Sure, Google can revoke my access to a movie at any time but I can watch on any of my devices and I dont have to worry about finding it in stock at the local store.
I can carry literally thousands of books with me in a device smaller than a paperback.
I can’t stream lossless music from Spotify but I can stream high enough quality that most people can’t tell the difference. Not to mention you get access to pretty much every song you want for 10$ a month.
Electron apps and the web are replacing desktop apps but they are also making it easier than ever to make a cross platform app, meaning we will get apps that we otherwise wouldn’t. This is especially good for Linux, which would be much further behind macOS and windows without popular electron/web apps available like slack, Spotify, etc.
It does nobody any good to have 1000 books on a single device if the whole thing is subject to revocation, especially when you paid full retail price for the privilege of being allowed to read it. This is regression.
Previously you paid your $10 and received a paper book. You could read it, re-read it, lend it, sell it, or burn it for warmth. You owned it for as long as you kept it dehydrated. The $15 you now pay per book gets you one of these rights, temporarily.
Whether most people can tell the difference between 320k and lossless is irrelevant-- the retail price is the same for a technically inferior product. This is a regression. And again, for your money, you own nothing.
And for apps, the cross-platform compatibility comes at the expense of consumers, who have to continuously purchase and maintain newer computer equipment to do the same damn word processing, email and shopping tasks that used to be possible on a 486. And of course, since everything is a subscription, it's a double punishment for the consumer-- they have to maintain hardware to run software they don't own.
The entire premise of modern technology has become a new vector to extract the most money from the consumer while delivering the least amount of value, power or control.
When I buy movies I generally buy the Blu-Ray with digital download. If it’s a kid’s movie I usually just buy the digital download. I almost never pull out the Blu-Rays, but I know I’ve got them. They usually come with the DVD as well, for even more compatability in a pinch.
When I buy books I generally buy the Kindle version first. I generally only take time to read on planes, trains, and travel/vacation. I’m good for maybe one a month. If I really like the book, I’ll buy a hardbound copy for my library.
Music is the part where I have internal consistency issues. I love music. I love all kinds of music. Motown, classic rock, hard rock, EDM/Electronic in general, classical, folk, rap. I have music on ALL the time. Probably 6-8 hours a day on average. I own no music. I pay for Apple Music because it’s convenient to share a subscription with my wife. I last bought physical album in probably 2008-ish. I buy an album or two on Apple Music a year. Where I really spend my music money is concerts. I’ll pay hundreds of dollars without thinking twice to see my favorite artists up close and in person.
So yeah, I agree that all the convenient ways of purchasing media are nothing but a long term lease and I would not consider anything I’ve bought through those channels as something I own. But if I flip it around and consider that I’m paying some third party to host a copy of the content in a convenient way, I feel okay about it.
If what you really care about is reading and the knowledge you get from it, as opposed to the opportunity to take some totally unrelated stand, then yes, it really does do you some serious good to have thousands of books in your pocket!
My camera can save images as either raw files or maximum-quality jpeg's. I know for a fact that I will never need to edit these photos later on. Which format is superior?
Useless data is of no value to anyone, and data we cannot perceive is useless.
If you're worried about license revocation, you should focus on obtaining DRM-Free digital media instead of killing trees. And make backups, of course. DRM-Free is standard for downloadable music nowadays. DRM-Free eBooks are less common, but they do exist, e.g. https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free
That about sum it up?
What? You can still buy the paperback book, tons of my kindle books are $10 or less, and it very clearly benefits me, which is why I buy tons of Kindle books.
They have revoked licenses in the past and deleted books from people's devices. I know you have a physical file that contains the book, but that file is secured with DRM.
To be blunt: Who really cares?
I care that I can read it. After I have I don't see further use for the ownership.
Others can claim they can revoke my access before the read event occurs but the chance of that is so low that I imagine it rounds to 0%.
