I think these days it's pretty easy to buy lossless audio - if you just look a little bit further than iTunes & Co. you'll find Qobuz, Boomkat, HDTracks, Bandcamp and similar stores.

I pretty much find everything I need, including rather obscure music.

Bleep! They also offer 24bit wav versions.

I know you're probably looking for a legal solution, but private torrent sites like what.cd offer a very large selection of .flac files. If only the music industry would do the same.

I'm in the camp of people who literally can't perceive the difference, so why would I download the much larger audio?

In fact I can't even tell the difference between 128kbps MP3 and the CD it's encoded from, let alone superior formats like Opus or AAC or higher-bitrate MP3.

For the consumer listener, I agree with you. On the vast majority of consumer sound systems and consumer ears, as you point out, compressing that further into a 128kbs MP3 isn't noticeable. For me it personally is, but on most music say 192VBR MP3 isn't.

Currently at the end of the line all audio is going to be squished, at best, to 44k 16bit sampling. Most audio production and engineering is going to be taking place at quality levels than what the final CD master is, however. /During/ production working with higher quality sources such as a higher sample rate, higher bit rate FLAC sample means that you can 'do more' with it before you start running into the walls of unintended artifacts and distortions. Think of all audio processing as a destructive process - the more you have to begin with the more you can do before the destruction becomes noticeable.

Intentionally ignoring all debates on aesthetics, obviously in many artistic circumstances the artifacts and distortions are desired - but when they are you can easily achieve them in an /intentional/ way. Avoiding them is the challenge.

And there are certain contexts in which it is more noticeable: high quality club sound-systems, custom home and car audio systems, etc. My vehicle's sound system has a very easily audible difference between a 128KBS MP3 and an uncompressed 44k 16bit CD for most music, and in that context you are damn sure I want the uncompressed experience. So having an /option/ for high quality lossless formats such as FLAC available universally helps to serve such niche markets.

tldr; if you are in camp that can't tell the difference, you shouldn't download the higher quality larger files. They aren't for you. Other camps do exist, however.

edit edit: And this all ignores the annoying 'loudness war' trend in modern audio engineering to use compressors to flatten out all dynamic range anyway. Le sigh

Flac is future proof. You can always take losslessly compressed audio and convert it to another lossless or lossy format.

You can convert lossy formats but there is no way to tell how the artifacts will interact.

And yet we save movies to h.264 or WebM and save photographic images to JPEG.

Lossless formats do have their place but it's not as if lossy formats literally sustain bit rot; they lose information one time and that's it. Unless, of course, you convert lossy formats, but you should know not to do that.

If you do have to convert between lossy formats or absolutely need every bit of data (e.g. RAW photography) then that's one of the places you might find lossless archival storage useful. But most uses don't need it at all.

Lossy formats are useful, no doubt about that. I was just pointing out an advantage of a lossless format.

I've only ever heard a difference for sure in one song: Who Said (Stuck in the UK) by Planet Funk. At one point there's a synthesized high frequency warble that MP3 at any bitrate is apparently unable to encode properly.

Another excellent test case is the track "Second Bad Vilbel" by Autechre. The rockets at the beginning pose an insurmountable challenge for most codecs. Last I checked, MP3 at any bitrate couldn't do it, and Ogg Vorbis fell down unless you went up to at least -q7, which is a rather high bitrate (~224kbps).

I was too. Now I find the superior formats sound better, but more importantly I find they hurt my ears less. I found mp3 and lower formats really hurt my ears, frequently causing uncomfortable numbness.

What are you listening with/on when you perform these comparisons? You probably won't hear any difference when listening with set of standard ear buds that come with your smart phone or laptop speakers. If you have a nice pair of headphones/speakers, the difference is easier to hear.

Who knows, maybe any differences I think I hear are just placebo effects :-)

Exactly this. The most astounding difference between MP3 and FLAC I've ever heard was Teen Spirit by Nirvana. In the opening riff there's just such a huge difference in depth and clarity. On the MP3 everything sounds flat and lifeless, on the FLAC recording you can hear each individual thrum, every single vibration as the song spins into life. There's nothing quite like listening to lossless Nirvana through some nice headphones/speakers.

7digital have a few too, I made a list here: http://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2012/02...

Flac is genuinely great, but I don't see the problem with people using mp3. I use Flac for my meditation sounds because of binaural tones encoded into them, otherwise for music mp3 is just fine, I am just enjoying it, not producing.

That's why I like buying from bands in Bandcamp.

A few artists on soundcloud.com also make their music available as flac (and as lossless wav).