[TheDreamthinker]

even if the music industry works like that, i won't start buying 50cent & co. just to support the development of new artists. I would rather buy there indie-albums, to a point where the great music-labels notice the musicians potential and sign him.
 
P.S.: Sadly it is not about the music anymore, it's about the money. Musicians in great labels mostly are no longer artists, but money-makers.

 

[kyuuketsuki]

But if the artist doesn't continue to sell, the artist will be dropped from the label. And there are other artists on the same label of 50Cent. 
 
And think of all the artists out there on major labels... under Sony there are 15 labels, Universal, and Warner probably have just as many individual labels. Consider the amount of artists there are. Are you suggesting all of them are money-machines? That's impossible. And yet not buying the music of those other artists have just as much impact as not buying mainstream artists, because revenue is dependent on the bottom line of the company, which involves all of their assets.
 
Quote:

even if the music industry works like that, i won't start buying 50cent & co. just to support the development of new artists. I would rather buy there indie-albums, to a point where the great music-labels notice the musicians potential and sign him.
 
P.S.: Sadly it is not about the music anymore, it's about the money. Musicians in great labels mostly are no longer artists, but money-machines.

 

 

[TheDreamthinker]

They are bound to become money-makers.
If they don't make their music according label-guidelines, the song/album won't be released.

 

[Snag1e]

     Quote:

even if the music industry works like that, i won't start buying 50cent & co. just to support the development of new artists. I would rather buy there indie-albums, to a point where the great music-labels notice the musicians potential and sign him.
 
P.S.: Sadly it is not about the music anymore, it's about the money. Musicians in great labels mostly are no longer artists, but money-makers.

This. 
 
 

 

[Permagrin]

even if the music industry works like that, i won't start buying 50cent & co. just to support the development of new artists. I would rather buy there indie-albums, to a point where the great music-labels notice the musicians potential and sign him.
 
P.S.: Sadly it is not about the music anymore, it's about the money. Musicians in great labels mostly are no longer artists, but money-makers.

What great music-labels? No one gave them any money so they all folded.

 

[rroseperry]

They are bound to become money-makers.
If they don't make their music according label-guidelines, the song/album won't be released.

When has it not been about the money? If people hadn't been able to sell those 45s (yeah, I'm that old), there would never have been any classic R&B, soul, blues, rock and any other genre of music.

I think you must be mistaking this for some other universe were there's this pure flow from artist to audience. 'Cause it's never happened on this earth.

 

[matbhuvi]

Quote:

Converting from .mp3 to .flac would be like resizing an 800x600 .jpeg image saved at 50% quality (i.e, artifacts everywhere) to 1920x1080 and saving it as a .png file. (just straight resizing, no actual editing involved). The 1920x1080 .png file would be a lossless, high resolution reproduction, but it would be a high-res reproduction of 800x600 pixels worth of artifacts.
 
Unless you're a CSI character, that is.

 
This thread has derailed to a diff topic of piracy..coming back to the original question...Let's take the same example above of an image..there are lots of software available now to do great upscaling. I know the image quality will be nowhere near 1920x1080. But, it definitely improves the image quality may be by using some predictive algorithms which are beyond me. My question is, why can't be the same thing applied on music.
btw, a 128 kbps mp3 sounds pathetic in my Zune, average in my HM-601 and nice in my iPhone 3GS. I don't know why, but i prefer my iPhone when i want to listen to my 128kbps collection from 70s and 80s. I use my HM-601 for 320kbps and lossless music.
 
 

 

[matbhuvi]

well..i googled around and found an article answering my question.
 
quote from it...
 
 
Quote:

But, perhaps partly as a result of this magazine's positive coverage of the dCS upsampler, a veritable slew of products has appeared offering that "96kHz" magic bullet. Like the Bel Canto DAC 1 reviewed by Robert Deutsch in this issue (p.143), or the MSB LinkDAC III chosen by Stereophile's scribes as our "Budget Component of 2000" (p.69), many of these products use Crystal's new CS8420 sample-rate converter chip to produce a high-sample-rate datastream from CD data. Others, such as the dCS 972, use a digital filter with several choices of topology and noise-shaping behavior.
 
Now I am sure.
 
It is important to remember three things about all of these products:
1) other than making active the lowest 8 bits of a 24-bit word, no new audio information is created by any of these products;
2) as susceptibility to word-clock jitter increases with sampling frequency, it is always possible that upsampling audio data can make things worse, not better; and
3) no matter how good these upsampling products can sound—and the dCS, Bel Canto, and MSB products indeed sound excellent—there is no conceptual difference between them and traditional CD playback systems.
 