I'm not going full RMS here and saying DRM is evil. I'm just saying that: I should be able to loan digital content to other people. I shouldn't be afraid that Apple will, one day, just say "I know you really enjoyed spending $200 on all that media, but its all gone. See ya." Maybe that means they need to offer downloads of the content, or maybe it means we need legislation which says we can sue the hell out of them when they try it. I have no preference. But consumers need more protection.
Also its worth clarifying: I don't hold subscription services to the same standards. That's a different business model.
This isn’t some “normies”/“audiophiles” thing. 256kbps mp3 is acoustically transparent to human beings in ideal listening situations.
The bad rap mp3 got was from 128kbps that was more common pre-broadband.
Also, using lossy compressed sources (even 256-320kbps) in derivative works (eg dj mixes, samples, et c) that will be later lossy recompressed (podcast, satellite radio, spotify, et c) is a good way to make your production sound crappy, which is why lossless is important. Any audiophile who tells you they need lossless for final listening simply hasn’t tested it. It is religion, not engineering.
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/when-is-mp3-transparent-an-a...
(They possibly use MP3 in their webplayer according to some sources)
You can really notice the difference on the high end and the width of the soundstage.
However above 16 44.1 I can't hear a difference.
If you listen to mainstream shit where the artist does not have enough control of their work to opt out of the scam that is the pay scale for streaming music.
I have had to resort to ripping vinyl and CDs from my collection to get digital versions of tracks that Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Music do not have. If I had to do it all over again, I'd keep the vinyl and CDs in the box and just grab the music from somewhere like REDacted instead.
I stopped buying albums for a while, because I have a Google play music subscription, but a couple albums I really liked were deleted from the service recently. I had "added them to my library", understanding that I didn't own them, but I never expected them to get pulled from the service.
I'm getting pretty sick of Google Play shenanigans altogether. I'm probably going back to ripping my own music because the streaming services suck, and oink/what are shut down.
The option is not well advertised. After you purchase a digital download, there's a tiny arrow next to the 'download' link that allows you to switch the download to flac.
I always download flac and consequently spend a lot of money at Bandcamp!
I love Bandcamp.
They also have an app that offers streaming and a bunch of social features so you can make a page for yourself where you show off the music you like and make playlists and interact with others. It's probably a great feature, but the thing that really sets Bandcamp apart is that you can just ignore the fuck out of it and pay money for some files that you can download using a browser and put on your own drives and devices.
Of course there's no need for a separate OGG download; no matter how transparent the MP3 encoding is, one thing at which MP3s suck and lossless codecs, by definition, excel is re-encodeability. If you've got FLAC, you're not far from OGG, AAC, and any other format you like.
This is a separate issue though from the usually high output noise floor and poor isolation from other components, e.g. many complaints about many makes and models where CPU/GPU or even disk activity will induce audible pulse noises in the heaphone outputs or speakers.
Those External Audio Cards receive the signal in digital form, thus free of any noise they could pick up in the process. These are decoded inside the external DAC which then feeds audio to the speakers. since this part of the signal path is analog, any interference picked up by these cables is gonna appear on the speakers, which is why the good gear usually supports BALANCED SIGNALS so that the speaker can reference the signal and weed out noises added while in-transit.
My gear is a pair of YAMAHA HS8 speakers and a YAMAHA AG06 external audio card. Both support Balanced audio so that's what I'm using regarding cables between the audio card and the speakers.
A replier said something about a brand called "Schiit Audio", but I've researched them and they only offer stuff with RCA outputs which are sadly not balanced at all.
If you're on a budget you could get the AG03 which is the same interface, but with less input channels.
Also, the DSP is totally optional on those, If you don't use it you'll bypass it totally, not coloring or changing your signal in any way.
Btw you mentioned your speakers are Mackie, right? Before buying, research if your speakers actually support balanced input (they use XLR or P2/TRS "stereo" (2 black bands) for that, because each speaker is actually receiving 2 polarity-inverted copies of the signal). If all they have are RCA inputs (mono), you're out of luck.
Hope I could help!
