[brusch64]

Bandcamp is my preferred way of buying music these days. The only advantage of physival media is the record cover. But I am really pissed if I can't download the album or if I am just able to download a shitty MP3 of the music I've bought.

So Bandcamp works great for me. It offers all the options I want (FLAC) and I like that a band can set the price to 0$ so you can download it from Bandcamp for free but you can give them money if you want to. Awesome experience all around. And with the music I like most of the bands are on Bandcamp.

[eertami]

What do you find so shitty about MP3, are you morally opposed to it's origin/licensing?

Quality wise for listening you aren't going to tell the difference between a -v0 MP3 and FLAC even if you think otherwise. For anyone that wants to claim otherwise, unless you've had someone setup an A/B test with a significant amount of cases you're falling victim to placebo.

I say this as a professional audio engineer, who long ago would always seek out FLAC. Now, unless I need to edit or re-encode a file the MP3 is just as good, far from shitty.

[Applejinx]

As another professional audio engineer, I've done it, and to do it I tuned in on 'personality' aspects of the sound, knowing that the rough frequency response would be pretty much taken care of.

The degradation is much like what you'd get running the mix through a generic digital EQ imposing some subtle but high-order filters, or going through the mix buss of an unexceptional DAW that's doing a lot of bit-shuffling to get to the output, perhaps with some unnecessary gain changes.

These are shitty if you have seriously good monitoring and care about ambience and soundstage depth and subtle emotional cues or shades of texture. Sooo… not exactly 'OMG, super obvious on earbuds through iTunes with the aural exciters on'. That stuff will wreck the sound MUCH worse than -v0 mp3, no argument there.

If you're working on gear where you'd be able to tell the difference, and you have experience with listening for the specific objectionable qualities of lossy audio, then you can hear the lossy audio even at its best.

Otherwise, the cure for bad sounding mp3s is to do 'em 320K and call it a day. Throwing more bits at it does definitely help. It's not hard to get mp3 over the threshold where other parts of the playback system harm the sound worse.

[goostavos]

"Placebo" describes the audio scene people pretty well in my experience.

I did that MP3/FLAC A/B/X test back in my audio engineer days after catching a ton of condescending comments due to my listening of 'terrible sounding' MP3s.

Either my ears are garbage, or the difference is so subtle that even with solid headphones in a dead quiet room, the absolute best you could hope to be able to detect is that one is "different." getting all the way to "shitty" sounds near impossible to me.

Also, to my surprise, if you burned someone a cd from an MP3 source, but told the person it was Flac, it'd still "sound really smooth". Hm.

[AsyncAwait]

My library is all FLACs. You can sometimes definitely tell the difference on high-enough fidelity gear, not so much in the sound itself, but being able to hear production flaws more, often you can't, but the point is, I don't care if I can tell the difference. If I am paying the same amount, I want the same quality as I'd get on a CD, if MP3s were cheaper, it'll be a different story.

[mediocrejoker]

I wonder if another reason to prefer FLAC to MP3 is if you ever want to convert the MP3s to another lossy format (perhaps multiple times), is there a loss of quality associated with converting one lossy format to another multiple times?

It's nice to have a lossless format because you can always get lossy from it, but you can't do the opposite.

[brusch64]

Sorry if this triggered somthing in you, but I really meant "shitty MP3s".

I don't have got anything against MP3s in general, but back when I was buying MP3s (Amazon or Downloads when you are buying a record) sometimes I got 256kbps MP3s or even worse. I think one time I even got a 192kbps MP3. And that's my problem.

When I am buying music digitally I would like to have a very very good (or even perfect) digital copy of the music - not something that saves download bandwith and space on the hard drive(for me these days are over).

I am fine with 320kpbs MP3s - but if I pay for it I prefer FLAC.

[TheAceOfHearts]

I try to always find the highest quality version of the media I'm consuming because I enjoy archiving it. If I'm going to keep an archived copy and storage is so cheap, why not opt for the best possibly quality?

I'd agree that for most music I can't tell the difference. But there are some tracks where the difference is noticeable, even if it's minor. I've tested myself thoroughly by running automated ABX tests.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Reminds me of one of my favorite articles about HDMI cables where they had a bunch of supposed audiophiles try to tell the difference between a $2,000 cable and one made from a bent coat hanger. Surprise surprise, they couldn't.

Back when I ripped CDs, I encoded my MP3s with variable bitrate with the quality set to high. They average around 192 kbps. I was never able to tell the difference between the CD and the MP3 at that rate.

[glitcher]

> The only advantage of physival media is the record cover.

I would add that for long-term archiving purposes, vinyl has many advantages over digital formats. I'll admit this is probably not a concern for most people, but once I own something on vinyl it feels much more like I own a permanent copy of the music.

[speleo_engr]

How is vinyl more durable as far as physical media goes than a CD (digital format)? Vinyl can easily warp when improperly stored, degrades every time it is played, and even a small scratch result in audible imperfections. A CD at least can be scratched heavily and still be identical to the original thanks to forward error correction by Reed-Solomon codes.

[brusch64]

I would say from a technical point of view vinyl is one of the worst for archiving purposes. It degrades every time you play it, it can warp, playing it back is error prone...

The advantage of vinyl is in your last sentence: "once I own something on vinyl it feels much more like I own a permanent copy of the music".

That's totally fine for me if you feel this way, but I don't. I feel better with multiple digital copies of the music on multiple places.