NFR Where do you download your music from ?

[YankeeJim]

Ah, cassettes and AM, what memories and hiss they doth yield, and yet despite the background, every bit as good, nay better, than an MP3.

Most downloaded stuff is not worth money being spent.  At one end it is low quality files often sold at higher price than loss-less CD quality prices - Apple (iTunes) started this particular rot.  At the other end you get supposed HD music files which are often 44.1/16bit  CD quality upsampled  and sold at more than the cost of the original CD.   The music industry is as big a rip off these days as anything else. 

If you really want to listen to music and hear it as a quality media then you need true high resolution recordings (which vinyl and analogue tapes were) with file sizes many times greater than an MP3 or even a CD quality recording.  Five minutes of relatively good recorded music should consume around 150 Mb of space in a file.  Most file sizes are much smaller than that and that means they are poor resolution.

Would that explain the volume difference on various iTunes downloads?

[toshes mate]

I download the songs off YouTube via conversion websites. It's not illegal unless you're distributing it.

If the music is copyrighted, it is illegal to download it. Not sure who told you otherwise.

It's illegal to make unsubstantiated claims about products in advertising or on sale and yet the 'free' market music industry shows contempt for the law every single day.  Someone downloading a pretty poor MP3 which they would not have bought with money damages exactly who?

Downloading someones music they have not given away for free would be the person missing out on the royalty, irrelevant of the quality of the audio.

AlexW132 - the music on youtube will have ads, so they would still profit from people listening.

Recording music from a public source (e.g. radio, which is what downloading a file is) has never been an infringement of the copyright owner.  Distribution of or broadcasting such recorded material is illegal.   The performer gets royalties from the original public broadcast.

[toshes mate]

Ah, cassettes and AM, what memories and hiss they doth yield, and yet despite the background, every bit as good, nay better, than an MP3.

Most downloaded stuff is not worth money being spent.  At one end it is low quality files often sold at higher price than loss-less CD quality prices - Apple (iTunes) started this particular rot.  At the other end you get supposed HD music files which are often 44.1/16bit  CD quality upsampled  and sold at more than the cost of the original CD.   The music industry is as big a rip off these days as anything else. 

If you really want to listen to music and hear it as a quality media then you need true high resolution recordings (which vinyl and analogue tapes were) with file sizes many times greater than an MP3 or even a CD quality recording.  Five minutes of relatively good recorded music should consume around 150 Mb of space in a file.  Most file sizes are much smaller than that and that means they are poor resolution.

Would that explain the volume difference on various iTunes downloads?

The volume difference is often down to the recording quality - as in a recording of someone else's recording.  Even source material - the original mix quality - can vary from master to master.  On iTunes it is simply the 'copy' they have released which is one of many copies.

[Logicalman]

talking of old music ....for the audiophiles out there ...  saw an item on BBC News (over here in the States) regarding vinyl nostalgia, which highlighted a couple of places in London where one can attend to hear original vinyl albums being played.

http://spiritland.com/about/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/arts/music/london-listening-clubs-spiritland.html?_r=0

[rweller86]

I download the songs off YouTube via conversion websites. It's not illegal unless you're distributing it.

If the music is copyrighted, it is illegal to download it. Not sure who told you otherwise.

It's illegal to make unsubstantiated claims about products in advertising or on sale and yet the 'free' market music industry shows contempt for the law every single day.  Someone downloading a pretty poor MP3 which they would not have bought with money damages exactly who?

Downloading someones music they have not given away for free would be the person missing out on the royalty, irrelevant of the quality of the audio.

AlexW132 - the music on youtube will have ads, so they would still profit from people listening.

Recording music from a public source (e.g. radio, which is what downloading a file is) has never been an infringement of the copyright owner.  Distribution of or broadcasting such recorded material is illegal.   The performer gets royalties from the original public broadcast.

Converting music videos from YouTube to MP3 is illegal.

[Fulham Joe]

It's always been illegal to tape music, but the world and his wife have done it.
Also, the copyright usually runs out on all music after 70 years, so if your favourite tune is fom 1946, you can do what you like with it.

This downloads from Youtube in high quality.

https://vubey.yt/

[Southcoastffc]

I download my cd or vinyl lp from the shelf and put it in/on the cd player or record deck.  Appropriate technology  :wine:

[kiwian]

I have gone through the whole 9 yards from taping off vinyl/radio, tapes, then cd to tape-yes!!, than youtube to cd, now gone legal by downloading off itunes, only problem is most of the music there is remastered, ie not the original sound. No wonder so many music acts are touring, at least we get the real mccoy.