EDIT: I have researched your monitors and they do have all three types of input: XLR and TRS (balanced) and RCA (unbalanced). yay \o/
Now go get yourself a nice audio interface with support for balanced output and go make yourself some nice XLR cables.
The Yamaha AG03 AG06 output balanced TRS signals, but for that extra "click" factor no the monitors I have built a custom cable that is TRS on the DAC and XLR to the monitors. That way it stays put :-)
Have a good one mate!
> make yourself some nice XLR cables
Intriguing. How difficult is this?
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/BPBQXM10--pro-co-bpb...
this is the kind of cable you are looking for if your audio card can only output balanced audio via TRS plugs (like mine, Yamaha AG06).
Good luck!
EDIT: Found the schematics for you!
https://www.mediacollege.com/audio/connection/xlr-jack-stere...
In that regard, the AG06 is much cheaper than any of the offerings i'm finding from Schiit.
At least with 320mp3s I could only get it right with certain songs and not too consistently. I'd say my room treatment has a far bigger impact.
(but regarding hardware I'm totally with you and haven't found the source of my rather high noise floor either)
That said, switching between Spotify and Tidal on the same track, I hear a pretty big difference. The lossless music has a depth that just isn't there on the compressed streams
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...
It's fun to think that I might be able to distinguish between uncompressed audio and 320kbps MP3. I didn't think it was possible. I had a hearing test recently, and they did say that I have better than average hearing. But yeah it was probably just random.
I just did this test and got the first two right: https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/5/15168340/lossless-audio-mu...
The third one was really tricky so I had to guess. But the first two were a really clear difference. Uncompressed kind of sounds "fuller" and sharper, and MP3 is a bit flatter. It's a tiny difference but I think I can hear it.
The first sample surprised me on how much of a difference it was, on the 2nd I was wrong, on the 3rd completely lost, but I guess that's by design.
The 128kbps was of course very easy to pick out.
I'm of the opinion that 320 vs lossless is meaningless enough to not really bother, but I know for some tracks it was trivial for me to tell the different. Mostly it was the very complex/atmospheric tracks, Mind In A Box being a good example, where 320 lost a notable amount of quality. Probably others like Ne Obliviscaris as well.
The biggest problem with Spotify is that not all of their library is available at 320kbps.
Spotify uses 3 quality ratings for streaming, all in the Ogg Vorbis format.
• ~96 kbps • Normal quality on mobile.
• ~160 kbps • Desktop and web player standard quality. • High quality on mobile.
• ~320 kbps (only available to Premium subscribers) • Desktop high quality. • Extreme quality on mobile.
The thing that gives it away for me is the extreme highs and lows, both are clipped when compressed usually. I should note, I wasn’t picking which “sounded better”, but rather which “sounded uncompressed”. Several of the tracks sounded better at 320k than they did uncompressed to me. Despite being rather close to 40, I am still able to easily hear sounds well over 20kHz.
The difference is usually very, very subtle (my description for it is "soundstage differences", like slight differences in audio imaging) and if you are in the situation you are 99% of the time where you are not in a critical listening environment, you probably won't be able to even hear this. But if you are absolutely gung-ho about preserving the full spectrum of the recording, MP3 won't work. It's not an archival format by design.
> we're puking web and electron everywhere ... literally only because developers are lazy
No. This is done because developers are slow and expensive. Reusing most of your web app as a desktop app, same for every platform, saves a lot of money to companies.
> you're consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy
No. This is because companies want recurring revenue, not one-time sale. It's vastly easier to get you into ("only $3.99/mo" vs "only $199.95 for lifetime of use"), and it keeps dripping every month.
There's not a bit of laziness here, only business shrewdness.
Let's say Dow Chemical wants to start dumping chemical by-products into the Mississippi River. Thankfully, we have the EPA and strict laws which make this impossible. The only other force which would stop them from doing this is consumer outrage, which only works in some situations and even then tends to be very fleeting.
