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Topic: Downloading FLAC format music (Read 16019 times) previous topic - next topic
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Downloading FLAC format music

A lot of the sites that I buy my music from mostly sell either MP4/MP3/WAV. I know one site that sells dance music as FLAC but its limited. Am I going to be having to be ripping CD,S only to play my style of music? or do I have other options. Thanks

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #1 –
Josh Coalson maintains a list of webstores/artists that offer FLAC files.  You won't find anywhere near the same availability as the lossy formats, though.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #2 –
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A lot of the sites that I buy my music from mostly sell either MP4/MP3/WAV.

Are you absolutely sure MP3/MP4 is not good enough? No need to anwer, it's up to you whether to care about this option.

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Am I going to be having to be ripping CD,S only to play my style of music? or do I have other options.

When it comes to lossless audio, the format it is purchased in is a rather trivial issue in my opinion. It is usually not difficult to convert from one lossless format to another, and it should only take a few minutes to convert an album's worth. So if FLAC is your preferred format, buy it that way when you can. Otherwise buy WAV or any other lossless format that is available, and convert it after downloading.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #3 –
Quote
A lot of the sites that I buy my music from mostly sell either MP4/MP3/WAV. I know one site that sells dance music as FLAC but its limited. Am I going to be having to be ripping CD'S only to play my style of music? or do I have other options. Thanks


What style of music are you referring to? If you are referring to dance music websites like Beatport only do MP3, AAC, and WAV. I haven't seen any others with a wider selection. If you are referring to music by the "music giants" then the answer is more then likely "no". There are a lot of independent sites that sell FLAC downloads and some mainstream artists do as well, but usually indirectly on their own sites and for other purposes such as, live performances. The demand for it never that high unfortunately plus you know what you are getting when you make your own rips. If there is no log file or checksum you simply do not know what you are getting or what kind of hardware the distributor used. 
budding I.T professional

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #4 –
Hi I was looking at dance Music in generally, I use sites like Beatport & Traxsource already. There are a couple of dance music labels that do FLAC but you can count them on two hands if that. Having time to think about it I doubt the small dance downloads will ever go down the FLAC road due to costs.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #5 –
Quote from: HotshotGG on
What style of music are you referring to? If you are referring to dance music websites like Beatport only do MP3, AAC, and WAV. I haven't seen any others with a wider selection. If you are referring to music by the "music giants" then the answer is more then likely "no".

hopefully we're not too far away (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Beatles-USB/dp/B002VH7P4O/)

Quote from: incass on
Hi I was looking at dance Music in generally, I use sites like Beatport & Traxsource already. There are a couple of dance music labels that do FLAC but you can count them on two hands if that. Having time to think about it I doubt the small dance downloads will ever go down the FLAC road due to costs.

huh?  if they're selling wave then how is flac going to cost more?

the premium commanded by flac must exceed the bandwidth cost otherwise so many sites wouldn't be selling flac.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #6 –
Quote
hopefully we're not too far away (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Beatles-USB/dp/B002VH7P4O/)


I noticed this in the news section on your site. I am impressed! Being an avid user of FLAC I would gladly begin to buy downloads from the "music giants" if they were sold losslessly, at a reasonable rate, and from a respectable distributor. I foresee two possible problems with this, however. One they won't adopt FLAC due to the fact that would probably try to push some sort of DRM or watermarking within the actual files and two if one actual believes they are going to change their dastardly ways and Philosophy about music and the open source model in general is "naive" with that said though we are seeing positive progress and this is a step in the right direction.
budding I.T professional

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #7 –
Quote from: HotshotGG on
One they won't adopt FLAC due to the fact that would probably try to push some sort of DRM or watermarking within the actual files


Why would they if they basically abandoned DRM in mp3s?

What really stops them from switching to/adding FLAC is:
1. most computers won't play FLAC unless special software is added, while most can play mp3 right away.

2. few portable players can play FLAC, most notably, the most popular ones (iPods) can't

3. most user don't know what FLAC is, while most know what mp3 is (or at least they know it's "songs")

4. most user's can't tell the difference between how a good mp3 vs. FLAC sound

5. but they can see that FLACs eat up their disk/portable player space 2-3 times faster

6. so the sellers would need to take expense of increasing their storage and bandwith to provide product most of their buyer's base is not interested in. Does not sound like a good buisiness plan to me.
Ceterum censeo, there should be an "%is_stop_after_current%".

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #8 –
Quote from: pawelq on
Quote from: HotshotGG on
One they won't adopt FLAC due to the fact that would probably try to push some sort of DRM or watermarking within the actual files


Why would they if they basically abandoned DRM in mp3s?


Because mp3 is "imperfect"?  Ignoring for the moment that many sell CD's which have no DRM.

