![[orchestra]](/public/2006/09/orchestra.jpg)
The Philadelphia Orchestra — indisputably one of the best orchestras in the world, and my personal favorite for two decades — has opened an online store to sell their own recordings. Some are on CD, others are available for download. For a fair price. In a free, open, lossless, non-patent-encumbered, non-DRM-infected format. Really.
Their online store requires cookies and JavaScript but is otherwise compatible with any browser on any platform. I bought and downloaded six recordings with a nightly build of Firefox 2 that I compiled myself on 64-bit Ubuntu Linux. Really.
Once you’ve purchased a recording, you can access the individual music files through their “My Downloads” page. Their FAQ recommends that Windows/IE users install an ActiveX control to automate downloading multi-file recordings. Ignore that. I used DownThemAll, a GPL-licensed download manager that works within Firefox (and thus sends all the proper authentication cookies, etc., with no additional configuration).
They do not appear to throttle download speeds; at least, I maxed out my DSL at 370 KB/s for a solid 45 minutes. FLAC files are rather large. It is lossless CD-quality audio, after all. They even offer surprisingly clueful FAQ entries on how to listen to FLAC files and how to burn FLAC files to CD.
(In case you were wondering, Ubuntu Linux can play FLAC files out of the box in Rhythmbox, thanks to FLAC support in GStreamer’s “plugins-good” package. Both of these are part of the default install. Amarok can also play FLAC files, thanks to support in libxine. There is also an XMMS FLAC plugin for those of you who like that sort of thing.)
There are a large number of open source converters that can help you transcode FLAC files into other formats, if you are unfortunate enough to own a portable music player that doesn’t support FLAC natively. Mac+iPod+iTunes users can allegedly install the FLAC QuickTime component and then use iTunes (with or without Doug’s QuickConvert script) to losslessly convert FLAC files to the iPod-compatible Apple Lossless Audio Codec. I haven’t tried it myself, for obvious reasons, so perhaps some kind soul could leave a comment about compatibility with the latest versions of QuickTime and iTunes.
FLAC to ALAC, eh? Of course that’s not an entirely lossless process. Just look at the acronyms. You’re losing “Free.” Of course, you’re also gaining “Apple.”
It’s like you, in reverse.
Comment by Mark Jaquith — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 1:39 am
I know I would love to not only be able to support the Philadelphia Orchestra and their FLAC goodness but would love to be able to store all my CDs in FLAC instead of ALAC. I will give it a try later but I would love to know if anyone does this on Mac OS X with iTunes.
Max is a great ripper. Also I think Vorbis makes a QT component for the ogg container. I think they include FLAC, Vorbis, Speex, and Theora in that but can’t remember.
Comment by Nathaniel Nutter — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 1:58 am
Buying a lossy mp3 is not worth it, the sound quality is not
good enough. I see no reason to accept less quality if you
buy the song online then buying it on a CD. The quality
should be even better as there is no real limit
(like fitting it to a CD) and also gives me the choice to
convert it to another format like OGG with my own chosen configuration.
The Philadelphia Orchestra does it right. Really! :)
Comment by 2tone — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 3:21 am
I haven’t been able to get the FLAC QuickTime component to work with QuickTime 7. Also no luck with the Xiph QuickTime Components.
Comment by Thijs van der Vossen — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 3:37 am
You’d rather listen to Magnatune, they does it right too!. You can listen to classical webstreams / podcasts or to the “San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra“. What you listen to are complete 128kbps MP3 albums (a generous preview). If you like you can buy the albums and get access to DRM-FREE WAV/OGG/FLAC/…$NEARLY_WHATEVER_FORMAT downloads. Magnatune also features a CC-based licensing engine. They also suggest giving 3 free copies to your friends! :)
Comment by Marco Fabbri — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 5:43 am
> It’s like you, in reverse.
Touche. Of course I meant “audio conversion without quality loss.” Obviously I wouldn’t recommend ALAC as a long-term storage format. Keep the FLAC files around for future conversions. But ALAC is fine as a short-term output format for iPod owners who want to listen to a great orchestra in all their glory. But the point is moot if there is no working FLAC component for modern versions of QuickTime.
