this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026

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No Stupid Questions

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Can I obtain basically any FLAC file(s) for any singular musical work for relatively inexpensive cost even if not freee? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by cheese_greater@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

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[–] skeevy_scallops@feddit.online 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

check out soulseek. there's a bunch of shared music there and a lot of it is FLAC

[–] Hubi@feddit.org 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

there's a bunch of shared music there

That's quite an understatement.

[–] skeevy_scallops@feddit.online 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I try to keep it low key. nobody has gone after soulseek yet but I don't want to give them a reason to. after all, it's only a file sharing platform, is it not?

[–] Hubi@feddit.org 1 points 4 months ago

It sure is

[–] slothrop@lemmy.ca 4 points 4 months ago

lucida.to

soulseek.org

[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If you don't mind using the analog hole and compressing the resulting audio yourself, sure.

EDIT: If you want a professionally-mastered FLAC, AFAICT, Bandcamp offers FLAC for bands that are listed on it along with other forms. though I haven't done a comprehensive look to see whether some might not provide it. I've certainly downloaded FLACs for music that I've purchased there.

EDIT2: Note that IIRC Bandcamp does not enforce volume normalization or ReplayGain tagging, so if you want ReplayGain tags

I do

you probably want to run something like rsgain on the resulting files.

EDIT3: Note that FLAC alone may not solve all of your quality concerns. If you have music that was mastered in an environment where the loudness war was being fought, you may have audio with limited dynamic range.

[–] Ghoelian@piefed.social 2 points 4 months ago

If you want to go the legal route, 7digital sells digital albums and separate songs. Not all are available in flac, but most I've seen are.

Then there's also bandcamp of course, though you usually won't find bigger artists' music there.

[+] adespoton@lemmy.ca -7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you have to ask, the answer is probably “no”. Some people can, but not you.

[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I appreciate taking the time to answer but this is also unhelpful unless it was calculated to stir an orherwise passive knowledgable bystander into action

I am Zen

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca -5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

It’s a simple answer to a simple question, with a touch of snark that may move someone into directly helping you with your audio collection.

Essentially, you’re asking the wrong questions.

Is your real question “where can I download lossless audio files of all the music I like to listen to on Spotify?” Because that’s a different question from what you asked.

I have music I’ve produced that’s never been encoded in FLAC and isn’t available for you to download anywhere, so your question as stated is “no” on two counts. There’s also plenty of musical performances that were never digitally recorded. And “FLAC” just means the audio as stored is the same quality as the audio source that was converted to FLAC — quality could easily be worse than a 128kbps MP3.

[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Actually appreciate the hell out of this writeup.

But why or under what circulstances would a FLAC download be randomly consistent with that example you gave? Unless its a mass purveyor of counterfeit files what would be the economic angle enabling that?

You kinda have to look a little harder for all things FLAC/"lossless", seems implausible to randomly stumble upon some serialization of that already unlikely case example

Edit: I guess if I'm being honest I would reformulate to

If there is a large combined/multi release album or work that I want and know to exist in lossless format (FLAC) how can I aquire it other than a torrent if not so already and findably available?

[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

How can I audit an audio file or a combined audio file to get the stats necessary to make an adequate evaluation consistent with what you've said?

Is it an ffprobe thing (ffmpeg)?

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 0 points 4 months ago

It’s tricky; you really need to do spectral analysis to see if there are any obvious bands of audio missing or patterns in the output that suggest it’s been previously compressed, or was originally sampled at a suboptimal rate.

Ffprobe will get you most of the way there:

ffprobe -v error -show_format -show_streams -print_format json "file.flac"

That reads the file metadata and audio stream headers to identify the digital encoding of the source files.

But the only way to be certain is to have the original audio that’s been ffmpeg compressed, because someone could easily have live recorded in mono to audiocassette, then recorded that to PCM 8 bit audio, then burned that to a red book audio track on a CD, then ripped that to FLAC. At which point the headers will indicate it’s 44.1kHz 16-bit 2 channel PCM uncompressed audio.