[toshes mate]

I hate to be an anorak but CD is a better quality than vinyl because a) it is, and b) the physics supports this.
Any genuine blind comparison favours CD.

And so why do people attend concerts, nose?   Sound is unsliced, unsampled and your ear hears it continuously not in bits.  Sound is non-digital. It is analogue and absolutely uncompressed.  Vinyl is analogue and very slightly compressed to overcome the problems of mastering an LP.   It has a range that far exceeds the human ear's capability to hear, and it is those harmonics we cannot hear that shape the sound we do hear.  Birds are known to sing along to musical instruments but they do not sing along to CD.

If CD were really that good then why not just play a CD loudly at a concert? 

Oh and blind testing has proven analogue is superior time after time after time.

[toshes mate]

It is not illegal to record from the radio since it has never been tested in a law court since the law on digital reproduction was changed in the EU in 2001.  That law has a relaxed stance about individuals recording for no commercial gain. It is the notion of 'fair compensation for the copyright owner' which has never been tested in an EU, or UK court.  The words 'it is illegal' are simply an opinion expressed by those who wish it to be illegal but until someone is taken to court for having privately recorded (or ripped) something and a precedent via case law is established by the judiciary it is not illegal, it is just opinion that it shouldn't be legal.  In Germany it has been made legal to record or rip for personal use just to end the rivalry.  In the UK it remains a sensitive subject for those who would like it to be illegal but don't want to risk everything by taking someone to court and the court not finding for them on the issue of fair recompense. 

I don't personally rip music and never have done, but I do make exceptionally good digital recordings from LPs which beat commercial CD's all ways, especially when compared to the original analogue masters. 

[rweller86]

It is not illegal to record from the radio since it has never been tested in a law court since the law on digital reproduction was changed in the EU in 2001.  That law has a relaxed stance about individuals recording for no commercial gain. It is the notion of 'fair compensation for the copyright owner' which has never been tested in an EU, or UK court.  The words 'it is illegal' are simply an opinion expressed by those who wish it to be illegal but until someone is taken to court for having privately recorded (or ripped) something and a precedent via case law is established by the judiciary it is not illegal, it is just opinion that it shouldn't be legal.  In Germany it has been made legal to record or rip for personal use just to end the rivalry.  In the UK it remains a sensitive subject for those who would like it to be illegal but don't want to risk everything by taking someone to court and the court not finding for them on the issue of fair recompense. 

I don't personally rip music and never have done, but I do make exceptionally good digital recordings from LPs which beat commercial CD's all ways, especially when compared to the original analogue masters. 

Not sure if this is in response to my post. But not once did I say recording from radio was illegal.

[nose]

I hate to be an anorak but CD is a better quality than vinyl because a) it is, and b) the physics supports this.
Any genuine blind comparison favours CD.

And so why do people attend concerts, nose?   Sound is unsliced, unsampled and your ear hears it continuously not in bits.  Sound is non-digital. It is analogue and absolutely uncompressed.  Vinyl is analogue and very slightly compressed to overcome the problems of mastering an LP.   It has a range that far exceeds the human ear's capability to hear, and it is those harmonics we cannot hear that shape the sound we do hear.  Birds are known to sing along to musical instruments but they do not sing along to CD.

If CD were really that good then why not just play a CD loudly at a concert? 

Oh and blind testing has proven analogue is superior time after time after time.

At concerts, very often the sound is far worse than listening to a recording. One goes to a concert for the performance and experience. I have been to many such events that were totally ruined by poor acoustics OR where our seat was located so local booming or echoing took place. It is also the case that sound engineers are notorious for turning the volume up far too loud.

But even though a concert can be pretty ropey, I still love to attend.

Regarding CD V vinyl, since I was a teenager, many years ago the various discussions about what sounds better than what which tone arm/catridge/speaker combination sounded better than other always raised my eyebrows. You like this I like that, and that remains but the physics absolutely supports that CD is better than vinyl BUT other factors do come into play. but before even touching on that the compression and de compression is the issue along with how the groove is cut. It may be analogue but it is an intefered with signal. Check waveforms and CD should be better. Sampling theory ensure that.

Other factors do count though, mainly how things are recorded and what is often misunderstood is that in much of the 'pop' world to give impact, CDs can be engineered to be louder and that actully causes distortion. That is not quite the case in vinyl.

I don't know about birds singing to plastic or CD I doubt that is any more than folk lore but if even if it were so, so what?