Comment by Mark — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 10:27 am
Gillian Welch does it, too. Unfortunately you select whether you are using windows or a mac, but the files work just fine on Linux. She owns her own record label (Acony) and by extension, her music.
Welch is an reasonably popular musician who wrote a song about music piracy (and if that’s not what it’s about, it should be.) and believes in controling her creative work and offers at least some of it over the internet in a way that allows for that control to be extended to the product people paid good money for. That’s strong sauce in plagued industry.
Comment by dm — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 1:01 pm
I recently used Max to convert some FLAC to AIFF, and then iTunes to get em into Apple Lossless. Seemed to work pretty well, though it seems odd that Max doesn’t have an Apple Lossless output option. (Also seems odd that iTunes doesn’t support FLAC… maybe its increasing popularity will encourage them to change their minds on that.)
I went to a talk about the Apple Lossless codec here at Reed the other week (apparently there’s a cadre of, like, 4 Reed grads working at Apple on this kind of stuff). It was fascinating. I had never really thought about the issues inherent in lossless codecs: nonlinear invertible matrix transforms, QV flips (to minimize entropy!), the seeming inability to get better than 2:1 compression (the prof giving the talk hypothesized that it was owing to the unavoidable entropy of the least-significant bits in anything but absolute unrealistic best cases)–just great stuff. (I’m sure FLAC does very similar things.)
Anyway, knowing some of the math behind it (and having seen some Mathematica code samples) really makes me appreciate what exactly is going on when I listen to the new Bob Dylan album, even if the damn thing is 400MB and you can’t really tell the difference on Powerbook speakers.
Comment by d chalmers — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 2:55 pm
I heard that the Leopard preview already includes updates to Quicktime that allow it to play FLAC. Looks like FLAC support will be native to OSX come spring. Here’s hoping. http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=47526
Comment by Anonymous — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 5:12 pm
Nice to see an organization supporting open formats.
You probably could have mentioned “Ubuntu” some more. Really.
Comment by baw — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 8:33 pm
“I recently used Max to convert some FLAC to AIFF, and then iTunes to get em into Apple Lossless. Seemed to work pretty well, though it seems odd that Max doesn’t have an Apple Lossless output option.”
The version of Max I use (0.6.1) outputs to ALAC.
Comment by baw — Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 8:34 pm
Baw, if you use Max to convert FLAC to ALAC, do you get the metadata from the FLAC file in the ALAC?
Comment by Thijs van der Vossen — Sunday, September 24, 2006 @ 6:39 am
It should, but I have not tried it with a FLAC to ALAC conversion. I know the metadata transferred over when I did some ALAC to MP3 conversions.
Comment by baw — Monday, September 25, 2006 @ 12:53 am
I just tested a FLAC to ALAC conversion. Metadata did transfer.
Comment by baw — Monday, September 25, 2006 @ 12:55 am
Max indeed does a fine job. What might not be immediately obvious is that you need to select ‘MPEG-4 Audio’ from the available output formats (there are two identically named entries in the list, you need the first) and then choose ‘Apple Lossless’ as the data format.
Max can be found at http://sbooth.org/Max/
OS X users might also want to take a look at Cog which seems to be a decent alternative for playing FLAC files.
You can find Cog at http://cogosx.sourceforge.net/
Comment by Thijs van der Vossen — Monday, September 25, 2006 @ 2:59 am
If using Max to convert files to ALAC, they cannot be played via iTunes sharing. Please refer to this thread;
http://sbooth.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=217
Comment by baw — Monday, September 25, 2006 @ 12:33 pm
I use XLD to transcode FLAC to MP3 in OS X. You can also use it to convert to Apple lossless, WAV, AIFF, Mpeg 4/AAC, Ogg Vorbis and more.
http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co.jp/xld/index_e.html
Comment by Jim Dye — Wednesday, September 27, 2006 @ 9:23 pm
If you want to encode your flacs to OGG, I have a program available at:
http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/GPL_code/
just for that. It preserves any tags you’ve set. Why convert to OGG? Say you want to carry the songs with you on a USB thumbdrive - you don’t want those huge flacs!
I also have a converter to MP3 if you want. Just email me ericsbinaryworld at gmail dot com
Hope that helps!
Comment by Eric — Friday, September 29, 2006 @ 5:44 pm