Now, let's say Slack wants to build their app in Electron. By doing so, they are collectively forcing their 8M users to burn more CPU cycles and purchase machines with larger memory footprints, all of which literally waste resources and cause pollution. Not to the same degree as the previous example, but the comparison is very valid.
What audio could you get lossless before that you now can't that you're claiming there has been a regression?
> Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies
You can buy most movies on physical disks. The old physical copy ownership option still exists. There has been no regression, just new options you personally don't like.
> Applications suck; we're puking web and electron everywhere
Clearly the market has decided that the heavier versions are just as fine. Also, in pretty much every case there's also lightweight non-electron alternative. There has been no regression, just new options you don't like.
> Modern operating systems suck; restricting filesystem access, exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron/RN.
That is absolutely your own fault if your OS restricts FS access. Applications are just as unportable as they have been. There has been no regression, just new options you don't like.
You're just looking at the past like it was some gold standard and a wonderland of software, development and user freedom (of choice or of software), it's ridiculous.
Compact discs. You should look them up. :-) Lots of music out these days that you can't find on a CD.
(1) Til The End - MitiS (2) Dear Me, - Borgeous (3) Ultraviolet - 3LAU (4) Mau5ville Level 1 - Deadmau5 (5) Sleeping With Roses - Chelsea Cutler
I could go on, because I literally didn't skip a single song. I started at the top and went down. On this playlist of 300 songs, I would guess that fewer than 20 have physical albums widely available. In some cases, the artist will sell one on their website (ironically LPs are even more popular nowadays).
And why should they? CDs suck. But they do two things really well: they have clear ownership, and they're pretty close to a master recording. Digital does not have to remove these advantages; we can improve instead of regress. Products like Bandcamp do an excellent job of replicating this experience digitally, but few artists distribute on there, because consumers-at-large demand music on Spotify/iTunes/GPM/etc. Tidal also does a really good job of getting masters, but doesn't have the "you own it" advantage.
In other words, consumers have ruined music for both the artists and audiophiles by changing the rules of the game and forcing the markets to adapt in a way that isn't backward compatible with how things have worked. Artists make shit money on most streaming services, and people who actually care about the audio quality also get shafted.
(2) https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/dear-me-borgeous/rdmk0qi0h...
(3) https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/ultraviolet-3lau/dah7cnit7...
(4) https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/mau5ville-level-1-deadmau5...
(5) https://ca.7digital.com/artist/chelsea-cutler/release/sleepi...
All lossless. All digital. Most of them available at several stores. You're welcome.
[1] https://www.hhb.co.uk/files/product/file/user_manual_2013112...
The quality of streaming services is also a far cry from BDs.
https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/203055911-High-F...
While I agree with your general thoughts, I have to disagree with this particular point. In my opinion there's never been a better time for lossless audio. My collection is made of digital, lossless material only. I buy a lot of music - about 5-10 releases a week - and I have no problem at all finding everthing I want in a lossless format. I understand that this may differ depending on what you listen to and ironically obscure, niche music might be better served by lossles music stores, but I just wanted to provid a different perspective.
If I don't what I'm looking for at Bandcamp, Boomkat, Bleep, Qobuz or various label stores chances are that it's a physical-only release, in which case ripping it myself is always an option.
If you like electronic music, Bandcamp and Beatport (thankfully) sell stuff in lossless. Bandcamp is arguably the best: largest cut for the artist; large range of format wth no extra cost for lossless.
> literally only because developers are lazy
I think management has a lot to do with this, or priorities in general because at the end of the day working with electron and web everywhere is on a superficial level just as difficult as working with other languages-- it's a matter of training and hiring the right people for the right jobs.
These ports pick up some lint and dust after a few months and it packs in pretty hard. Eventually it will give you connection issues.
I don't think there's anything modern about this.
There's POSIX which is pretty great because it at least allows to write somewhat portable networking & io code. But for pretty much anything else, you'll have to write separate code for every OS, and it's always been the case.
Motherboard audio and soundcards are just terrible.
Sure but that doesn't mean the default Apple audio jack is high quality.