Ranges that exceed the human ear and dynamics we cannot hear are irrelevant because we cannot hear them, I recall all those arguments when we were young, I thought it had gone away.

Notwithstanding any of that, I always say, it doesn't matter what I say or you say, it is what the listener hears and if you manage to convince yourself a) is better than b) it doesn't matter I thionk something else. The sound system is a means to an end, but the physics remains the physics and it says CD will reproduce the original more faithfully just because of the recording technique of the analogue.

[toshes mate]

Where we disagree is, nose, the end product.  I believe music at home should sound as close to the real thing as possible and only an analogue system can do that.  Physics never came into the decision to base compact discs upon 44.1 kHz/16 bit; it was the fact that it allowed a certain operatic piece to fit on a single disc or so legend has it.  Even 44.1 kHz/24 bit sounds better, or the more obvious 48kHz/16 bit which at least fits other media.  The fact is music loses something the moment it isn't 'live' (forget poor acoustics etc for a moment) even on an analogue tape but it loses more through a digital system that disassembles the sound mathematically only to reassemble it again to play it back via an analogue amplifier and an analogue speaker.   Mathematics is cute and, as I have already said, at higher sample rates digital is very good at doing a job.  My argument is solely aimed at the poor quality of digital music within the music industry simply because they realised that an LP was as close to the original master recording as anyone was likely to get.     

To record and reproduce digitally requires two processes - disassembling the analogue sound form a human voice and musical instruments mathematically and reassembling it mathematically to replay it through an analogue amplifier and analogue speakers.  Within that process several things are not true to life, rather like mathematics can never accurately replicate nature or infinity; it can get close but it can never get close enough.

[toshes mate]

It is not illegal to record from the radio since it has never been tested in a law court since the law on digital reproduction was changed in the EU in 2001.  That law has a relaxed stance about individuals recording for no commercial gain. It is the notion of 'fair compensation for the copyright owner' which has never been tested in an EU, or UK court.  The words 'it is illegal' are simply an opinion expressed by those who wish it to be illegal but until someone is taken to court for having privately recorded (or ripped) something and a precedent via case law is established by the judiciary it is not illegal, it is just opinion that it shouldn't be legal.  In Germany it has been made legal to record or rip for personal use just to end the rivalry.  In the UK it remains a sensitive subject for those who would like it to be illegal but don't want to risk everything by taking someone to court and the court not finding for them on the issue of fair recompense. 

I don't personally rip music and never have done, but I do make exceptionally good digital recordings from LPs which beat commercial CD's all ways, especially when compared to the original analogue masters.    What has changed is the market's greed.

Not sure if this is in response to my post. But not once did I say recording from radio was illegal.

The 'laxed attitude' I refer to covers all forms of personal recording and downloading where there is no commercial gain or theft implied because many things have happened to fairly compensate the copyright owner already including the charges you have incurred when purchasing the equipment you use to record or download.  The law was effectively amended when recording equipment first appeared on the domestic scene via license fees and taxes included in the price you paid for the equipment e.g. cassette mechanisms and tapes etc.  Those fees and taxes were an element of recompense to the copyright owners to reflect potential losses in other ways.

[rweller86]

It is not illegal to record from the radio since it has never been tested in a law court since the law on digital reproduction was changed in the EU in 2001.  That law has a relaxed stance about individuals recording for no commercial gain. It is the notion of 'fair compensation for the copyright owner' which has never been tested in an EU, or UK court.  The words 'it is illegal' are simply an opinion expressed by those who wish it to be illegal but until someone is taken to court for having privately recorded (or ripped) something and a precedent via case law is established by the judiciary it is not illegal, it is just opinion that it shouldn't be legal.  In Germany it has been made legal to record or rip for personal use just to end the rivalry.  In the UK it remains a sensitive subject for those who would like it to be illegal but don't want to risk everything by taking someone to court and the court not finding for them on the issue of fair recompense. 

I don't personally rip music and never have done, but I do make exceptionally good digital recordings from LPs which beat commercial CD's all ways, especially when compared to the original analogue masters.    What has changed is the market's greed.

Not sure if this is in response to my post. But not once did I say recording from radio was illegal.

The 'laxed attitude' I refer to covers all forms of personal recording and downloading where there is no commercial gain or theft implied because many things have happened to fairly compensate the copyright owner already including the charges you have incurred when purchasing the equipment you use to record or download.  The law was effectively amended when recording equipment first appeared on the domestic scene via license fees and taxes included in the price you paid for the equipment e.g. cassette mechanisms and tapes etc.  Those fees and taxes were an element of recompense to the copyright owners to reflect potential losses in other ways.

