[Quinftw]

hi
Since I've joined head-fi the community has helped me a lot when deciding on equipment. I have vmoda m100s, ath-m50, beyerdynamic dt 990-pro(250),and some other cans..But I'm still listening to music on itunes. I like a lot of different types of music but mainly modern rap,hip-hop,trap-step,etc. I cant find any place online to get lossless or flac of other uncompressed files for the music I listen to. For example Drake, Jcole, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and others. and no-one seems to have the artist's albums I'm in to. I would really apprerciate it if someone could give me some sites.

 

[bflatfinesse]

Unfortunately, the main audience of the music you listen to does not care about sound quality, especially since most popular music can be illegally downloaded for free.  Classical music, jazz, and rock seem to find the biggest support for high quality files (try listening to orchestral music at anything below 320 kbps and you'll understand why).  Your best bet is to buy CDs from online retailers (Amazon.com) and rip them onto your computer in a lossless format such as AIFF or FLAC.  

 

[saxelrod92]

I'm sorta in the same boat as you, just I listen to different genres than you do. like progressive metal, djent, metalcore, deathcore, general rock, as well as some EDM like hardstyle and house and some chill-step. Still basically non-existant on any website to download in flac. So far the best solutions I could find, is either just go full illegal with a rip online, hope the band/artist is on bandcamp (this only really works with unknown bands or artists, since anyone huge and famous doesnt really use it, thankfully a lot of bands I listen to use bandcamp though), or buy the cd and use something like dbpoweramp to rip it into whatever format you want.

Also I reccomend to use a different media player other than itunes, something like foobar 2000 is free and works great after you get past the initial set up. Because something I didnt realize when I first got into all this, was that different media players have a pretty noticeable affect on the sound. Like if you pull up itunes, and foobar to compare back and forth with, you will notice theres a difference in the sound. I prefer foobar because I feel its the most honest version of the song, and just plays the data as directly as possible to your set up. With itunes I know theres some extra internal eq to make it sound "good" according to apple's criteria for good sound, which I am not a fan of. I also tried using winamp for a few weeks, and it honestly makes everything sound terrible. When I compared it, it seemed like winamp was making the sound more muddy, and cloudy, and quiet. out of the three, foobar won for me.

 

[bflatfinesse]

I agree with saxelrod92.  Bandcamp has some artists, and the option to download FLAC, but for mainstream artists you're probably gonna have to buy the CD and rip it.  I also agree about the music player software.  If you are planning on playing hi-rez file formats and/or planning on buying a DAC in the future, it is worth looking into a software other than itunes.  There are softwares like Audirvana Plus that integrate with itunes and allow you to play hi-rez formats, along with the capability of sending bit-perfect data to a DAC, and amazing sound quality.  

 

[Tad-Bravo]

  hi
Since I've joined head-fi the community has helped me a lot when deciding on equipment. I have vmoda m100s, ath-m50, beyerdynamic dt 990-pro(250),and some other cans..But I'm still listening to music on itunes. I like a lot of different types of music but mainly modern rap,hip-hop,trap-step,etc. I cant find any place online to get lossless or flac of other uncompressed files for the music I listen to. For example Drake, Jcole, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and others. and no-one seems to have the artist's albums I'm in to. I would really apprerciate it if someone could give me some sites.

 
Flac will not make any difference in audio quality with the stuff you listen to so don't bother.
 
Flac and so called lossless audio is way overrated. In real life there's no way to notice the difference between a flac and a well encoded high bitrate mp3/aac.

 

[zunehdrocks]

Flac will not make any difference in audio quality with the stuff you listen to so don't bother.

Flac and so called lossless audio is way overrated. In real life there's no way to notice the difference between a flac and a well encoded high bitrate mp3/aac.

It really depends on your equipment (a lot of the time it makes no difference but saying never is a bit of a stretch)and i don't think mp3 supports sample rates more than 44.1khz (but im not telling you to pay extra for 647257476478487288khz sample rate... Maybe up to 24 bit 96Khz)

 

[Tad-Bravo]

and i don't think mp3 supports sample rates more than 44.1khz

 
Neither does the human ear. Not to mention the extra bits are filled with blank noise on 24bit flacs.

 

[zunehdrocks]

Neither does the human ear. Not to mention the extra bits are filled with blank noise on 24bit flacs.

Blank noise?
Who told you that?
And sample rate doesn't exactly work like that.

 

[Tad-Bravo]

Suffice to say that the CD audio norm is more than what human ears can hear so anything beyond that is a waste of diskspace and bandwidth (EDIT: Especially on music that's compressed as hell like the type of music the OP listens to)
 
You may disagree and I'm not gonna try to convice you. it's not the topic of this thread.

 

[zunehdrocks]

Well this is useful
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(signal_processing)
It says the upper limit is around 60khz sample rate.

 

[Tad-Bravo]

I'll just leave this here:
 
 
 
Read more about it: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

 

[bflatfinesse]

This is starting to sway from the original topic, but higher resolution audio does more than increase the frequency range.  When you change from mp3 to AIFF for instance, the soundstage will open up quite noticeably.