How’s that work btw? I mean considering that music is originally wave if I remember correctly how do some not have lossless formats? I also have one artist whose first album is just mp3s. And due to the type of music I listen to I would say mine is solid 50/50 lossless vs mp3
So some smaller artists artists only release in lossy formats like those on itunes, play music, SoundCloud, etc, or stuff like that
Or it was a super small band that was never really popular and you just can’t find any lossless versions available
More and more small artists are releasing studio versions or cd quality which is nice though
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Oooooooooh! That’s quite surprising but now that you mentioned smaller artist doing it it adds up because the one who I mentioned is an extremely small unknown singer. And yeah it’s great that others do it now, particularly grateful for the system bandcamp uses. It’s perfect, now if only all artists would get on there
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Another unfortunate thing is when you sometimes find that a CD from an artist sound pretty bad, but their vinyl release has better mastering (typically only for older releases lol), but you can’t find anywhere to buy the vinyl and rip. I don’t have a vinyl setup but I do have a friend who has a pretty crazy one and I just have him rip it for me in high quality
Wow! I didn’t even known your could rip vinyl! Lol learn something new everyday
By rip vinyl I mean record playback with an ADC to a lossless format
He just has a really nice turntable and preamp and all that jazz so I bring over a really good ADC
Edit: for anyone curious he has a VPI Avenger Reference with a VPI Voyager phono pre. Don’t know his cartridge and stylus tho
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Oooooooooh i see, thnx for the clear up.
Sometimes I wonder if someone used a set up like that to do rips of those hyper expensive reel to reel tapes they sell for like 400 dollars an album
Yeah, I mean people have r2r copiers for the master tapes, and then are converted to high quality lossless. Some places like hdtracks do that for some of their high rez releases
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Looking through my collection in foobar2000, I now have around 24,000 tracks in my “all playlist”, which hasn’t been updated in quite some time. But say I’ve got a thousand or two extra tracks, with maybe a hundred or so un-ripped CD’s laying around. I need to get myself a USB-connected optical drive so that I can rip my tracks as I don’t have one in this PC anymore since rebuilding my system.
Speaking of streaming services and such. Bandcamp really has revolutionized my music acquisition. I’ve found so many good artists and bought their albums on a whim, simply because of how easy it is to listen to either a single or their whole album and then still be able to get it in FLAC.
For anyone into weird Japanese music, I highly recommend macaroom.
Main vocalist emaru has an amazingly unique voice and their whole electro-pop style is very varied. Tracks mixed with Japanese and English lyrics, with some apparent nonsense words on a few single tracks. I just love them, it tickles my ears the right way. The fact that they released their album “swimming classroom” in 24bit FLAC speaks volumes to me.
Another label to check out is NewRetroWave Records, they’ve got some amazing artists under their belt.
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Omg yes, bandcamp is my favorite site. Everything about it i love. Specially how you can actually buy a physical album AND download the music in any format! No need to rip the disc anymore
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I have been using Apple Music for so many years. It is hard to get out of Apple’s ecosystem when start using iPhone. But speaking of the music catalog, Spotify defenitely wins. So I sometimes use Spotify. It is easy to and merge playlists by downloading and converting Spotify to MP3, and then transfer playlists from Spotify to Apple Music.
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Right so what’s better about like using apple music if you are in the ecosystem? I had an iPad myself and I just passed my music like usual
Apple music was one of the first streaming options with the caveat that you had to buy what you streamed. that got a lot of people hooked into their eco-system and the effort to get out and take your music with you is difficult, from what I understand.
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That would make sense if it was physical but since you stream can’t you just stream in in Spotify? I’m just genuinely curious
I’m not sure why you would play Apple Music through Spotify…as they would already have that music, so seems redundant/
No I guess I just mean what’s the advantage of using apple music over Spotify if they have the same stuff
I largely use Amazon Music HD, it’s got most of what I listen to.
I do have a reasonably sized collection converted to FLAC, which I use for the occasional album that amazon doesn’t have, or doesn’t have in at least CD Quality.
I did the large collection of physical media thing several times, with LP’s, LaserDisk’s and DVD’s, they just become a pain to manage, streaming is just a lot more convenient.
I stream for access to the latest and greatest, suggestions, etc. Home set up is Tidal and Audirvana. I like the “radio” effect- “play something for me… 
oh, very nice. Make-a-the sexy-time…”.
Files wise, I usually play what I make, check other people’s projects, and I usually get white labels from other people. I like to pay artists for their work, but I got rid of Most of my CD and Vinyl collection after conversion. I still do frequent Hard Offs and House Offs to see what used CDs and Vinyl are laying around.
nothing but a captive catalog that you can’t use but through Apple Music, LoLoL!