Tidal music launch: Pop plutocrats pour FLAC on rival Spotify Pop mega-stars including potty-mouthed rapper Jay-Z, professional non-smiler Kanye West and someone called Madonna have “launched” a music-streaming service owned by the artists. It includes a “lossless” FLAC audio quality $19.99-per-month tier, and there’s no ad-supported version. Jay-Z spent $56m this year on Aspiro, which …
Waste of space. MUCH rather have high bitrate lossy aac, ac3, ogg, etc. at a higher hertz and multichannel. Seriously, even if you claim CDDA quality is better than mp3, you still understand this is wasteful for a streaming service. I'm with Neil Young, until CD is dead, high quality music will have to wait.
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This is what should have happened years ago. I hope they aren't too late.
>Commercial distribution of music to end users in FLAC is a perfect solution as far as I'm concerned.
Do iphones support FLAC now? If not, well... it was a nice idea. You've also got the problem that Apple might decide it wants to do streaming and removes your app from its store.
Lastly, but not leastly... how much per month? I'm all for not under-funding things, but are there still people who spend that much on music every month who don't want to buy the CD? Is the service that different from, say, Swift's Vevo postings with the video discarded? Hello JDownloader2, my caching friend!
Perhaps there is a market out there which can be tapped, but streaming has always seemed to me to be a solution looking for a problem and not finding a problem large enough to allow funding. Oh it solves artists' problems, but it doesn't solve customers' problems.
Its a bit like catch-up tv streaming. Quite frankly, its worse than piracy. I don't mean, "I don't want to watch commercials" I mean, the compression is so high and the streaming so flaky that it hurts my eyes and irritates me when it crashes and I have to try to scroll through and find my place again, but also watch all the adverts all over again. Torrents give better quality. Why not just put in short adverts of uneven length so it isn't worth skipping and push the video out on a tracker?
"Commercial distribution of music to end users in FLAC is a perfect solution as far as I'm concerned."
Just so you here understand, your "perfect" solution wasn't even perfect the year it was drafted, which was 1979. Some of the earlier drafts for Red Book were testing 48khz, not 44.1khz (I've never read on why they couldn't do 48khz, maybe you know since you read about all of this?). If you really like the digital "solution" from 36 years ago, then you're in luck because that is all there is.
BTW, I know you just read about music quality, because anyone worth their weight in audio knows a higher lossy bitrate has absolutely, positively, nothing to do with whatever a loseless bitrate is...NOTHING!
"Oh it solves artists' problems, but it doesn't solve customers' problems" <- No it doesn't solve their problems, it creates them. The process of tracking down royalties is cumbersome, and like YouTube, this won't help. Of course piracy is very real and pretty much kills a streaming service at this price point (it costs more than NetFlix!). My suggestion is ditch CDDA completely and invest in a vinyl setup for ripping *if* you're serious about buying right now. Vinyl, sadly, is still mainstream king (but I just can't afford it anymore, financially or the physical room).
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"... least 50% of audiophiles are perfectly happy with 44100 hz sampling."
Ah, and there we are, your in that 50%. You continue down the path of 1979, I'm movig on. Wait I can't, your 50% is too stuburn! You'll have plenty of more times to regurgitate what you have posted again, because eventually the entity that keeps your "perfect solution" alive will have to up the bar if they want fight piracy. Wether we like it or not, sales will dictate who's camp will have prevail. I'm hopeful users mine, it makes sense. If they up the numbers, I will be happy and you can down sample to that 70's spec. Win/win, but not enough see it that way.
I buy good quality second-hand CDs from eBay, bit-perfect rip them to FLAC or AIF then I have the music and the CD.
I know we're supposed to rent everything now, but if you lose your income, you have nothing. I can build a house out of my CDs and live in that if need be.
And you probably never will, musicians have longevity and don't need to shout "pay me loads of money I'm really talented" from their shirt lived podiums
look up a video called "The Wreckin Crew", see how most bands got their studio sound without ever playing in one
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