2024-03-18

music

recommendations

my collection is not a pop/rock music collection. it is more about general rhythm, texture and synthesizers and rarely guitar and singing. over 10000 albums and it took decades to find the things i like, yet frequently it already existed for decades before when i discover it. i know how subjective interests are and how everyone has a list of favorites tailored to them, nonetheless, i hope someones tastes overlap enough so that the lists can be useful for finding unusual music and make better buying decisions. main genres: ambient, experimental, musique concrete, idm, electronic, harsh noise, sound art

ratings

music listing 1

music listing 2

music listing 3

music listing 4

  • 1 top 10%. ideally a minimum selection of the most art defining music
  • 2 frequently listenable
  • 3 with potential, unevaluated or not as frequently listenable

there are always entries that have an unfitting rating.

difficulties with finding music

  • overwhelmingly large amount of existing material
  • hard to judge beforehand without listening to it thoroughly in high quality in the right mood. buying is a lottery
  • very expensive. 10000 cd quality albums at $10 take $100000. this is without calculating in the time-cost required for searching, where pop music fans will always have the edge
  • experimental music labels artificially limit copies to small numbers, making unusual music even rarer
  • compact discs need physical space, need to be shipped as well as copied to digital devices. it would be nice if cds were smaller and would not have large jewel cases, this would make them easier to ship worldwide
  • streaming is fully dependent on ongoing payments. content can be, and is, removed at a whim. music that you love vanishes suddenly, never to be seen again. latency and network issues always occur. sound quality of drm-laden streaming is sub-par even from hd offers. only a small part of the worlds music is available. another big flaw of streaming is that while cds can be sold by anyone, streaming can only be offered by those who have the necessary temporary and costly licensing contracts with the copyright holders. it additionally depends on copyright holders to be available to make such contracts, and the contracts are often given out exclusive to single companies. this not only fragments available music over different streaming services, it also leads to material being excluded from many regions because licenses tend to be sold per region and streaming providers then only buy licenses for a small selection of most profitable regions

where to get music in 2020

  • wav files on bandcamp.com
  • wav/flac files on 7digital
  • dsf files on nativedsd.com
  • cds on ebay
  • cds on discogs.com marketplace
  • streaming on tidal. note that spotify has far less than cd quality to this date (2020). none of the hd streaming services i tried did sound as good as playing local files. playback even seemed unstable through drm and browser, at least that is how i would describe the effect (damped/discontinous/uneven-flow)

a note on formats

  • dsf are files of the dsd format with has 64, 128, 512 or even more times the resolution of a standard audio cd.
  • wav can have a higher fidelity than flac files because flac supports only integer sample formats and wav supports float sample formats and formats with higher bitrate (for example, the wav version of "猫 シ corp. - palm mall" had better quality than the flac version). from my experience, wav tends to always sound better than flac.
  • sacds contain data in the dsd format but sacds can only be played on specific hardware devices listening on other devices is made difficult because of copy protection.

ways to find new artists

  • if you have a bandcamp collection: following -> fans to follow
  • discogs recommendations on detail pages
  • samplers - compilation albums with various artists
  • bandcamp tags. most-buyed albums are highlighted there
  • similar artists on last.fm
  • gnoosic.com, enter three artists and get a list of related

personal song of the year

other subtopics