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Records, CDs, or MP3s?


mad wookiee11

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13 minutes ago, Necturion said:

@Requiem I'd rather rip them to FLAC. You get almost no noticable compression and you really start noticing a difference once you get used to the FLAC format.

Interesting. 

I’m just downloading them on Apple Music (when they have it ha!) so I just press a button and sit back in Castle Requiem and it loads on my phone. 

I get enough flac from the Countess Requiem and the infernal nekro-children of the damned. 

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2 hours ago, Requiem said:

I get enough flac

this is weird because in my area only we have a slang word called "flackn" which means either stealing or fucking and I never thought someone outside it would usw "FLAC" in the same way jokingly. I always tell my friends "I FLACed this album of my collection" (meaning fking... Not stealing as I own them ?)

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I'd say that about 95% of the time when I'm listening to music it's on youtube. I still have a shitload of cds, as I started buying them in the 90s. But, increasingly, there seems no point in buying music I can listen to on youtube, or if necessary, bandcamp. I'll buy a cd if it's music that's otherwise not available or if it is one of my favorite artists. I collect vinyls of bands/releases I really respect.

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19 hours ago, Necturion said:

this is weird because in my area only we have a slang word called "flackn" which means either stealing or fucking and I never thought someone outside it would usw "FLAC" in the same way jokingly. I always tell my friends "I FLACed this album of my collection" (meaning fking... Not stealing as I own them ?)

‘Flak’ is anti-aircraft fire.

It’s also synonymous with getting shit eg “The boss is giving me a lot of flak for losing that deal”. So I was actually making a pun about my family giving me trouble. 

On my mind right now is this pint of Guinness as a warm-up before the Dark Funeral show tonight.

Last night I saw an amazing show by Cradle of Filth playing ‘Cruelty and the Beast’ in its entirety, and tonight it’s Dark Funeral. So many shows! I’m going to need all day to recover tomorrow...

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  • 4 weeks later...

While I only own two, 7 inch records are quickly becoming my favorite format over cds, tapes, or ever 12 inch records.  I have always liked short releases, as I think that they compel the artist to accomplish as much as they can in the relatively short time frame that they are allotted.  Moreover, the common view of eps as "minor releases" often seems to grant musicians greater license to experiment with their music.

My least favorite format would have to be digital.  I like being able to preview a release online to see if like it before deciding to buy it, and it is often nice to be able to hear uploaded versions of releases that are to hard to find in physical formats.  That all being said, I much prefer being able to hold a real object in my hands, to be able to read through a booklet and packaging while listening, and even to have something to physically add to my collection so that I can see it actually grow over time.

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  • 1 month later...

CDs all the way for me, if it's something I care at all about - I buy a lot, and am not averse to downloading releases from Bandcamp to burn them for myself either. I'll back up CDs up digitally (WAV and MP3) as well though. And if I don't really care about a release then I'm more than happy to just let mp3s stagnate on my hard drive :D But yeah, I mostly listen to CDs. And research stuff on YouTube. I do have some vinyl, but that was amassed for DJing rather than collecting purposes; and I no longer have anything to play it on. Shout-out to cassettes, the first cut is the deepest and all that... but I definitely don't listen to tapes any more.

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  • 3 months later...

For me I listen to mostly MP3 recordings as they are cheap and I don't get the clutter of loads of physical copies of the album which is useful in my small house. If I had the space I would get vinyl as sound to me ears is generally a bit better. Plus googled it and experts say vinyl is superior to c

CDs as the full recorded sound wave is captured on vinyl where CDs don't.think that's what it was saying? 

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34 minutes ago, blaaacdoommmmfan said:

Plus googled it and experts say vinyl is superior to c

CDs as the full recorded sound wave is captured on vinyl where CDs don't.think that's what it was saying? 

