Napster, now legit.
Good post @Alley_Cat thank you and an interesting read.
I have to say I think the idea of simply relying on stuff to always be available via streaming has always seemed to me to be somewhere between naive and bonkers. I used my CD rips and will keep the CDs. Obviously there are no guarantees there as there’s always a chance of mould etc. but always more guarantees than just using a stream.
I then have my download purchases but have confined myself thus far to replacing those CDs which wouldn’t rip; a small number of things I’ve never seen on CD but can get as a download and a small number of new albums until such time as the backlog of the first two is done and dusted.
Having tried a bit of high res but can’t say I thought there was sufficient there to regularly fork out those amounts and have found a few which are audibly inferior.
Of the services I’ve tried I’d say BandCamp and 7Digital are the least painful and cheapest but none of them are perfect and, in common with Qobuz, BandCamp looks like it was a site purchased off the shelf from a domain name seller.
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It is one of the reasons I have more recently signed up to Amazon HD. I ‘trust’ that they will both be around for the long haul, and will have the greater capacity to keep ‘my’ library intact, without deletion.
It’s not really a route I’m planning on going down but I had a good look and to me they’re no better than the others. At least 300+ of my CDs simply don’t exist on Amazon and they’re unlikely to ever do so.
Early days, but I’ve started writing an application to manage Qobuz “tar” file downloads. So far it goes inside the tar file and reads all the file metadata. Ultimately you’ll be able to choose where to extract the files, and it will put them in the artist/album etc folder of your choosing. Only tested with flacs, but it’s able to show the embedded data and the cover art.
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Updates:
tidied up the first tab, so you can see all the track metadata inside the Qobuz tar file without extracting any of it to your hard drive.
Added a 2nd tab that allows you to select 1 or more albums (if you have downloaded multiple in the same tar file), set your extract path, and then extract into path + artist + album folder.
extract tab:
written for Windows. At some point I need to work out how to make this available for download.
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Github maybe?
Yes, github possibly, I’ll look into alternatives. Ultimately it will be a single “exe” file with no install, it will just run.
It’s tested and working with MP3, FLAC, ALAC, WMA, AIFF and will extract and show the track metadata and cover art. It handles multiple albums within a single Tar, and you can extract 1 album or more at a time.
I cant get it to work nicely with WAV, so I’ve bypassed accessing the metadata.
Extracting the files works regardless of the file format, but as I cant get artist/album metadata from WAV I’m simply using the folder name within the Tar file.
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Now available
Release Qobuz Untar · rob3rt-h/Qobuz_Untar · GitHub
Instructions here Qobuz_Untar/Qobuz Untar Downloads v0.1.pdf at v0.1 · rob3rt-h/Qobuz_Untar · GitHub
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