and high rez files along with some sacd’s I ripped, I really don’t like streaming, but it can be costly to buy albums all the time (well when you have as large of a music intake as me lol)

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These numbers are not very impressive imo… I hope they’re improved upon moving forward.

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And that is what makes it so hard to compare.
It ought to sound better than 44.1/16, at least that much of the signal is uncompressed, even the most basic decoding of the additional data ought to be able to throw away the embedded compressed portion of the signal.
I thought what I listened to sounded OK, with. The caveat the 96/24 and 192/24 uncompressed signals were obviously better.
So why bother, the need for lossy compression as a need for low bandwidth connections just doesn’t have value anymore.
It’s all about the digital fingerprinting and licensing costs.

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don’t get me wrong,i don’t stream and own all my music. use bandcamp alot as well as other sites to buy music. just assumed you meant in general and came across this video yesterday lol

I hope I didn’t come across as attacking and judging anyone lol was not my intention… I just know people in the music industry and it can be a struggle and they do it because they love it. Like rza said we spend lots of money on headphones and equipment so let’s not forget to spend money on the music as well.

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I listen mostly to physical media (vinyl and CD), but for streaming, my family uses Apple music and I use Amazon Music.

I have been really loving Amazon Music. Great catalog and a large amount of HiDef titles. Their player also tells you the sample and bitrate for the track, the sample and bitrate your DAC is capable of decoding, as well as the sample and bitrate that is actually playing.
My DAC doesn’t decode MQA, so having all the music PCM is A-OK with me.

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