Where do you all source your high quality tracks from?

Personally i like buying cds and ripping them to FLAC myself . ive been known to use winamp mostly for FLAC rippage. but lately ive been into downloading .WAV files from psyshop.com . pretty much anywhere i can get my hands on lossless recordings i go for it

Or i just listen to my vinyls. nothing sounds better than those.

Edit: but as for EAC. i tried it out once but was totally clueless about operating the software (i gave it like 5 mins tops). does anybody know if that software is known to rip cds better than winamp?

Quote:

Originally Posted by broski 

 

Edit: but as for EAC. i tried it out once but was totally clueless about operating the software (i gave it like 5 mins tops). does anybody know if that software is known to rip cds better than winamp?

I like dBpoweramp. It's easy to use, it supports all the major formats, it uses AccurateRip, etc. etc.

They have a free trial. I liked it so much after the free trial period that I purchased it, and I've been using it ever since.

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

I buy and rip CDs myself and sometimes download files from "qobuz.com", even in their "Studio Master" quality.

Never tried a vinyl rip...

Quote:

Originally Posted by StratocasterMan 

 

I like dBpoweramp. It's easy to use, it supports all the major formats, it uses AccurateRip, etc. etc.

 

They have a free trial. I liked it so much after the free trial period that I purchased it, and I've been using it ever since.

 

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

X2. Extremely convenient, fast to use and for multiple purposes. Well worth the money.

Quote:

Originally Posted by AlphaChicken 

Little bit off topic.

 

Bump for interest in original question. At what point does a source become "high-quality" enough to sound good with a DAC, amp, and a pair of high quality cans?

 

In other words, what kind of stuff do y'all listen to on your audiophile setups? And I don't mean genre of music... I mean material source of said music.

i would say any type of lossless media would be considered HQ and 320kb/s mp3 files arent bad either. i have an assortment of various lossy files in weird bit rates (anywhere from 128kb/s and up) in my library but im slowly trying for solely lossless.

Edit: its a bitch sometimes to find some of the stuff i listen to in lossless format or acutally find the CD (obscure early 90's death metal, second wave black metal, slightly underground electronic music) 

^if anybody knows of a good place to buy CDs or lossless downloads for this kind of stuff, please let me know

Is CD HQ?

If CD quality is your goal, then rip CDs using the best tool available for your platform.

If you want above-CD quality, things get tricky. There are a lot of analog-master-to-FLAC-or-WAV files out there, but very few HD digital recordings (produced in a recording studio using all digital, state-of-the-art equipment) can be guaranteed to offer more bandwidth than what comes with a CD.

Quote:

Originally Posted by broski 

 

i would say any type of lossless media would be considered HQ and 320kb/s mp3 files arent bad either. i have an assortment of various lossy files in weird bit rates (anywhere from 128kb/s and up) in my library but im slowly trying for solely lossless.

 

Edit: its a bitch sometimes to find some of the stuff i listen to in lossless format or acutally find the CD (obscure early 90's death metal, second wave black metal, slightly underground electronic music) 

 

^if anybody knows of a good place to buy CDs or lossless downloads for this kind of stuff, please let me know

Quote:

Originally Posted by AlphaChicken 

I use EAC to rip CDs from my own collection and I get vinyl rips off of the internet from people with expensive turntable setups.

 

What do you audiophiles use for high quality music? Vinyl rips, CD rips, digital high res downloads?

 

**edit**

I'm just trying to get an idea for what kind/quality music people feed to their DAC/amp/headphone setups.

There's a thread of free flac music recommendations. I went to one which was some kind of library, which was posted by the OP and about the fifth post for Cowboy Junkies Live. That site is full of downloads; like music, pink/brown/white noise, and some lossless tracks, that seem to all be free. Maybe find metal there too.

I do only CDs and records due to slow internet. I have an older mp3 player called a Cowon X5 with 60gb that can record music a few different ways, but I still haven't tried to digitize my vinyl on it. But it supposedly can do 320kb/s, which was pretty cool back in 2007 when it was made.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JamesHuntington 

 

 

 

There's a thread of free flac music recommendations. I went to one which was some kind of library, which was posted by the OP and about the fifth post for Cowboy Junkies Live. That site is full of downloads; like music, pink/brown/white noise, and some lossless tracks, that seem to all be free. Maybe find metal there too.

I do only CDs and records due to slow internet. I have an older mp3 player called a Cowon X5 with 60gb that can record music a few different ways, but I still haven't tried to digitize my vinyl on it. But it supposedly can do 320kb/s, which was pretty cool back in 2007 when it was made.

I seent it. but i couldnt find any good stuff on that site. but i feel weird about downloads. i guess i can back them up on CD right? would there be any loss of quality if i burnt a few WAV files to a cd then later ripped them to a computer?

Quote:

Originally Posted by AlphaChicken 

As long as you do not transcode them to a lossy format. I believe that audio CDs use AIFF; data CDs of course use whatever format the files you put on it happen to be in. Both WAV and AIFF are lossless, PCM file formats. Should be fine.

Shibby! ill definitely have to back up all the downloads i actually pay for. you think i would be able to compress a whole CD of FLAC files into a .7z or .tar . then throw it on a data cd w/out losing audio quality?

Quote:

Originally Posted by AlphaChicken 

You could use FLAC to compress them losslessly. I am on a mac, XLD is a great program that allows you to easily do that. If you are using a PC I'm not sure quite how to do it. Probably could be done with some simple console commands after installing the FLAC codecs/frontend. 

 

http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_tools.html (description of console tools)

 

I do not know if you would really gain that much extra space using .7z or .tar. You would see the most space difference in using FLAC's built in compression.

 

If you simply want all the files to be in one archived file, then .7z and .tar are lossless storage methods. They will not harm your files. However, is this not the point of putting them on a CD? To have them all in one collection?

well i was going to use the CDs as more of backup media more than anything so i was probably going to have a few albums worth of data on one disc. Hence, trying to get the size down as small as possible (CDs are rather expensive). and i usually convert my WAVs to FLAC as soon as i get them and use the FLAC to listen to and the WAV as backup on a different drive. i just dislike the idea of not having any type of physical backup. weirds me out.