@exchgr WTF. In the sane lossless world, HD means 24 bit, non HD means 16, it's that simple. 16/48 files aren't meaningfully larger than 16/44 but any 24 bit file is much larger per unit time than any 16. That's the practical distinction people care about really.
@danblondell yes, and it even differs on the same album sometimes. for instance, if someone accidentally set their daw project inconsistently on one or a few songs. but instead of just having the “lossless” setting resample (which is not technically lossless, but also i don’t care) to cd quality, it presents a mishmash of different resolutions, which inserts a buffering gap between songs as the airplay session starts fresh
@danblondell oh yeah, i’m talking about sound check. usually it operates in track mode, but i always want album mode, even when i’m shuffling a bunch of songs from different albums and such
@danblondell i’m talking strictly about normalization here, not shuffle, which is just incidental to how i consume music sometimes. take this example: the last two tracks on pink floyd’s “the wall”: “the trial” and “outside the wall.” there’s a big explosion at the end of “the trial” that fades out into “outside the wall” gaplessly, and “outside the wall” is overall very quiet compared to the rest of the album. (1/4)
with album gain, the entire album’s loudness will be normalized to an average target loudness specified by the algorithm. but quiet songs will still be quiet, and loud songs will still be loud. the last two tracks of “the wall” will play as expected. kind of like when you’re reading text, some letters are taller than others, and some go under the baseline. but you want the font size to be the same across paragraphs. (2/4)
with track gain, each track’s relative loudness on the album is disregarded. loud tracks are made quieter, and quiet tracks are made louder. this is often very bad on albums with high dynamic range, since the quieter songs are made louder without regard to the effects that has on equalization (an unseemly bass boost) and vice versa (see here for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour). kind of like if every letter of text was the same height, regardless of whether it’s capitalized. (3/4)
@exchgr@mrcompletely Don’t worry, in a few years we’ll get “AI” “powered” “uncompressed” audio inside the headphones. It’ll make Spatialized Stereo sound like Neil Young personally mixed it.
@exchgr@danblondell depends on the source, conversions/downsampling, and listening context. Under my normal conditions I score 70+% on ABX between high qual lossy and 16/44, 75%+ between lossy and 16/48. But I have trained my ears to hear the characteristic changes from lossy compression. My root reason for collecting lossless is editability, I make a lot of edits and mixes.
Well formed lossy audio from clean masters is usually fine of course and I listen to plenty of it
@danblondell@exchgr the editability piece? Yeah. In the live music trading community this is a big big deal and the main driver behind circulating 24 bit audio as the default. Even if you listen at 16 there are advantages to mastering at 24 as I understand it.
The other niche concern for me is live performance audience recordings, which I listen to a lot of. They are much more prone to audible compression artifacts than most studio (or live soundboard) recordings.
@danblondell@exchgr yeah I'm coming at it originally from a deadhead perspective but I collect live audio across almost any genre where the performances vary enough for it to make sense, except the modern/current jam band scene, which doesn't do it for me. This weekend I'll work on prepping some great sounding super early Willie Nelson shows for circulation for instance, a little outside my usual wheelhouse but superb and exciting performances.
@danblondell@exchgr Ill Considered (a fantastic modern UK jazz outfit) was doing £1 live soundboard releases on bandcamp for awhile, that's a great approach. A lot of good jazz gets audience recorded these days fwiw, I have a few recent Shabaka Hutchings shows for instance. Zorn/Frisell/Ribot type shows are widely taped.
Not sure if the distinction matters to you, but there's a big "non jam bands that jam" scene now, avant/psych/experimental rock like Kikagaku Moyo that gets taped
@danblondell@exchgr I feel you. For me it's just that "jam bands" more or less copycat the modern Phish style of rock improv (which is admittedly very sophisticated and highly developed) and sound like derivative wankers while these other groups coming from a post punk, krautrock or avant noise angle are maybe less fluid at the act of improv but have more originality and better vibe (and often but not always better songs)
@danblondell@exchgr last nerd note: if you haven't heard the recent series of CAN official archival live releases, that's kind of a "run don't walk" situation imo
@mrcompletely@danblondell circling back to this. i just listened to tago mago for the first time the other day and my mind was blown. i can hear like 10 different bands from decades later in this
@exchgr@danblondell there are so many interesting things about them. They started as an experimental performance art collective with an emphasis on improv both in studio and live. They also just happened to have one of the couple best drummers in rock history (and my single favorite). They were massively influential but in a way that became very niche in the US over time, to the point that you go your whole life without knowing about them but once you hear them their influence is everywhere
@exchgr@danblondell there's def a whole scene to get into around them (Amon Duul, Embryo, Agitation Free, they're Cluster adjacent, etc) but just the core CAN catalog plus the recent archival live releases are enough to keep anyone busy for ages.
