Lossless Audio Downloads

[Jack N]

I hope I picked the right forum to ask this question - I'm wondering if anyone knows of a website where I can download lossless audio tracks ?

 

[sh0]

AllOfMP3.com has most of their newer content available in lossless formats. Even if a lossy audio format is chosen, you can specify bitrates which is pretty cool.
http://www.allofmp3.com/

It's a Russian site and note that their license to distribute music is being disputed. Info on the site and their license issues is described on Wikipedia. Also, if the Wikipedia info is correct, if you select a track for which they do not offer a lossless format, you are getting a file transcoded from a 384kbit/s MP3.

 

[Jack N]

Wow. How can they do it so cheap ? Thanks for link.

 

[stratman]

Come on! They're Russians (you know KGB!!)

 

[Jack N]

"Come on! They're Russians (you know KGB!!)"

LOL. Good one.

Just read the Wikpedia information. I won't be doing business with allofmp3. Are there any other sites out there where I can get lossless downloads ?

 

[MDS]

http://www.musicgiants.com/

They seem to be offering Windows Media Lossless downloads but the selection is somewhat sparse. Note that although the files were compressed using a lossless encoder, they still have a DRM wrapper on them just like lossy files from iTunes and other download services.

 

[Jack N]

I take it then that CD is still the best way to get the best relative sound. I sure hope somebody comes up with a better format soon. Even the CDs are starting to sound like crap.

 

[Buckle-meister]

I sure hope somebody comes up with a better format soon. Even the CDs are starting to sound like crap.

It's not the CDs, but the recordings that're 'crap'.

 

[Nick250]

It's not the CDs, but the recordings that're 'crap'.

I agree with Buckle. Most specifically to my ears is that they have a very small amount of dynamic range. As a side note, crappy CD's sound less crappy to me when I listen through headphones. In my case Senns HD580's. That's counter intuitive to me. Go figure.

Nick

 

[Indiansprings]

I was interested in the musicgiants.com deal. They call it HD, but isnt the best quality only CD quality? For the $1.29 a song, why not just go buy the cd and load it yourself to the ipod? Wouldnt that be the same thing?

 

[MDS]

I was interested in the musicgiants.com deal. They call it HD, but isnt the best quality only CD quality? For the $1.29 a song, why not just go buy the cd and load it yourself to the ipod? Wouldnt that be the same thing?

Because they are using WMA Lossless, the quality would be identical to CD; ie the song originally came from a CD and then was compressed using the lossless encoder.

Yes, I would prefer owning the CD and ripping it myself and that is exactly what I do. There is one difference bewtween ripping the CD yourself and buying the wma lossless encoded version from musicgiants - the Digital Rights Managment wrapper which will limit the number of computers you can copy it to and maybe the number of times it can be burned to a CD.

 

[Buckle-meister]

Because they are using WMA Lossless, the quality would be identical to CD; ie the song originally came from a CD and then was compressed using the lossless encoder.

Typically, what's the ratio of compressed (though lossless) to uncompressed size?

 

[MDS]

Typically, what's the ratio of compressed (though lossless) to uncompressed size?

Roughly 50%.

 

[stratman]

Because they are using WMA Lossless, the quality would be identical to CD; ie the song originally came from a CD and then was compressed using the lossless encoder.

Yes, I would prefer owning the CD and ripping it myself and that is exactly what I do. There is one difference bewtween ripping the CD yourself and buying the wma lossless encoded version from musicgiants - the Digital Rights Managment wrapper which will limit the number of computers you can copy it to and maybe the number of times it can be burned to a CD.

I think its better to buy the CD, you don't have to worry about data corruption, you can make as many copies as you need, if your drive goes bad, so what, you have permanent back up. And like MDS pointed out no DRM.

 

[Buckle-meister]

Roughly 50%.

50%? Woah! Why on earth didn't they make PCM 50% more efficient when they put it together? 50%'s an enormous difference (with such a large figure it seems strange that 'they' didn't think of it at the time).

 

[MDS]

PCM is a raw format. Its just a sequence of samples in linear order: left sample1, right sample 1, left sample 2, right sample 2....so it can't be any smaller than bit depth * sampling frequency * number of channels. So eg. 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo will always be 16 * 44,100 * 2 for every second of audio which equates to about 10.5 MB per minute of audio. That's why an average 4 minute song takes up ~40 MB of disk space.

Lossless codecs exploit the fact that there is some redundancy in audio data and shortens the length of each sample. There is even a lossless codec named Shorten. Although the algorithms are entirely different it's conceptually the same as using PKZip to compress a text file. When you unzip the file you get the original data back unchanged - hence 'lossless'.

Edit: 10.5 MB per MINUTE of audio (incorrectly wrote 'second' originally).

 

[Buckle-meister]

Lossless codecs exploit the fact that there is some redundancy in audio data and shortens the length of each sample.

I understand the concept of redundancy, but not in the context of audio. Can you elaborate please?

 

[MDS]

I understand the concept of redundancy, but not in the context of audio. Can you elaborate please?

Say the same sample value occurs in multiple places in the file. If the file is a raw format like PCM that same value is repeated multiple times; if there are 1,000 occurences of the same 16 bit value, it would take 1,000*16 bits of storage (not quite 16K). If instead you store the first value and replace every other occurrence with a shorter 'code' that refers to the original value, you have saved space. On decoding, the code is looked up and the value replaced with the original. This is the basic concept of all encoding regardless of whether the data is audio or something else.

One of the simplest encoding schemes is RLE - Run Length Encoding. If the sequence of values is say AABBBCCCC it would be replaced with A2B3C4 (meaning 2 A's followed by 3 B's followed by 4 C's). If each value takes one byte to store, the original raw data takes up 9 bytes but the encoded data only takes up 6 bytes - a space savings of 33%.

Audio is more complicated and none of the algorithms use a simple scheme like RLE. I could elaborate a bit further...but right now I have to actually work (have a conference call).

 

[Buckle-meister]

I could elaborate a bit further...but right now I have to actually work...

That's ok...

Say the same sample value occurs in multiple places in the file...

...I thought it might be something off the same lines as this but didn't want to ask the question and then propose the answer.

Thanks MDS.

 

[Jack N]

Let me see if I understand a couple of the things that have been said here. It sounds like the consensus is that the recording studios and the CD manufacturers have the equipment and the technique to deliver a CD that has all around better sound. Correct ?

So if they have that capability, why wouldn’t they want to produce the best sounding CD possible ?