What competitors do you recommend?
I use soundcloud and have used Bandcamp but Bandcamp got sold to Epic.
I have also heard of Faircamp which looks promising.
Tidal sells snake-oil hi-fi, though. MQA is pseudo-scientific bullshit, and the fact that Tidal promotes it disqualifies them from serious consideration. Spotify’s maximum sound quality is more than enough for all purposes. “Audiophiles” thinking they can tell the difference between V0 and lossless continues to be the biggest fucking joke in the universe. But hey, those are the same people who’ll shell out $50K for an external DAC despite the technology having been solved to the point where a Chinese $5 DAC on a motherboard does the exact same thing.
The world of audiophiles is an absolutely fucking hilarious clown show where absolutely no one has any fucking idea about anything.
well, i am an audiophile myself and i do think having lossless out of principle is pretty reasonable, even if you can’t tell the difference. especially with how fast the internet has gotten, we don’t need to compress anymore. and with serious sets of headphones (even with DT770 pros) i can definetely tell a difference between an internal DAC and a 20€ external DAC. the better the components, the more expensive the product (plus audiophile tax).
edit: i read up on it and it turns out a properly compressed file is basically indistiguishable from an uncompressed one. (emphasis on “properly”)
so you may have a point, but if the people want FLACs, why not let them have them?
and if you spend little money on audio equipment, good for you if you like it that way, but people are allowed to spend money on stuff.
Yeah, I’m not against spending money on audio equipment, but the vast majority of that money should go towards good speakers and headphones rather than things that don’t make a difference. Not because it bothers me, because who am I, but because people would get more out of their money that way.
I really respect your edit, by the way. Rock on. And the DAC thing we can just disagree on and still be friends. With even a moderately decent sample rate, the DACs job is trivial, and it really makes no difference. If you can hear a difference, it’s because one of the DACs is either doing something more than being a DAC or is broken and polluting the output.
I switched to a TIDAL subscription a couple of months ago. The whole experience, apart from sound quality, is a downgrade from Spotify Premium. I still recommend it to people because supposedly they pay a better cut per stream to artists. The sound quality upgrade is quite noticable if you have good sound gear.
I like Apple Music and would use them if it wasn’t so god damned difficult to upload my own music. I have an eclectic collection of music and though, to be fair, I haven’t listened to a lot of it in a while, I would still like the option. Being on Linux there is no iTunes option and getting it to run under Wine hasn’t worked for me. So right now I use YouTube Music because it’s so easy. I may switch to Plex now that I have a decent internet connection.
What competitors do you recommend?
I use soundcloud and have used Bandcamp but Bandcamp got sold to Epic.
I have also heard of Faircamp which looks promising.
one of my friends uses deezer, there is actual lossless audio there.
tidal is also supposed to be good, but i heard horrible things about the app.
Tidal sells snake-oil hi-fi, though. MQA is pseudo-scientific bullshit, and the fact that Tidal promotes it disqualifies them from serious consideration. Spotify’s maximum sound quality is more than enough for all purposes. “Audiophiles” thinking they can tell the difference between V0 and lossless continues to be the biggest fucking joke in the universe. But hey, those are the same people who’ll shell out $50K for an external DAC despite the technology having been solved to the point where a Chinese $5 DAC on a motherboard does the exact same thing.
The world of audiophiles is an absolutely fucking hilarious clown show where absolutely no one has any fucking idea about anything.
well, i am an audiophile myself and i do think having lossless out of principle is pretty reasonable, even if you can’t tell the difference. especially with how fast the internet has gotten, we don’t need to compress anymore. and with serious sets of headphones (even with DT770 pros) i can definetely tell a difference between an internal DAC and a 20€ external DAC. the better the components, the more expensive the product (plus audiophile tax).
edit: i read up on it and it turns out a properly compressed file is basically indistiguishable from an uncompressed one. (emphasis on “properly”) so you may have a point, but if the people want FLACs, why not let them have them? and if you spend little money on audio equipment, good for you if you like it that way, but people are allowed to spend money on stuff.
Yeah, I’m not against spending money on audio equipment, but the vast majority of that money should go towards good speakers and headphones rather than things that don’t make a difference. Not because it bothers me, because who am I, but because people would get more out of their money that way.
I really respect your edit, by the way. Rock on. And the DAC thing we can just disagree on and still be friends. With even a moderately decent sample rate, the DACs job is trivial, and it really makes no difference. If you can hear a difference, it’s because one of the DACs is either doing something more than being a DAC or is broken and polluting the output.
Tidal brought FLAC this year, so this MQA critique doesn’t really apply anymore.
Nice I will give Deezer a try.
I switched to a TIDAL subscription a couple of months ago. The whole experience, apart from sound quality, is a downgrade from Spotify Premium. I still recommend it to people because supposedly they pay a better cut per stream to artists. The sound quality upgrade is quite noticable if you have good sound gear.
Epic already sold off Bandcamp to another company (songtradr) and it’s probably not an improvement.
Apple Music is also very good. Lossless at no extra cost.
I like Apple Music and would use them if it wasn’t so god damned difficult to upload my own music. I have an eclectic collection of music and though, to be fair, I haven’t listened to a lot of it in a while, I would still like the option. Being on Linux there is no iTunes option and getting it to run under Wine hasn’t worked for me. So right now I use YouTube Music because it’s so easy. I may switch to Plex now that I have a decent internet connection.
It’s easy enough, just add your music to the Music app on macOS.
The Windows version of iTunes is terrible anyway. The Music app on macOS is much better. Can’t you hackintosh it?