The RIAA Armageddon has begun

I hate soulseek, not installing a P2P app on my work laptop sorry

I'm crossposting my post from the Spotify thread since this issue concerns all digital delivery modes and is RIAArmageddon to the max:

So it turns out I'm not crazy, my ears weren't playing tricks on me, and there is a reason just about all spotify tracks (and emusic and amazon downloads etc) originating from UMG labels sound weird and fluttery. It's not, as I presumed, a defect in the codec they used to digitise their holdings; rather, it's a deliberately introduced, ostensibly 'inaudible' sonic watermark. Even the flacs you can buy of UMG material from sites like Passionato have it. The only way to get a good-sounding file of a UMG track is to... yes... buy it from UMG's own webstore. Where they only offer a scant sliver of their material anyway.

Mystery was unraveled here:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=89818

And neatly summarized here:

http://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark

So yeah do not ever pay money for a digital file of anything on Island, Motown, ECM, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Def Jam, Blue Note, Impulse, the list goes on and on and on. And if yr listening to it on Spotify, yes it sounds fucked up on purpose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Music_Group_labels

(This all belongs just as much on the RIAA Armageddon thread I suppose, since the watermarks are supposed to be a way for the label to know what digital vendor an illegally shared file was originally bought from).

― hibernaculum (Jon Lewis), Wednesday, January 30, 2013 12:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that really is crazy

xp Yeah that is absolutely crazy...maybe not so many people care about sound quality anymore but the optics of a company sabotaging their digital catalogue, if it becomes common knowledge, could scupper the uptake of legal downloading.

The problem here is that the UMG watermark degrades the audio to about the equivalent of a 96 kbit MP3.

yikes

wtf

god digital distro sucks so hard

if you want to really hear it big time listen to any solo piano recording.

the sad part of this is that we're finally at a stage were -- and i know ppl make fun of neil young and his PONO project -- but 24bit digital audio sounds really fucking great and hard drive space is so cheap now and broadband is so prevalent that we could be living in a pretty amazing age of easy hi-fi digital music, good DACs are really coming down in price

Lots of the indie classical labels are selling reasonable lossless and lossless+ downloads through their own sites. But yeah.

oh yeah i mean there's sites that sell them, it just sucks that we're probably going to be saddled with the digital equilalent of cassette forever

I hear the MPAA is gonna start having a few frames per minute of a different exec wiggling his dong in all prints they send out to various theater chains. Birthmarks and wart clusters will be used to identify the source of pirated films. The slight penile-induced reduction of picture quality will be a small price to pay for this reactionary anti-piracy intitiative which will do nothing to end piracy.

god digital distro sucks so hard

― Welcome to my world of proses (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, January 31, 2013 6:07 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if you want to really hear it big time listen to any solo piano recording.

― hibernaculum (Jon Lewis), Thursday, January 31, 2013 6:10 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really interesting - last night I set the clock to 420 and listened to the Sun Bear Concerts (on ECM), which I have digitally - and I'm sitting there staring at the speakers goin "man...I know for a fact I love this record...but that just does not sound right at all...fuck...back to Slayer I guess"

this morning I checked again and the fucked-ness was nowhere near as obvious to me but under the right circumstances what the shitty encoding/watermarking is costing you is like glaringly obvious

if only anyone on this message board wrote for any widely-trafficked music or political websites or print magazines

sound the alarm you guys, this is vandalism

yeah this seems like it should become a bigger story, reminds me of the Sony rootkit fiasco.

So yeah do not ever pay money for a digital file of anything on Island, Motown, ECM, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Def Jam, Blue Note, Impulse, the list goes on and on and on. And if yr listening to it on Spotify, yes it sounds fucked up on purpose.

I def noticed this when listening to alice coltrane stuff on spotify, but the deluxe edition of the slits' cut sounded fine to me... unless that reissue wasn't on island...

a little off topic, but one thing I really like about spotify is that they put up various versions of albums, remasters and reissues, so sometimes I'll listen to a couple to figure out which sound best

Some kinds of 'sound picture' do seem to show it much more than others.

There's plenty of used vinyl out there.

I remember swearing off itunes almost a decade ago after hearing how terrible stuff like martha argerich and the velvets 3rd album sounded on it

what sucks hardest about this for me is that I got spotify premium specifically to listen to opera. Decca? DG? that's a lotta opera at 96k.

I got it mainly for the Bluenote jazz

I dunno maybe you guys should try listening to some metal or sumthin

Maybe one day I will give metal a go when I'm older

Bluenote = a UMG label

Aero there's still shit tons of vintage live opera labels on there. And EMI/Virgin and Warner and Sony/RCA.

anybody noticed sonic probs on watermarked promos? I haven't yet.

if only anyone on this message board wrote for any widely-trafficked music or political websites or print magazines

sound the alarm you guys, this is vandalism

― Milton Parker, Thursday, January 31, 2013 8:54 PM (Yesterday)

Maybe one day I will give metal a go when I'm older

this post will be underappreciated

Anyway, yeah, this is horrific and this should be a much, much larger story than it is.

it seriously pisses me off but what the fuck can anybody do

Man, I knew Spotify sounded weird!

does last.fm have the same problem? I don't listen to the radio there but I was just about to get a subscription... (seems like it should, right?)

IMO this deserves its own thread

this is nuts!!

the difference waveforms sound really cool

The only thing I can imagine is maybe apple making a stance against it the same way they changed their stance towards DRM.

Though ironically it seems that's when UMG began watermarking, when DRM went out of fashion...

i wouldn't be surprised if a lot more of this sort of thing has happened post-drm tbh

I wouldn't even care one damn bit if it actually were an 'inaudible' watermark!

is this grounds for some kind of legal action? say from ascap or someone. i know 0 about publisher/artist agreements and copyright law.

Seems like more grounds for legal action from ppl who have spent money on defective flacs, M4As and MP3s.

yeah, this is a nice class action suit waiting to happen

sue these assholes for a change

one thing that really annoys me about these filesharing sites going down is that now I can no longer find stuff digitally that I already paid for/previously purchased in other formats. like, I'll be fucked if I'm going to give the Rolling Stones any more money just because I would like to hear Beggars Banquet on MP3 and my cassette copy is dead

Along those lines, it's so much easier for me to download a boxed set than to sit in front of my computer feeding CDs (which I already own and paid for) in one at a time.

Hence the Amazon AutoRip thing...

If I bought it from Amazon, right?

Yeah you have to have bought it through Amazon. Cute idea though.

It's quicker to download a CD than it is for me to actually go to the basement, dig out the box, find it, and rip it. In fact, it's usually quicker to download it than do any one of those steps.

either way the metadata is always off, like [DISC 2] of what, hmmmm????

the library of congress does a better job than all these idiots and it doesn't actually own anything

Doh i just lost another video i had done to youtube. I had taken vocals from a Beatles song and rewritten the backing track to be performed with videogame samples. It was pulled offline this morning. Doesn't surprise me, but it still kinda sucks.

damn totally noticing this UMG shit now :(

listening to Gaucho by steely dan and it's very noticable.

ugh the thought of hearing watermarked cybergunked gaucho is so sad