Amazon 'cloud' music VS the CD
Soundbox
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I have ordered many CD's from Amazon and now I have been told by Amazon that all the CD's I have ordered are available on 'cloud'. I suppose with the correct equipment I can play them from the Amazon website.
What is the quality of the cloud version compared to the CD? Has anyone tried this feature?
I have my Denon CD player working most evenings and if the music is available in another way then that is a plus. Is there anything I can use apart from the headphone out on my laptop to play the Amazon version?
Sorry to ask what is probably a very easy question but I am more at home with mechanical items.
What is the quality of the cloud version compared to the CD? Has anyone tried this feature?
I have my Denon CD player working most evenings and if the music is available in another way then that is a plus. Is there anything I can use apart from the headphone out on my laptop to play the Amazon version?
Sorry to ask what is probably a very easy question but I am more at home with mechanical items.
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Now if Amazon could be persuaded to put WAV files or even lossless FLAC into the Cloud player than I might have more interest in the thing. As it is the Cloud player is a waste of time for me.
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1843245
the autorip files are not the same as the digital download versions of the songs. but you can not only stream them from the cloud, you can download them too. and immediately.
the files are MP3 encoded with lame 3.97 if you are interested the parameters are:
-m j -V 0 -q 3 -lowpass 19.5 --vbr-old -b 32
which is about as good as mp3 can sound.
ripping to wav is pointless. it supports no tagging and the audio quality is the same as flac, or any other lossless codec that does.
they would never even consider putting wav in the cloud. it is just a pointless waste of space.
it is also worth mentioning that you do get the cd.
as for mp3 quality. i wrote this little blind test if you are up for it.
http://nigelcoldwell.co.uk/audio/#blind
Though plenty will tell you they can (as long as they know which is playing).
it's true. and more importantly it doesn't matter if you can tell on high end kit. only the stuff on which you are listening to it.
Lol, I picked the 320 and lossless as being a bit better (on fairly high quality kit) but got them the wrong way round.
Though even the 64 would be fine if played as background music. Probably better than most pop DAB stations actually. :eek:
Mark
Google Broadcast WAV Format for an example of how artist and title data along with other fields are added to a bog standard WAV file.
MP3 is compressed so there is a loss of quality, however, the challenge would be if you can hear a difference between MP3 / Flac on the system you usually use to listen to music. Personally I can't. So I have FLAC for the backup and MP3 (v2 vbr) for portable players.
And as I don't have any sort of portable player I have no need to compress the music files I use.
its not the compression that causes loss of quality, its the fact MP3 is lossy compression, i.e. data is thrown away in the process. FLAC is compressed too but without the loss (thats why its larger) but can be uncompressed to a WAV without loss of quality.
Shall knows that. read his post carefully.