Any copying or publication without the consent of the copyright owner is an infringement, and you could face legal action. The owner can effectively make a claim for damages to recover lost revenue / royalties - it's just whether said owner takes legal action, which is unlikely.

[Riversider]

For those asking, the problem I've had with Spotify is that I can't add my wife to the family account as she has the same e mail address as me,
So we can't play our music separately on our mobiles !
I've just had a web chat with Spotify and they confirmed this (as incredible as it sounds)
Now looking to move to Deezer.

[nose]

Where we disagree is, nose, the end product.  I believe music at home should sound as close to the real thing as possible and only an analogue system can do that.  Physics never came into the decision to base compact discs upon 44.1 kHz/16 bit; it was the fact that it allowed a certain operatic piece to fit on a single disc or so legend has it.  Even 44.1 kHz/24 bit sounds better, or the more obvious 48kHz/16 bit which at least fits other media.  The fact is music loses something the moment it isn't 'live' (forget poor acoustics etc for a moment) even on an analogue tape but it loses more through a digital system that disassembles the sound mathematically only to reassemble it again to play it back via an analogue amplifier and an analogue speaker.   Mathematics is cute and, as I have already said, at higher sample rates digital is very good at doing a job.  My argument is solely aimed at the poor quality of digital music within the music industry simply because they realised that an LP was as close to the original master recording as anyone was likely to get.     

To record and reproduce digitally requires two processes - disassembling the analogue sound form a human voice and musical instruments mathematically and reassembling it mathematically to replay it through an analogue amplifier and analogue speakers.  Within that process several things are not true to life, rather like mathematics can never accurately replicate nature or infinity; it can get close but it can never get close enough.

Well I am pleased you have cut the thread so it isn't a mile long!
I will not debate the issue regasrding the technicality because I have done it so often that I do not want to go there any more.
I do not think we do disagree expect in the sense of what do we mean by 'I believe music at home should sound as close to the real thing as possible'  This is not having a go at you or anybody but most music is created in a studio and is messed about with by engineers until they and the artist feel it sounds as good as they can get it using their monitors in the studio. Then the label owners come in and want it tweaked to sound good on the radio etc etc.... and then we play it at home in rooms furnished differently with wives (not meant to be sexist) that do not want our speakrs in the ideal position and move the listening seat.... and by the way I tensd oto listen to my sound system standing or dancing......   the sound I hear is not the real thing but rather something i find I like.... in your home it will sound a bit different....   

IMO what we as consumers should be aiming at is a sound that is acceptable and probably in your case and cetainly in mine I have spent far too much on my olde worlde hifi plus cd player plus MP3 player and I am bound to say that whilst I know the MP3 is not quite as good as the rest as a source, it is nonetheless brilliant because I have such a vast library at my fingertips in such a small space....  unless I do direct comparisons it is usually (not always) more than adequate.

My biggest issue with vinyl is access to track, size, noise, scratches and dirt, and the shortness of the play on each side.

I cannot recall why we start this discourse but i am pleased there are people still willing to discuss such things and I long for the new football season!

A pleasure to hear your views on the topic. By the way do you have a fancy hifi, if so can I ask what it is?

[Logicalman]

Great discussion chaps, I can see the befits from both ends of the spectrum, so to speak, and how both are making exceptional points.

This article does the same, and might provide the antidote to 'what is better?' inasmuch that nether really are!!!!
http://www.klipsch.com/blog/digital-vs-analog-audio

[toshes mate]

By the way do you have a fancy hifi, if so can I ask what it is?

My hifi isn't that 'fancy', nose, especially with turntable/arm/cartridge costing just over £1k. Total for amps and speakers about £2k.  I am a devil for developing 'mods' for turntables/tonearms that will work (but are quite weird so people say) and so the quality of reproduction possibly eclipses decks costing a lot more (and in my past I have owned very expensive stuff).  I also know what 'live' and 'studio' music sounds like having had a background in composing and recording music and so I know when vinyl is producing what is actually on the record and not the best 'guess' it can make.  Of course CDs just play the same old file time after time after time with relentless sameness (until the laser lens dusts over)!  I just wish 96kHz / 24bit recordings didn't take up so much space because they very nearly reproduce the similar vinyl atmosphere (listen to some early Buddy Holly studio mono and you'll hear what I mean) you tend to miss on a CD version.     

[Fulhamfan666]

Normally buy CD's...rarely Download tbh