Physical Audio Media

[restorer-john]

When it comes to sharing music with friends, nothing beats listening together, I believe. That’s something the lack of physical media can’t take away.

Well said @Room314 You should post more.

 

[PortaStudio]

Well, I wouldn’t call myself young anymore, but yes. A couple of years ago I got a CD as a Christmas present (from someone younger than me, which is weird in itself). I had already given up CDs for years, so I tried to hide my surprise as best as I could... The gift was, of course, appreciated, and at that time I still had an older laptop with a CD drive, so at least I could simply rip it. Thankfully, it wasn’t a vinyl record or cassette (which probably would have surprised me less, given their recent comeback).

When it comes to sharing music with friends, nothing beats listening together, I believe. That’s something the lack of physical media can’t take away.

Yeah, that is great when possible. In other cases physical standards are missed. Sharing a thumb drive isn't the same as sharing a CD with jewelcase, coverart etc. I have seen thumb drives under 2$ when bought in bulk. It's quite afforadable but aesthetically it is just not the same unfortunatly.

 

[Room314]

In other cases physical standards are missed. Sharing a thumb drive isn't the same as sharing a CD with jewelcase, coverart etc. I have seen thumb drives under 2$ when bought in bulk. It's quite afforadable but aesthetically it is just not the same unfortunatly.

Yes, for sure. Even if I'd never consider turning to vinyl (or returning to CDs) myself, I still enjoy record sleeves, CD booklets etc. whenever I get the chance. Thankfully, not everyone has gone fully digital yet

 

[Prana Ferox]

The nice thing about a USB drive is you can shove it in pretty much any other form factor you wanted. The functional parts are barely the size of a thumbnail. Novelty is limited by imagination and effort. You could probably get a USB in a still-working cassette tape.

 

[FeelinNoPain]

Is a thumb drive going to be a more accessable medium to share audio for listening purposes than a CD?

I think so. Often laptops don’t have cd drives anymore. I think the only issue with higher sample rates would be that it takes up more space on the drive. But if you want to present your music in a nice package with a booklet or art, then a cd is nicer.

 

[raif71]

During the lock-down, I started again buying CDs. Too much spare time . Anyhow after I got them, I would straight away extract individual tracks to FLACs and transfer them to usb drives/micro-sd cards. I have several old bluray players that support sacd kept in a room for spares. My immediate player is an OPPO bdp-103d which I use to play CDs and occasionally SACDs.

 

[Zensō]

No one I personally know under the age of 60 (I’m 61) has any interest in physical media of any sort. If I gave them a CD, cassette, or even a thumb drive, they wouldn’t have the equipment or software to play it. I mostly just send links to BandCamp or whatever streaming service they subscribe to.

Personally, I gave up physical media when iTunes became a thing. That in conjunction with the cool early iPod hardware was too much to resist (1,000 songs in your pocket!). I don’t really have any nostalgia for CD and vinyl, and I’m satisfied with streaming.

Regarding streaming quality, in my experience the issue is the quality of the masters, not streaming per se. When comparing the same masters streamed lossless and on CD there is no difference. I’ve even done these comparisons with my own music, comparing lossless streams with the masters, and as expected they null.

 

[Prana Ferox]

No one I personally know under the age of 60 (I’m 61) has any interest in physical media of any sort. If I gave them a CD, cassette, or even a thumb drive, they wouldn’t have the equipment or software to play it. I mostly just send links to BandCamp or whatever streaming service they subscribe to.

Personally, I gave up physical media when iTunes became a thing. That in conjunction with the cool early iPod hardware was too much to resist (1,000 songs in your pocket!). I don’t really have any nostalgia for CD and vinyl, and I’m satisfied with streaming.

There's a pretty broad spectrum here. Even on this forum of relative technophiles you have people with various grudges of streaming and desire for physical media. I'm way below your age threshold and I've certainly bought / acquired plenty of physical media in recent years, with little interest in streaming other than new music discovery.

Elsewhere you have people who buy albums without record players, or try to revive cassettes. Then you have people whose music consumption doesn't get past Youtube or possibly iTunes on their phone.

There is a certain romance in being able to hand someone a tangible token of your art, beyond just a card with a QR code.

