ඞmir
EN/NL PhD @ TU Delft CGV Loves EDM, LoL, TFT and MTG
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If you learn how an encoder works you can compress the FLAC into whatever format you prefer yourself. I highly recommend 256kbps AAC using Apple’s encoder (specifically that encoder, other AAC encoders are much worse) but you can also do VBR MP3 in any bitrate you want. Plus, if you keep the FLACs in archive, you can re-compress them later to a better format if one is developed.
YouTube is absolutely unacceptable quality. The difference is clearly audible even on $5 earbuds. I feel sorry for your ears if you don’t hear the difference, but the vast majority of those who care enough to download music will be able to tell the difference.
I personally pay for Deezer HiFi and save the FLACs locally. Friends mostly do the same with Tidal, but both work well for this purpose.
If you want to find FLACs without paying for a service you can check out rutracker. It has torrents for discographies from a lot of famous artists. Alternatively, you could find a stolen account for one of the previously mentioned services, but that goes too far for my morals because you’re hurting a normal person with a hacked account.
EEE is about a big company acting like they’re helping a smaller company/organization, but they have the goal of taking full monopolistic control over the market. Enshittification is companies using loss leader products to create lock-in, and then slowly making the product worse to squeeze money out of all parties until the company’s product crashes and fades into irrelevancy.
There’s no reason ToC has any correlation with an ethical framework, just like laws against gay marriage don’t make gay marriage unethical. They’re merely corporate decisions made by men in suits. Being ethical and being against ToC or against the law are nowhere near the same thing.
My ethical framework is about driving the world towards overall happiness of all people.
If I, instead of loading the file in FLAC 200 times from Deezer’s servers, locally save it and replay it in my music player, all the while paying for the service so I could actually stream it 200 times if I wanted to - I don’t see who’s being hurt by this.
Does that make sense?
Now if the ToC says “don’t do this, instead use our bandwidth as we want you to use it, but don’t save our file” then instead of blindly accepting that, I read between the lines of why they don’t want that.
Which seems fairly obvious: they want you to keep paying for the service monthly to keep your access to the content. And thus I keep paying monthly, as I have for years now.
If I stop paying and don’t delete the content? Yes, then it does become unethical. I’m not planning to do that. But I’d still argue it’s not nearly as unethical as using their servers without paying for access - because you’re not inducing any costs for the company.
If your ethical framework is about “respecting corporate ToCs” yet don’t mind making people use fake credit cards then I don’t really know what to say anymore.
you’re talking about lost opportunity cost
I explicitly said that I think this is not problematic. I don’t see how that is weird in a piracy community
I think you can be an ethical pirate. As long as companies can not see your existence by any measurement (server cost, bandwidth allocation), whatever you do is ethical in my eyes.
If you didn’t exist the company would be in the exact same state, so why should your existence on this planet mean they deserve anything more?
Does that not qualify me as a pirate? Lol
I’ve paid monthly for Deezer HiFi in the past like 3 years, I don’t consider it unethical to store the FLACs on my PC so I can use my own local music player to listen to them as long as I keep paying for the service.
I do consider it unethical to scam Deezer into giving me new trials every month. I’m not one to tell you what to do or not do, but I don’t personally want to do that.
Only one of them gets to make the decision to fire the other