Where do you get your FLAC from?

So I've come to the forums today to ask the community a question. Where does everyone get their FLAC audio from?

Legitly? Bandcamp, ALAC -> FLAC, HD Tracks, personal rips.

Illegally? Who knows.

Not from upscaled CD rips. Those things piss me off. You're taking a 16-bit lossy(?) 44.1kHz sample and converting it to 24-bit lossless 192kHz (from what I've seen). Basically you're taking a 600x800 image and storing it in 4k. And some how it magically looks like a better picture. I think not. You have to get source FLAC for 192kHz, not CD.

(End rant/PSA)

However, if you don't upscale like some people, CD rips mostly.

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Have either of you ever heard of what.cd?

Armada Music/Tiesto/Armin Van Buuren. I also get my vinyl from those artist's sites.

Nope.

what.cd is not a legitimate site to legally get music, or well, the content it tends to distribute isn't.

The ALAC -> FLAC was referring to iTune's lossless content.

Oh ya I knew that I guess I clicked the wrong reply button. But thanks anyways!

So in other words, you are getting ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) over FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). You are paying a license fee just to use ALAC (up until 2011). Versus FLAC which is Free. No licensing. Been the Industry standard for so so long.


Wikipedia

FLAC is an open format with royalty-free licensing and a reference implementation which is free software. FLAC has support for metadata tagging, album cover art, and fast seeking.

Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. After initially keeping it proprietary from its inception in 2004, in late 2011 Apple made the codec available open source and royalty-free.

Both codecs produce identical sound quality but While FLAC is supported on a wide selection of devices and software, ALAC is mainly Apple Only devices.

Ehhhhhhhhh, I'm not sure how to answer that... perhaps you should read what I said again?

Incase you were wondering.... "ALAC to FLAC" = "ALAC -> FLAC" != "ALAC > FLAC"

I know the differences between ALAC and FLAC, and if you were wondering, ALAC does have its plus points, such as support on Apple devices. As someone that owns one, I find it rather useful, even if I won't notice the difference, saves the pain of having to transcode it when I'm on the move without the processing power.

I'm not sure what the problem is even if I did like ALAC over FLAC, unless we are going to get into an argument about Apple vs. everything else.

Have you just been buying FLAC and then transforming it into ALAC, or have you been ripping directly from the CD to ALAC?

I'm going to get a lot of flac for saying this, but i still listen to mp3's...

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I generally rip to WAV + CUE, then go from there to whatever I want.

My downloads are generally whatever I have the HDD space for and what is being offered.

Thank you for the pun sir. Not gonna lie, I do too. My equipment is such crap, I doubt I would hear the difference, and I'm always fighting for disc space.

If you'd be able to hear a difference you'd have to REALLY focus. So using FLAC/lossless for the quality is pretty dumb, but I can understand that someone might want to store their data losless so they can convert it to a lossy format in the future.

There was a website somewhere that tested various audio formats, interestingly i was able to tell the difference between the 'lower quality' formapts (mp3 etc) compared to wav. But thats not the only reason not to use mp3, open is better :P

I usualy get flac files from bandcamp