@exchgr@danblondell yeah the Cluster guy is Manuel Gottsching and before Cluster he was the leader of Ash Ra Tempel/Ashra which was one of the early "krautrock" bands - they are def worth hearing.
ART also included early electronic music wizard Klaus Schulze who was in the early, lesser known lineups of Tangerine Dream. So it's this whole intertwined experimental art-rock scene that by the early/mid 70s blended into the developing electronic music world, a little parallel music universe
@exchgr@danblondell like any experimental music scene there are likely to be a lot of tracks or whole albums that are just a miss for any given person but especially for people who have a sense of music history and how things developed over time there's a ton of mindblowing stuff in there. And some of it sounds totally fresh today. I can mix modern psych/experimental rock in playlists with some of the early weirdo Kraut stuff and it fits very naturally which is super cool
@mrcompletely@exchgr@danblondell
I spent so much time listening to the German experimental/art/electronic bands that it became part of my musical fabric a long time ago. I didn't like Tangerine Cream at first but soon learned to appreciate them, same with Amon Duul.
Then there's the French prog/experimental scene with Magma, Gong(Anglo-French), etc.
@godzero@exchgr@danblondell I cherrypick tracks here and there with that stuff like I do most music. overall the synth heavy music of the late 70s (e.g. Tangerine) is not really something that interests me much though I respect it. My fav subset of this meta-genre is mid period CAN (e.g. Future Days) & stuff with that vibe (more driven by guitars than synths, motorik groove jams over spacy or noisy experimental) but that's just a matter of taste. The synth stuff is more influential probably
@mrcompletely@exchgr@danblondell
I don't listen to whole albums now, skip tracks which I find tedious, but there was a time when I would. I think being under the influence probably helped lol
@godzero@exchgr@danblondell interesting. I'm the same way and most people think I'm crazy. With some exceptions (What's Going On, In A Silent Way, Love Supreme etc) I have little remaining interest in the album format per se - it's a container of songs for me. I skip thru albums finding tracks I like and then add those to playlists, usually after buying the flacs from Qobuz or bandcamp. It's one reason I don't find vinyl interesting at all. I live totally in playlist world.
@mrcompletely@godzero@danblondell i can be a bit of an album extremist. for instance, i maintain a playlist system in 3 phases: 1. inbox, 2. priority queue, 3. heavy rotation, which all consist of entire albums. inbox is an unsorted mess that i’ll probably never get to. priority queue is stuff i intend to listen to very soon, but is also a mess except near the very top. it has almost 30k songs on it 😅 (1/3)
heavy rotation is what i’m listening to this month. it’s limited to 1000 songs, and each time i finish an album on the top, i either rotate it to the bottom (in which case it’ll come around again next month), or take it off if i’m tired of it/have heard it at least 7 times. if i remove an album and it goes below 1000, i pluck the next one off the top of priority queue. (2/3)
i also have a system of shufflelists, which are purpose-built and contain mostly full albums, but i’m free to delete annoying/interlude/outside-of-purpose/etc tracks. these are the playlists: allez (high energy, for biking, on my specialized allez); cool out, man (downtempo/ambient, for chilling the heck out); focus locus (instrumentals of almost any genre, for reading and/or working); subliminal spaceflight (strictly ambient, for winding down for sleep) (3/3)
@danblondell@exchgr this feed is nothing but newly circulated live shows across many genres, from 50+ year old archival releases to new stuff. A lot of it's junk but there's something for almost everyone: https://heads.social/@livetapes
@exchgr@danblondell my ABX scores between 24 and 16 are much lower, to the point that when I can hear the difference it usually means someone fucked up the dithering in the downsample or some such other mastering error. Occasionally I can hear a small audible difference in soundstage openness/width, decays in a cymbal or roundness of bass notes when played on speakers at very high volume. But it's always marginal.
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