[iyulaev]

Is anyone else bothered by the lack of lossless audio availability on Amazon and other music distributors? This has been a stumbling point for me. Why doesn't Amazon offer FLAC or similar? I can't imagine the bandwidth and storage requirements are beyond what they can (inexpensively) handle.

For this reason I've been really excited about bandcamp. That and it makes it really easy for (actually) independent artists to distribute their music.

[Daiz]

Count me in. It's absolutely ridiculous that CDs, which have existed for over 30 years already, still offer higher quality audio than you can generally buy digitally. It's a sad truth in general that if you want high quality digital media, you'll either have to buy and rip physical products yourself or resort to piracy - this is true for both audio and video, especially the latter - hell, with video you can barely even BUY anything digitally since it's all either streaming or files DRM up the bum (both of which are ultimately just renting).

In case of music, the Bandcamp model should really be the default - one price allows you to get the product in whatever common format you want, be that lossless FLAC or just bog-standard MP3. It would definitely make me buy a helluva lot more music than I currently do. (Though sadly most of the music I listen to would probably still be completely unavailable to me legally thanks to the wonders of region locking, which is another one of those damn things that makes digital media way worse than what it could potentially be.)

[zanny]

mp3s are good enough for most people. I'm included in that group - I don't perceive the difference between 128kbps mp3s, 96kbps opus, 320kbps mp3s, or flac (though below 128kbps mp3 I hear the difference). At least on my integrated sound cards (I got a creative x-fi card once to see if I noticed the difference on $120 speakers, I didn't). I also only really get $30 - 60 speakers that carry 25w and have some reasonable quality to them, but I'm not an audiophile.

So my entire collection varies from 128kbps mp3s to vbr mp3s and a few flac files in there, but whenever I download something off bandcamp I get the vorbis 128kbps versions because I can't hear the difference.

Amazon should at least make flac a non-default download option. Everyone having lossy copies of music isn't good for the long term preservation of said music.

[freerobby]

You will notice the difference if you ever want to move your music to a better format in the future (due to transcoding losses). With FLAC you would not have this problem.

[zanny]

This is true, I do eventually want to move it to opus if they ever resolve the random seek issues with the codec since it gets better compression ratios and more importantly is open.

But I also figure my 60gb of mp3s would be at least 400gb or more as flac, though given how cheap storage space is that may not be an issue. I guess I should start trying to collect flac music after all!