I am now convinced that the sonic differences we have heard and reported on are due to the different choices in digital filters made by the designers of these products with respect to the number of taps, passband ripple, and stopband rejection (footnote 2), and to changes in the jitter performance.

 

 

[bcasey25raptor]

It is a bad idea. A low quality mp3 is still a low quality mp3 after the conversion to flac. You cannot convert something to sound better. That is unless you want flac for archiving purposes. Then I see no problem with it but don't expect sound improvements.

 

[xnor]

matbhuvi, there is software available to reduce noise, clicks, pops, hum, repair clipping, drop outs and so on.. similar to what is available for image processing.
 
The problem with low bitrate mp3's is the lowpass filter that virtually eliminates high-frequency information. In the image analogy this would be like a very strong blur effect.

 

[RuthlessVermin]

     Quote:

It is a bad idea. A low quality mp3 is still a low quality mp3 after the conversion to flac. You cannot convert something to sound better. That is unless you want flac for archiving purposes. Then I see no problem with it but don't expect sound improvements.

 
In what situation could one possibly want FLAC for archival purposes when said FLAC is converted from MP3?  There is absolutely no benefit in so doing, and there are many detriments.
 
Let's say I'm going on a hike in the desert.  I bring along one gallon of water in a one gallon jug.  When I arrive at the hiking destination, I note that other hikers are carrying five gallon jugs of water.  Converting MP3 to FLAC is like buying a five gallon jug, dumping in the one gallon of water I already have, and filling it up the rest of the way with motor oil.  I am in absolutely no better position in terms of water quantity (audio data), and am unnecessarily lugging along excess weight in motor oil (wasted hard drive space with FLAC).  Further, I'll undoubtedly lose some water if I try to filter out the oil so I can drink just clean water later (converting lossy-sourced FLAC to lossy again), putting me in a worse position than I was in to start with.  Any rational person is going to either just take the one gallon jug of water (just keep the MP3), or buy the five gallon jug and fill it all the way up with water (archive straight from lossless>FLAC).
 
 

 

[kiteki]

Hey snag1e, your replies were entertaining to read and you seem well-informed in your own way, and if you find that article that said Piracy is increasing CD sales can you please link it here? I'm interested in reading it.
 
I don't think people that have collected CD's for a long time should be bitter at some kid with a 1TB harddrive of discographies Lol, I mean it's totally different, I don't get excited when a torrent has reached 99%, but I do get excited from a parcel in the mail with a CD and booklet and smell and physical touch.
 
It's a bit like "pirated books", I mean where is the whole pirated books debate? Why doesn't anyone care about the pirated books!!
 
Try downloading a comic book and reading it on your computer, it's a horrible experience, compared to reading the real comic book.
 
However there are a lot of people that will buy a CD, convert it to .m4a, and dispose of the CD.
 
Then there are also a lot of people now that will never buy a CD in their life and think they belong in the 90's along with discmans.
 
These two groups of people confuse the issue for me, since group 1 is not partaking in piracy, and also not caring about the physical media or sound fidelity, either, group 2 is partaking in piracy, and not caring about physical media and most likely not the sound fidelity.
 
__________________
 
As for the thread title, users that prefer Flac are either going to be purists, or on a hi-fi quest.
 
Converting a CD to mp3 and then to Flac, is like taking Coke, converting it to Diet Coke, then adding some sugar and putting it back in the Coke bottle.  So that's why you were getting repetetive violent reactions to your idea, from the coke lovers. ;]
 
I don't actually understand why converting mp3 to Flac results in a different file-size though, does it become much larger? I mean if you change .ZIP to .RAR they're pretty much the same size and information just different compression methods.
 
 

 

[matbhuvi]

Quote:

matbhuvi, there is software available to reduce noise, clicks, pops, hum, repair clipping, drop outs and so on.. similar to what is available for image processing.
 
The problem with low bitrate mp3's is the lowpass filter that virtually eliminates high-frequency information. In the image analogy this would be like a very strong blur effect.

 
Can you recommend any good software (preferably a one click solution 

). I have a lot of my favorite songs from 50s to 80s in 128kbps. Songs from vintage tamil movies(South indian). They were available in cassettes  at that time. Now these low bit mp3s are my only source. 

 

[xnor]

What I was trying to say is that with the low pass a lot of high-frequency information is irreversibly lost. Sharpening a very blurry image also will get you nowhere near the original.
 
There are a lot of products that can repair audio, I've heard good things about iZotope RX for example. But this won't fix low bitrate mp3's.. because there's not much left to fix.

 

[kiteki]

yeah coz only teenagers, dogs and bats can hear above 16kHz anyway what's that about? My as well throw all that HF data in the garbage bin right away.