FLAC Now Available
After many months of promises and procrastination, I have finally gotten to this. For those of you who don’t know, FLAC is a lossless compression format, which basically means these files are smaller than full quality ones would be but they sound just as good. (The MP3 format makes music files much smaller, but you lose some amount of quality along the way.) This may or may not matter to you depending on your ears, headphones, etc., but a lot of you have asked for them, so here they are.
You’ll need a device or player software that supports FLAC, so don’t just go buying these willy-nilly if you don’t know what you’re doing. They’re the same price as MP3s. And of course, I’ve just set it up so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the files are named wrong, or missing, or whatever. Just let me know if you have any trouble and I’ll fix it as soon as I can.
Some of you will ask me, “Hey JoCo, I appreciate you making those files available, and I understand it must have taken an awful lot of time and effort and everything (you rule dood, thx!). But I already bought music in mp3 format, and I love FLAC. FLAC FLAC FLAC! LOL! Anyhoo, I’d prefer to listen to your music in its full-quality audio glory. Can I trade my mp3s in for FLAC?” To which I will say “Yes, I think.” I’m not sure how many of you will want to do this, and I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for me to send you new download links. Obviously if you bought the whole collection that’s pretty easy for me to do, but if you picked 13 different songs a la carte, that’s going to take a little more effort. So if you’re in this situation, just let me know and we’ll see if we can work it out.
And now, enjoy your FLAC.
Comments
Spiff says
I don't think you're under any obligation to let people trade .mp3s for FLAC for free. When George Lucas comes out with a new "improved" version of Star Wars, he doesn't let people trade in their old one. Not to be a jerk about it, but I think you'd be perfectly in the right to say that the newer format are a different product than the older formats and charging another $1 for them seems reasonable to me.
jesss says
I agree with Spiff, unless they just bought them or something. Anyone who was really concerned about the quality probably got CD's directly anyhow.
Brad O'Farrell says
My MP3 player doesn't take no flac from no one.
Rick says
Props for making the right choice, JoCo!
Scarybug says
He's under no obligation. He's just awesome like that!
spi says
spi says
Opps that post got eaten by the post eating machine. I love flac. I have bought a handful of flac albums from other bands in the past. The best thing about flac is I know I am getting the same thing as if I bought the album in the store, but no album! :)
I can also painlessly transcode to mp3/ogg format for my standalone player.
Way go to JoCo!
Noah Ramon says
I think Scarybug summed it up best :
You don't have to, but you're doing it anyway because you rock multiple houses.
Mizgrimalkin says
Dearest JoCo,
That is very generous of you to offer a trade, but you have to live too. I'm perfectly happy with my mp3 ones, but if I decided I wanted the spiffy FLAC versions, I wouldn't complain about having to buy them.
Just saying.
Tim says
Spiff said, "I think you’d be perfectly in the right to say that the newer format are a different product than the older formats"
Actually, since the MP3s (at least most of them) were available for free download, I would say in this case that the "product" was supporting JoCo.
I am of the opinion that in general, the product in question is the song, not the file in a particular format, unless you regard the act of ripping a CD to be producing a new product.
Paul says
You're indeed generous, JoCo, but you're entitled to something for your efforts. It's not like you deliberately held back the better format just so you could sell as many MP3s as possible first. No one ever offered me free CDs when my cassette tapes went out of style.
witten says
Thanks for taking the time to do this! In a few weeks or months, I'd be interested in hearing whether more than three or so people actually bought FLACs from you. I'm going to go become one of them right now..
Tony says
Just a message for Jonathon here, wanna say well done for creating
the great ending song for Portal. Genious! =D
Richard says
Just a heads-up: I think you might have a problem with your FLAC encoding process. I bought the box set in FLAC, and at least "Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms" (and possibly the others -- that's the only one that's successfully downloaded so far) does not play in Winamp, nor in MPlayer. It does, however, play if converted to .wav using the flac tools from flac.sourceforge.net. Weird.
dlab says
Cool. Apple fanboys will be happy to know that the new Mac operating system has added support for FLAC files, so anybody that upgrades their Mac can now play them using iTunes.
Johan says
Hey, Richard, that's probably because you don't have the right codecs...
JoCo says
Richard - those files were encoded from 24-bit masters, so some flac decoders don't play them right. I've corrected the problem in the files that are up there, so try downloading again (let me know if you can't). Sorry about that...
Matthew Henry says
I have Winamp 5.5 and the FLACs play fine, including "Our Bodies, Ourselves"
Maurice J says
What a guy!!! I don't want Flac, not sure what Flac is but sweet of you to offer your new format, your swapping and your time...
I think for the few people who have the means, it would be awesome if they bought them again... If they have the means that is...
What a guy.
Matthew Henry says
No flacs of the Ze Frank covers?
Richard says
JC: Thanks, all sorted now. You don't scissors or paper.
Logan says
Awesome! One of the only reason I still buy more physical CDs than online music is that mp3s aren't lossless. Thanks for being ahead of the curve.
Matthew says
Cool!
I would download them but I've already bought the CDs and ripped them to FLAC :) It's amazing for some of them how much better the full versions sound.