Quote
What really stops them from switching to/adding FLAC is:
1. most computers won't play FLAC unless special software is added, while most can play mp3 right away.


Funny, as everytime I install a new version of Linux it plays FLAC out of the box and I have to go looking for MP3 decoders.

Quote
2. few portable players can play FLAC, most notably, the most popular ones (iPods) can't

3. most user don't know what FLAC is, while most know what mp3 is (or at least they know it's "songs")

4. most user's can't tell the difference between how a good mp3 vs. FLAC sound

5. but they can see that FLACs eat up their disk/portable player space 2-3 times faster

6. so the sellers would need to take expense of increasing their storage and bandwith to provide product most of their buyer's base is not interested in. Does not sound like a good buisiness plan to me.


These are all a wash if the vendor already offers wav (per the OP).

These days, storage with 2x redundancy runs about 5 cents for an hour long CD in FLAC.

The vendor I use that does offer FLAC also has mp3, AAC, vorbis.  The customer who only knows mp3 will naturally click on that figuring (rightly) that the other choices are "something else"  they don't need to worry about.


Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #9 –
Quote from: DonP on
Funny, as everytime I install a new version of Linux it plays FLAC out of the box and I have to go looking for MP3 decoders.


This is why I wrote "most computers". Most computers will have Windows with WMP or MacOS with iTunes.


Quote from: DonP on
These are all a wash if the vendor already offers wav (per the OP).


Wavs will add even more than FLACs to storage requirement. Which is not as cheap for portable players, right? And, more importantly, to bandwidth requirements. Also, correct me if I'm wrong but I think that there is no commonly accepted tagging scheme for wav.
Ceterum censeo, there should be an "%is_stop_after_current%".

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #10 –
Quote
1. most computers won't play FLAC unless special software is added, while most can play mp3 right away.


What you mean to say is "Windows" won't play FLAC unless special software is installed. Linux supports it out of the box. CoreAudio in OS/X has the potential to support it, but it's "conveniently" left out   


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Funny, as everytime I install a new version of Linux it plays FLAC out of the box and I have to go looking for MP3 decoders.


It's completely in line with the open source Philosophy and their stance against proprietary software. Notice they give you the "option" of playing MP3's though if for instance you install the Gstreamer framework separately it's not the other way around.


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2. few portable players can play FLAC, most notably, the most popular ones (iPods) can't


Yeah, because it's direct competition with them (Everyone know's about the huge dabacle in the HTML 5 wars we don't need to rehash them again). A majority of players excluding Apple do in fact support FLAC out of the box. Most of Cowon players do now and some models of the Sansa do with firmware updates.

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5. but they can see that FLACs eat up their disk/portable player space 2-3 times faster


That's a poor excuse. I have friends who have hard-drives that are almost a 1 TB who make that argument all of the time. It might eat up space for portable players, but for archival based purposes there is nothing wrong with using it. That's just laziness if you ask me.
budding I.T professional

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #11 –
Quote from: pawelq on
Quote from: DonP on
These are all a wash if the vendor already offers wav (per the OP).


Wavs will add even more than FLACs to storage requirement. Which is not as cheap for portable players, right? And, more importantly, to bandwidth requirements. Also, correct me if I'm wrong but I think that there is no commonly accepted tagging scheme for wav.


My point was that if the vendor found it worthwhile to offer wav, then FLAC should be a slam-dunk, tags being one reason.

WRT storage, you seemed to be painting that from the vendor's viewpoint, so storage on a player isn't his problem.
From the buyer's point, I've certainly read a lot of posts from people who as much as possible use FLAC on their portables, but I'd think the main uses would be a) burning a CD, b) flexibility in what lossy format/bitrate to put on their portables, and c) lossless on their PC for squeezebox etc.

The vendor I use (Magnatune) mentioned on his forum that he didn't consider the cost of bandwidth for distributing FLAC as significant.

Consider the bandwidth used by radio streams and podcasts, sometimes at 256Kb/s, for no compensation other than slipping in a few ads.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #12 –
Quote from: DonP on
WRT storage, you seemed to be painting that from the vendor's viewpoint, so storage on a player isn't his problem.


I was talking both sides. The vendor has to pay for storage (negligible probably) and bandwidth. Limited storage capacity of players influences vendors indirectly because it causes potential buyers to think twice before they choose FLAC.

In general, I agree that FLAC should the main distribution format for online music sale. And it is my prefrred format for music storage at home - thanks, among other things, to the possiblity of converting to anything lossless or lossy without excessive quality loss.

But my or your preferences do not mean much for vendors. We do not constitute a significant part of the market. Most people do not care about lossy compression, they even don't know it is there. They just want to play music on their computers and portable players without hassle, and music equals mp3 (or CD) for them.