 

[Joe Smith]

At 64 years old, one of the social changes driving all this is that "sharing" is harder now because of the hyper-specificity of musical tastes now in many people. When we were all listening to basically the same things in the 70s, it was not an imposition to share but invited and more of a collective feeling. Today, anytime I get really excited about an album or performer, I can barely get my wife interested, let alone friends. Everyone's taste is very specific (the range of choice allows them to be) and very few are listining to whole albums, or even sides of albums. As a child of the late 50s, my bent is to always go on the journey that the artist laid out, which means listing to an album, not just to cuts.

(The new Caroline Polacheck album, "Desire..." is a perfect example of thoughtful sequencing for the entire album that makes it work. She cares so much about sequencing that she shot herself in the foot re LP and cassette production, the album came out in February but the physical media won't be out until August (because she only finalized the track order a couple days prior to streaming release), and she started a world tour behind the album in late April. Ouch.)

 

[HoweSound]

I have an embarrassingly large number of CDs. I regularly visit used record stores looking for CDs to add to my music library. All the treasures I find are immediately converted to FLAC when I get home and stored on my music server. There is a lot of great music that can't be found for digital download, lurking on the shelves of your local used music store. Most of the younger customers are fixated on vinyl, leaving CDs to old-timers like me. Now that I have the proper Sony DVD player, I'm about to embark on SACD conversions next.

 

[kemmler3D]

How would you share your audio like this these days?

Realistically I send my friends links to Spotify playlists via SMS. It's not nearly as nice as having physical media, but the market has moved far, far away from physical media for a while.

 

[PortaStudio]

I don't expect anyone to listen to my audio for long if at all, when I am just sending them a link. Handing out CD or even LPs with some effort put into the coverart, it is way more likely that someone is going to invest some time, I think.

 

[egellings]

The 1st thing I thought of (if you don't have a CD) is a USB thumb drive. They are cheap enough that you can give them away.

Most music seems to still be released on CD and/or you can still buy & own MP3s from Amazon and M4As from iTunes. Maybe that will change in the future. I usually buy CDs (or an MP3 if the CD isn't available) but I'm old (over 65) and I already own most of the music I want so it's getting rarer for me to buy one.

...But it is a copyright violation if you keep the original and give-away a copy. I don't loan anybody CDs, DVDs, or books anymore because I've lost some. If I want to share I'll make a copy and tell the person that they can scrap or destroy it if they don't want to permanently-keep a pirated copy. And if they like it, of course they can buy their own copy. I don't tell them to destroy it when they are done "borrowing" it. So yeah... I'm guilty. But I usually buy music (and movies) when I can. A couple of times I've "recorded" from streaming or downloaded a pirated copy when it wasn't available legitimately. (No, I don't copy books... They have to get their own copy.)


Purchased (or other good quality) MP3s and M4As are quite good! In most cases you can't hear a difference in a proper blind ABX test, or you have to listen very carefully to hear the difference between the original and the lossy copy. That's assuming it's the same master and the same recording... Sometimes MP3, M4A, or streamed copy is a different version (maybe remastered).

If you happen to have a thumb drive handy when you know the tune you like is coming up then that would be good, too. Typically, when listening to a radio or stream, you may not have that advance warning.

 

[PortaStudio]

I have seen in a youtube video that this year CD sales have finally risen, after a long decline. Perhaps this could be a indication that CD will stay around, even if it won't be as popular as it once was by far.

Maybe it is a good idea to share my own audio as a CD and on a thumb drive.

HDtracks sells their audio in different resolutions if I am not mistaken. Like

48khz 24bit
96khz 24bit
192khz 24bit

Perhaps putting all that on a thumb drive for someone that isn't that much into audio might be confusing?

Also is there any problems with FLAC in some applications, and there is a benefit in including m4a or even mp3?

 

[little-endian]

Perhaps putting all that on a thumb drive for someone that isn't that much into audio might be confusing?

Not only that. Even for those being into audio, those several variants bonded together are more or less redundant anyway and 44.1 kHz / 16 bit (or given ideal filtering probably even 32 kHz / 12 Bit) would do it in virtually all listening cases.

Also is there any problems with FLAC in some applications, and there is a benefit in including m4a or even mp3?

Don't confuse the container (officially MP4, aka M4A for audio-only content) which can feature many different codecs (although mostly going along with AAC, given) with the codec itself (MP3).

Technical benefits of lossy codecs I see besides the obvious storage savings (if not foiled again by the use of too high bitrates):

- in case of MP1/2/3 probably extremely high compatibility, probably still way exeeding that of many lossless ones
- getting the charme of floating point representation, resulting in extremely high dynamic ranges which may easily exceed that of 16 bit or 24 bit integer PCM. Mostly theoretical though and might rather come in handy when converting or downmixing from other floating point schemes without the risk of clipping in case of decoding to integers bound to the 0dBFS-limit.