I have a cheap USB DAC (bought from monoprice) to power a set of Beyerdynamic headphones. The DAC beat a macbook I was using for work hands down on quality of sound.
Specifically, I noted the DAC had better definition of sound meaning that I could pick out details better. It also had better spatial attributes as well, meaning that I could pick out instruments in 3d space.
To be fair, doing a D to A conversion in a laptop is hard, and while Apple does it relatively better than average, it's still probably better off done outside of the macbook itself.
* the DAC and AMP were Schiit Magni/Modi
I'm not an audiophile either, but there is something about having listened to a track over and over again on an average pair of headphones and then listening to it again through a DAC and the DT770s I have. It's like hearing it for the first time again. Details just pop out and I really began to appreciate the engineering that went into some of the 80's songs I listened to on crappy car speakers when I was a kid.
BTW, the tracks I used to test the spatial qualities of my macbook was "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" on the O' Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, and "Blackbird" by the Kings Singers.
With the DT770's alone using the Mac jack, the Mac smeared the audio on both tracks. The first one especially because the mic used for recording introduces a distortion.
With the DAC, spatial on both were clear and came from point sources. Phenomenal.
If almost every device has poor audio quality, maybe its not the device but the headphones that are your problem?
Neutron Player on Android > USB OTG cable > HiFimeDIY USB noise isolator > HiFimeDIY USB DAC > Beyerdynamic DT880
Although I don't use all that any longer, for convenience sake I just use a wireless Audiotechnica ATH-DSR9BT which supports aptX-HD and produces "good enough" quality with no hissing/noise.
I can plug them into an analog output device and they work perfectly. I'm talking about digital, and the only digital devices that work are a Vizio TV (possibly others, didn't really test against TVs), iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
This has always been the case, even when you "owned" the physical media. Owning a CD, DVD or even vinyl copy of audio/video did not mean you owned the content. It was always just a delivery mechanism. It always came with legal wording to state you didn't own the content, and were only allowed to listen/view in a private setting. You were not allowed to take the music and play it in public, you were not allowed to show the video to large groups of people (including in your own home).
Your OS is the same way. You don't own the software. You only pay for a license granting use of it on one computer.
Think of it as an underlying Windows OEM license that allows you to run Windows. If you want to hook computers together with an AD, you need client access licenses.
(Bear with me, This is the first time I’ve used Microsoft as an example to clarify a license issue.)
Point is, there’s a distinction between a public and private performance. I believe that different stakeholders get paid for each.
The last few decades have shown a preference for accessibility over "quality":
- concord high speed luxury air travel >> cheap but slow mass air travel
- pentium >> netbooks >> raspberry pi
- professional international newsrooms >> amateur blogs
- CDs >> MP3s >> streaming
- steel cars >> plastic and aluminum
- handcrafted oak furniture >> ikea
- durable hand-me-downs >> dispensable chinese products
- etc.
The trade-off is generally positive in my opinion.
I'm wholly convinced that the computing world is, in general, regressing. Audio has been a huge loser in this fight. Today, many modern phones don't ship with 3.5mm jacks. If you want lossless audio, you literally can't find it, even though there's zero reason companies like Spotify couldn't stream it when available (even if it costs extra) (Spotify literally asks artists to upload the masters when they publish, they have that data and then throw it away). Many artists don't even publish physical CDs anymore, so its a game of luck if they have a website where I can buy the FLACs/ALACs. And if you want the actual files to, you know, live your life in a completely legal way, those are gone.
Its more than just audio. Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies, and have them taken away at any time. eBooks are the same and always have been; the world's oldest technology has been coopted by companies like Amazon to increase revenue, and there's practically zero competition. Applications suck; we're puking web and electron everywhere, eating up every conceivable megabyte of memory available literally only because developers are lazy, and now you're consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy. Modern operating systems suck; restricting filesystem access, exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron/RN.
Somehow we took systems and workflows that were amazing throughout the 90s-00s and, in the course of a decade, completely ruined them.