FSOLDigital Calendar

[Enofa]

Who knows...

Sax notes from the same source as Plough, I think. Quite a jazzy piece, not dissimilar to some Jazz Mags and Blackhill Transmitter pieces. Dark stuff. The closing environment is really beautiful, lovely textures. Looks like there'll be gaps between the tracks, however.

And what a beautiful cover to go with it...

[ronniedobbs]

Got my 320k copy

[moxlox]

Love the track, love the cover.

[tryptych]

No flac, no buy

[dell1972]

I like the track, it has a slight jazzy updated isdn era vibe to it. I was a bit disappointed by the mp3 only format, not as disappointed as when the 160 kbps version initially appeared though. It can't be that much of a stretch to offer up a higher resolution too surely.

[Pandemonium]

While I agree that offering FLAC would be great,
I can't (completely) understand the fuss about people who'd only buy FLAC.

For me, FLAC is an illusion of owning something more than just a string of zeroes and ones.
I have tens of thousands of releases in digital, and 90% of them are MP3.

My policy is physical release in my hands or MP3 on my hard drives,
and FLAC is pointless if you really think about it...

PS - a properly ripped 320 has no real life difference compared to FLAC,
almost every audiophile fails the A/B testing,
be real people, it's all in your heads

[epitome]

Personally, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between MP3 @ 320 and FLAC. I think I can tell a difference going down to MP3 @ 192 and definitely anything lower than that. But I accept that my ears just might not be as good as some people's.

So I'm more than happy with the 320 version, but I can see why people might want a "full quality" one.

[Enofa]

As Pandemonium says, a lot of audiophiles fail the test, so I never get the bother. A lot of it is placebo as well - a friend of mine's band put out a free album as mp3, and got a lot of people complaining (there's gratitude), so they just upscaled the mp3 to wavs and uploaded that and a couple of people thanked them, saying it sounded much better.

Either way, it's definitely an audiophile thing. The notes and rhythms and arrangement are all the same regardless.

I'm totally the opposite anyway. I did that test for when Tidal went online and almost every one I guessed the 128kbps stream was lossless. Loads of my music has mp3 samples in it. I even lost masters for a fair few tracks so my albums have mp3s upscaled for some track hah.

[seedy]

depends on your media and equipment too

i'm still on CDs and playing through a nice home theater setup so i surely prefer flac. i also like the archival aspect of it

[dell1972]

It invariably ends up being a bit of an emotive subject where it's difficult to avoid sounding like a smug/condescending prick regardless of what opinion you express. To me I do feel I hear a difference, though it could well be placebo effect. It's nice to listen to something in the best quality you can get hold of, I agree with the archival aspect and there may be something said for not over fatiguing your ears on lower quality digital playback when listening for long periods (though that in itself depends entirely on the quality of the source material).

At the end of the day, it's down to personal preference, your listening environments and what you are listening with. Sound quality is a little pointless on my journey into work on a packed bus full of sixth formers and commuters for example, I just want to drown out the teenage monologues as effectively as possible. I'm starting to sound like an old man so I'll stop there.

[Pandemonium]

Yeah... I wrote a long post - realized it sounded 'like an old man' and I didn't even posted

[mcbpete]

I definitely 100% can't hear a difference between a well encoded mp3 (160kbps is probably my top limit of differentiating between a lossy and lossless file) but recently I've been favouring FLAC over mp3 purchases. The only reason being is from an archival point of view - It's really not that larger than a 320kbps file especially in this era of multi-terabyte drives, plus it's nice to have a bit-for-bit replica of the file created by the composer - sort of future proofs it in a way.

As I say I really can't hear the difference between [a good] lossy and lossless file, but with storage so cheap and internet speeds so fast it seems unnecessary to have a file shrunk down with bits chucked out for the sake of a download that only takes a few seconds less.

[Pandemonium]

Pete, what you say is 100% correct,
but in my case,
I have a little problem you see...
with an archive going over 30.000 releases - I can't do FLAC even though I have 9TB (+9TB mirror backup)

[Enofa]

Also if you've got hundreds of people downloading it, all those megabytes eventually add up to a lot of bandwidth being used.

[mcbpete]

with an archive going over 30.000 releases - I can't do FLAC even though I have 9TB (+9TB mirror backup)

Woah, that is impressive