About physical media: what the "nowadays generation" (with some personal annoyance) seems to "forget" is that trivially, the data always has to be stored and come from somewhere physical either way. Be in on a technically outdated, yet still neat, CD, a hard / flash disk cluster in some data center and transferred via dozens of network hops or written on a long sheet of paper.

After all, the beauty of digital information is the entire independence of its carrier in principle (which however decides parameters such as reliability, (machine) readability, access times, throughout and capacity).

So, an early first pressing on CD with a dynamic mastering it is, despite the fact that streaming services could provide exactly the same data as well.

 

[jsrtheta]

I still have a Philips CD-100 in working condition for sentimental reasons. Bought it second hand a few years ago because I couldn't afford it when was released. You are absolutely right: the CD was a revolution in terms of accessible sound quality and we will never whitness something like it again.

In fact I suppose we will see a degradation of sound quality in future due to the fact, that most of the young people simply don't care and are satisfied with a cellphone, Bluetooth and some portable active-speaker-thingis...

As long as companies can make a profit on CDs, they'll be around.

Money is the key in all things.

 

[jsrtheta]

I think so. Often laptops don’t have cd drives anymore. I think the only issue with higher sample rates would be that it takes up more space on the drive. But if you want to present your music in a nice package with a booklet or art, then a cd is nicer.

Oh hell, I asked to borrow a friend's laptop 10 years ago. He handed it to me. I asked where the hell the CD drive was. He laughed.

I cried.

 

[PortaStudio]

Technical benefits of lossy codecs I see besides the obvious storage savings (if not foiled again by the use of too high bitrates):

Even the highest bitrate mp3 is so small, in what scenarios is that even a concern these days?

- in case of MP1/2/3 probably extremely high compatibility, probably still way exeeding that of many lossless ones

Okay, I guess that mp3 is more supported that the apple options? Do you know what is the most supported lossless one?

- getting the charme of floating point representation, resulting in extremely high dynamic ranges which may easily exceed that of 16 bit or 24 bit integer PCM. Mostly theoretical though and might rather come in handy when converting or downmixing from other floating point schemes without the risk of clipping in case of decoding to integers bound to the 0dBFS-limit.

Okay, I did not know anything about that. Where can I read up on this subject, or which key words should I look up?

 

[threni]

Oh hell, I asked to borrow a friend's laptop 10 years ago. He handed it to me. I asked where the hell the CD drive was. He laughed.

I cried.

You can get USB CD players but of course they lack the emotional attachment of actually holding a full-sized desktop CD player...the smell...the feeling of sliding it into the desktop and attaching the SATA cable... Also there's no room on the ridiculous tiny boxes USB CD Player boxes typically come in for all the photos and boilerplate electronic certification text you used to read on the box of a real CD player.

 

[little-endian]

Even the highest bitrate mp3 is so small, in what scenarios is that even a concern these days?

Yes, the rather general "concern" was to point out that at (very) high bitrates, one quickly has not only diminishing returns in terms of quality/size - ratio but also gives away the essential advantage of using a more efficient codec in the first place as most will be completely transparent then anyway.

Also, one is not be too far away from the average lossless bitrates then and might go down that road then right away.

Okay, I guess that mp3 is more supported that the apple options?

I'd say, MP3 (and the predecessors MP1 and MP2) are unbeaten when it comes to compatibility, AAC also relatively decent by now. For movie soundtracks, I often create 5.1 or 7.1 AAC while others may prefer Vorbis which is also very good.

Do you know what is the most supported lossless one?

"Knowing" something for sure is always a tough one, but I'd say FLAC it is.

For archival purposes, WavPack is also worth a look as it is a bit more efficient even, but for playback compatibility and especially movie tracks, FLAC is probably preferable.

Okay, I did not know anything about that. Where can I read up on this subject, or which key words should I look up?

E.g. 1 and 2 with the hint to MP3's global gain function relatvie to ReplayGain where one can change the decoding result without having to re-encode the original but only changing the metadata.

The floating point nature of common lossy codecs also becomes apparent in the case of movie tracks where eac3to for instance often has to reduce the gain to avoid clipping when decoding to integer-based PCM for further processing.