Same about Linux - come on, what part of music market do Linux users make? Isn't it like 90% Windows, 7% MacOS, 3% Linux or something like that?
Ceterum censeo, there should be an "%is_stop_after_current%".

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #13 –
Quote from: pawelq on
In general, I agree that FLAC should the main distribution format for online music sale. And it is my prefrred format for music storage at home - thanks, among other things, to the possiblity of converting to anything lossless or lossy without excessive quality loss.

But my or your preferences do not mean much for vendors. We do not constitute a significant part of the market. Most people do not care about lossy compression, they even don't know it is there. They just want to play music on their computers and portable players without hassle, and music equals mp3 (or CD) for them.


IF it costs a vendor little to add lossless and it attracts even a few extra customers then it's worth it.  A small percentage of a huge market is still a lot.  A small percentage use it, but when word gets out you have it, you attract their attention. 

Look at all the portable player brands that have added vorbis.  I'm sure that was a lot more effort than adding an extra checkbox for flac to an online music store.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #14 –
exactly, flac is not going to replace mp3, it's a profitable alternative offering.  not selling flac is leaving money on the table.

as far as the naysaying re: drm and labels, well drm is pretty much dead as far as music sales are concerned.  the beatles copyright is one of the most valuable of all time.  bands like metallica are very protective of their copyright and they're selling flac too.  big classical labels have started selling flac, like deutsche grammophon, naxos will start soon, etc.  just be patient and keep pestering apple for flac support.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #15 –
p.s. and portable support is a red herring.  DAPs don't support CDs either but CDs still sell plenty.  that's because people are happy with a CD or FLAC master, and they convert to something else if needed.

lossless make the least sense on a portable but there is still plenty of choice of portables if you want flac.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #16 –
Quote from: DonP on
IF it costs a vendor little to add lossless and it attracts even a few extra customers then it's worth it.  A small percentage of a huge market is still a lot.  A small percentage use it, but when word gets out you have it, you attract their attention.


Why then major music vendors do not offer lossless, if it is cheap profit for them?
Ceterum censeo, there should be an "%is_stop_after_current%".

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #17 –
because they're dinosaurs and are still trying to create a police state that would be necessary to make drm work.  they've made very good progress towards that with the dmca, acta, etc but unfortunately for them, nothing short of a complete, airtight police state can preserve their current business model (creating an artificial scarcity of bits).

emi is showing some signs of getting it though.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #18 –
Quote
But my or your preferences do not mean much for vendors. We do not constitute a significant part of the market. Most people do not care about lossy compression, they even don't know it is there. They just want to play music on their computers and portable players without hassle, and music equals mp3 (or CD) for them.


No they don't right away, but if you even suggest using some open source codecs like FLAC or Vorbis in a specification or standard everyone all of a sudden is up in arms and has something to say about it (This is why happened with HTML 5 wars). While I attempt not to take sides in that debacle I am glad Mozilla is sticking it to them . Using the same analogy I think it would only be partially true if I said nobody cares about Web Browsers so everyone is using Internet Explorer ;D. 

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Same about Linux - come on, what part of music market do Linux users make? Isn't it like 90% Windows, 7% MacOS, 3% Linux or something like that?


I don't want to go off-topic, but the problem here is there is what I call "half-assed open source model". Everyone has something to say about Linux and GNU Software packages until somebody comes along and makes a Win32 compile of a piece of open source software then all of a sudden it's a "different story".  A small percentage can go a long way and in the case of FLAC it has. 
budding I.T professional

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #20 –
www.livemetallica.com

They sell their daily concert performance in mp3 and FLAC.
mp3 like 8.99 per show and FLAC is 12.99 per show if i'm not mistaken.

In nine inch nails website there are download for their album The Slip is FLAC and FLAC HD for free. What exactly is this FLAC HD? is it exist?

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #21 –
The NIN "FLAC HD" download is 24/96kHz rather than 16/44.1kHz.

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #22 –
Probably a version with a higher sample rate (96 or 192 kHz instead of 44.1 or 48kHz) or bit depth (24 instead of 16).

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #23 –
Bandwith is likely the reason you don't see more music to download in FLAC.  Someone said above if the end result is eventually an ipod or mp3 portable device, why sell a bigger file and have to pay the cost to transfer the file?  That's likely why itunes or amazon with huge music download stores won't be selling lossless files.  Lossless would be nice, but mp3s at -V0 are well beyond transparency levels for me.
foobar2000, FLAC, and qAAC -V90
It just works people!

Downloading FLAC format music

Reply #24 –
I already explained why: the price premium you get selling the flac version more than makes up for the incremental bandwidth and storage costs, otherwise why would so many people be doing it?