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where to purchase and download FLAC tracks?


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Guest thaddeussmith
I'm working on converting my mp3 library to FLAC and no longer have a lot of the CD's I used for ripping to mp3. Most of the sites I can find for legally acquiring FLAC tracks are devoted to jazz, classical, easy listening (which, in my limited experience, seems to be the common trend with much of the HI-FI world). 

 

where can i go to get the tool discog .. or pink floyd .. or chemical brothers .etc? I've had to resort to usenet for a lot of the stuff, but even that is limited. I'm not against purchasing the music, but I have no real desire to maintain a physical music library and it's stupid to purchase 1-2k cd's just so i can rip them to FLAC and resell at a loss ..
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Guest thaddeussmith

 

 

I hope you know there's no point in converting mp3 files to FLAC as you wont get better quality than the mp3 file you convert..

 

 

 

yes ;) ..should have phrased that differently. convert, as in, switch from what I have in mp3 format now by locating FLAC files. i fear i may have to have a hybrid library .. :(
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Why not jump off the digi format of the month club and the constant converting and worrying if it will convert.  Just store it as the total real music. 
I wouldn't dream today of anything but Wave files.  I want ALL the music!!  Drive space is cheap.  I can even load up my wifes Ipod with Waves. 
 
You can set here every night, going from forum to forum watching people wrangle around with the format issue and reburning, relabeling and so on...and on....and on.... Just jump off and do it right!  I wantta listen to the music!
 
Mark
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FLAC is a lossless format, which means you get all the music, it's not just a question of  drive space either.

It's also far more faster to transfer the smaller FLAC files from your PC to a dedicated music server if you've got one, also easier/faster to do backup of your music if they're in FLAC compared to wave files. (This matters only with large music collections though)

 

Anyway, weithrino's advice about going to your local library was a good one!
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Mark, there is a reason to go with some lossless format and a player that plays it.  For instance, I convert all my CDs to Apple lossless format.  That way, I can store them in a library that is linked to a database that has the album artwork, the year of the specific track, it's full name, and many other useful things like its position on the album (disk number and track number).  For classical music, you can have the conductor as well as the composer.  For a big library, it's nice to have the genré of the music.  All these are sortable to put together a playlist.  WAV files can only have certain tags associated with them, and I know album artwork isn't one of them.

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Guest thaddeussmith
all good points, thanks guys. I have only a handful of vinyl records and absolutely no cd's anymore. my problem is that as I grow my hardware list, I am definitely starting to hear the limitations of the mp3 compression. those artifacts and loss of quality simply aren't there in the flac files ..but now I no longer have the physical media, so I can't just re-rip my music.

 

why am I choosing flac over aac? flexibility and a bit more future-proofing of my library, i guess. I've found some bits and pieces for services offering flac downloads, but nothing that gives me the mainstream music and back catalogues I'm hoping to find. oh well.. 
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He's busy but here's his response:
 
"The "safe" answer is to get an iTunes account and purchase in Apple lossless format. The problem is that it may not be as portable as he wants but, hey, due to the larger file sizes lossless formats are not meant for portability anyway. There are also other services such as http://www.hdtracks.com/. There are some premium services (I don't remember the name anymore) that will allow you to request any track and they will hunt it down for you and sell it to you as a FLAC or WMV-HD.

Just to dispel a few myths that I saw in the thread. Neither WMV or FLAC are necessarily 100% lossless. And, yes, you can get some high-bit-rate MP3 rips that sound indistinguishable from their CD original, in my humble opinion.

If you want to rip a CD where not a single bit is lost, you can save it as an image. My Linux media server is setup to play those .iso or .img files as if they were physical CD drives. Some argue that this is even better than a real CD because of the lack (or reduction) in jitter. That's splitting too many hairs for me. It just sounds the same to me. Only problem there is that it is tough to add those into most computer music library programs. I use MythTV in my Linux media server and it does a fairly decent job.

Of course, when you play music through a computer it introduces a whole bunch of new arguments such as whether your sound card is as good as the DACs in even the most average CD player or processor, and whether the sound format (or the drivers that you use) faithfully reproduce the sound. In my case, I use an Outlaw 990 preamp/processor which has a USB input that my computer recognizes as an external sound card. All my media server does is decode and send a bitstream to the Outlaw 990 which processes that stream via the same 194 kHz 24-bit DACs that it uses for the CD and DVD inputs.

Also, some universal DVD players (such as my Oppo) will play just about any digital media you will throw at them. I can plug my external USB hard drive right to my DVD player and it will play most formats that I use.

I hope that helps.

Nice hearing from you. Tell everyone I said hi.

Take care,
Nelson"
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Ax Robert says, the portable format is WAV.  You can always convert Apple Lossless to WAV at any time.  THe problem with the iTunes store is the usage protection they put on things.  It makes it a pain to move around.  What I've done is the old fashioned way, buy the CD and rip it.  I ripped all my vinyl, too.

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Guest thaddeussmith
i think it's just a case of my expectations and reality not synching up.. i'm just going to convert what flac files i have over to apple lossless ( so they are still playable on my ps3/iphone/etc) and just replace the mp3 files with higher quality stuff as i can.

 

thanks everyone for your input and suggestions. 
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