Which is the best music tracker.

[DeadPoet]

So I usually don't know what songs are good.

Those which you love to listen...
For similar artists you can search on last.fm. Easy as that.

On topick.
It depends on you music taste, but you can try to join two biggest of them - what & waffles.

[supercoolkid]

You can generally find any album in 320kbps mp3 on google, no need to settle for V2/0.

Why would I use a bloated (and most likely transcoded) 320 when I can get a proper V0

ps: I'd recommend what.cd as well.

What is a V0/V2? I always use a 320 .... pls explain.

@DeadPoet, I am doing that presently...Using the Last.Fm app on my ipod touch is really good.

But also looking for a more social interaction where I can find music recommended my people. I also checkout the Billboard top 100 and preview all songs ... If I like any, I usually download that album it comes from and then I keep track of the artist/band.

[anon]

What is a V0/V2? I always use a 320 .... pls explain.

Both are LAME presets. If I remember correctly, V0 = ~245Kbits VBR, while V2 = ~192Kbits VBR. A lot of people download V0s because they make a good balance between quality and filesize. Scene music releases use the latter.

[supercoolkid]

@anon-sbi, your telling me to stick to 320 if I want the best quality????

[ca_aok]

Well no, stick to some sort of lossless format if you want the best quality...

As for 320, the thing is that 320 is a constant bitrate of 320kbps throughout the song, meaning even for low resolution parts such as extremely quiet bits or silence, it's recording at 320kbps when it's a complete waste of space. What V0 and V2 do is record at a variable bitrate on a per-frame basis, meaning it'll use 320kbps if needed and a lower bitrate if not, decreasing the size of the file. V2 has a lower target bitrate so there shouldn't really be any frames encoded at 320, but V0 is mostly between 224-320kbps.

While 320 is technically a higher quality, the quality to size trade-off isn't good at all. That's why V0 is the most popular format to download at What/Waffles.

Also V0/V2 ensures that the LAME codec was used, which is the best MP3 encoder. 320kbps files could have come from any encoder.

[anon]

@anon-sbi, your telling me to stick to 320 if I want the best quality????

Well, 320Kbit is the max quality MP3 can offer, although 320 CBR rips have this issue of compressing all parts of the audio with that bitrate, even if they're silent or barely audible, just like ca_aok said.

Perfect quality can only be achieved by a well-done FLAC (or any other lossless format) rip of the CD. Lossless compression makes sure no audio frequencies are sacrificed - of course, you have to deal with larger files.

[Quarterquack]

Perfect quality can only be achieved by a well-done FLAC (or any other lossless format)

APEs > FLACs (till they get corrupted at least). Honestly I'm not trying to be offensive but FLACs seem to be the biggest thing right now, while they're only popular because of its high tendency to overlook corruption/errors, but APEs are still a far superior encode format.

People care about the size of the file, so they save it as a FLAC rather than as a WAV (which is beautiful because it can save the different instruments to different channels, like photoshop does with layers), but APEs do that better. People reason that FLACs have more leeway for corruption, but in this day and age, with torrenting having in-built anti-corruption methods, I'm sure that's not a problem. That's not all, I'm sure a few people would be willing to code a file re-builder for APEs when/if they become a huge thing.

I'm just sick and tired of the hordes of people running around asking for FLACs when they don't know jack about quality formats (I've used APEs for as long as I remember) and probably can't even hear the difference.

/morning rant (not aimed at you anon)

[anon]

/morning rant (not aimed at you anon)

Well, until today I thought all lossless formats were pretty much the same. Probably due to my lack of interest in such content, as V0s are enough for me.

[ca_aok]

APEs > FLACs (till they get corrupted at least). Honestly I'm not trying to be offensive but FLACs seem to be the biggest thing right now, while they're only popular because of its high tendency to overlook corruption/errors, but APEs are still a far superior encode format.

People care about the size of the file, so they save it as a FLAC rather than as a WAV (which is beautiful because it can save the different instruments to different channels, like photoshop does with layers), but APEs do that better. People reason that FLACs have more leeway for corruption, but in this day and age, with torrenting having in-built anti-corruption methods, I'm sure that's not a problem. That's not all, I'm sure a few people would be willing to code a file re-builder for APEs when/if they become a huge thing.

I'm just sick and tired of the hordes of people running around asking for FLACs when they don't know jack about quality formats (I've used APEs for as long as I remember) and probably can't even hear the difference.

/morning rant (not aimed at you anon)

There is no audible difference (I have no idea what the hell you're going on about with that sort of thing). If you uncompress an APE and uncompress a FLAC file of the same original WAV, the resulting WAV will be a bit for bit match.

The only things that differentiate lossless codecs are the features included in the codec. People like FLAC because it's open source and offers good compression and uncompression speed. Also correct me if I'm wrong but APE can't handle multichannel lossless files can it?

WavPack is also a decent codec but since FLAC is being adopted as the standard, there's really no need to use anything else. The resulting audio will be bit for bit identical from the different codecs.

[Quarterquack]

I never said the quality is different, I just said APEs were a far superior compression format. They scale down to a smaller size. The source code is out there, APEs are just not licensed as open source. As I said before, FLACs are only superior when handling encoding corruptions, which is a non-issue with today's filesharing protocols.

You're correct on the multichannel issue, but it's a trade-off as there's a java version of Monkey's Audio which can help it play on many different stereo (non 3.1/5.1/6.1/7.1) systems, that do not support FLAC but support java (example: most cell phones, natively).

I agree that there's not much we (I) can do, as FLAC has already been instated as the standard. I will go with it if it becomes universal, but that doesn't mean I like it. A lot of superior formats always end up dying because the consumers don't actually know what they actually want. The same way Betamax lost, the same way HD-DVD lost, it's time for APE to lose (WAV is still used as the industry standard for music recordings, it will be a while before that's outed).