Experts, huh? This is kind of true in a technical, unhelpful way that doesn't have much to do with what we can actually hear. The reason CD audio is sampled at 44.1 kHz is because that sampling rate is capable of reproducing frequencies all the way up to the upper limit of human hearing, around 20 kHz. It's true that digital storage records discrete points rather than a wave, but the wave is reconstituted as the signal goes through the D/A convertor. The sound that's lost to the digital recording process is sound that we can't hear, and double blind experiments have shown that people generally can't distinguish between recordings with and without that high-frequency information. Some people prefer the "sound" of vinyl, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I think that has more to do with a preference for the kind of mix that sounds good on vinyl, and the idiosyncrasies of analog playback. Records can sound awesome and they're fun to listen to, but there's nothing inherently inferior about modern digital recording.

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An excellent response ? everydays a school day as they say. I used to listen to vinyl  mostly as a youngster as it was alot cheaper than full price CDs and I preferred them to tapes. I couldn't play CDs easily as only player was my parents and they hated my music with a passion? even after all these decades there metal fans 

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  • 2 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...

mp3 for me, I've bought Pantera's whole discog at least 3 times, cos I used to lose them, well one time they were stolen, but yeah. When I was in my late teens, early twenties, I was the guy who carried around a cd folder with 400 cds everywhere I went, no wonder I kept losing them! haha.  I do have "The Number of The Beast" on vinyl somewhere, pretty poor condition though, my dad gave it to me, he bought it in the year I was born...

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  • 1 month later...

For me it’s all about convenience as I listen to music pretty much everywhere I go so it’s mostly digital for me. Also it’s easy to get the whole discography even if I only listen to a few songs from each album. Then if I like an album enough to buy a physical copy, I buy CDs. And if it’s an all time favourite, I get vinyl too.

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  • 2 months later...

Having spent the afternoon setting up a new turntable and failing for ages to get it to connect to my new bluetooth speakers (a battle I have since won) I will attest first-hand to how impractical vinyl is.  I mean the levelling of the turntable, the alignment of the arm and cartridge head is all massively important but took me a good couple of hours to get right, that having been said the sound quality is much superior and right now I am as close to 13 year old me as I ever have been (although 13 year old me had more vinyl) but I can now build my sound system to have a cd player and I am sure cassette also.  

With my new speakers I can get the PC to play my music through them also so double win.

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  • 3 months later...
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i used to be a cd guy, but now i prefer mp3's. i still occasionally order cd's if i can't find an mp3 of a certain album. i enjoy efficiency of digital. i can listen to an album immediately after buying it. that's nice. never been a vinyl guy. 1, because vinyl players and records are expensive and 2, vinyl is overrated hipster bullshit in my opinion. vinyl does not sound better. that's a lie. also records are so fragile, they scratch even easier than cd's do

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The thing I like about vinyl is both the sound quality, the different color options, and the fact that when you get vinyl you're getting something big and substantial so if it has good cover art you can display it as a nice piece of art. I'm debating buying an In the Nightside Eclipse picture disc just to frame the cover of the album (since I already have a copy on blue vinyl).

I have vinyl of all different genres though. Not just metal. I have some alternative rock (Smashing Pumpkins), post-punk & goth (The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division), some hip hop (Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, the Roots), Punk & Hardcore (Rancid, Black Flag, Youth of Today, Earth Crisis) and even some Jazz (John Coltrane, Miles Davis) and Country (Neko Case, Johnny Cash). I have them all on an Ikea shelf in my room and I'm rapidly running out of space on it and need to take a trip to Tampa to buy another one.

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  • 4 weeks later...

If the computer is on I'm surfing the web and forget about the music. To listen to music I have to turn the computer off. Physical media is required to actually listen to music. 

Digital downloads are the best for making mixtapes. Mixtapes are my favorite physical media. I figured out I don't want to hear much new metal. The way to keep old albums interesting is mix the songs up. All music sounds better played back off of a cassette tape. I'm intending to make a stack of mixtapes from my vinyl and cd collection, not sure what else to do with my type 4's. 

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