Qobuz - lossless music DOWNLOAD site

[ignitenz]

Hey all,

I'm super stoked to share this with you all!

After years of diminishing places to download music to play on-air, I have discovered this gem. Sure, it's main purpose is streaming music, but they also offer the ability to download your sounds too!

And, as a bonus, you have the choice of lossless, CD quality (44.1kHz) flac or lossy MP3. But, as I'm finding out, flac is definitely the way to go in radio. Kiss good bye to lossy artifacts!

In terms of cost, a track that costs NZ$2.39 on iTunes will cost NZ$3.79 on Qobuz - but that's the price you pay for true CD quality music. Just be aware also that they charge a small surcharge on any Visa transaction, debit or credit, so might be best to buy a few songs at once to lower that cost.

It's also great that cover art is embedded in the flac file itself, so unless you edit the audio, the cover art appears in RDJ (and then presumably on your stream, though untested here).

Unlike iTunes, you can use Qobuz on any computer, regardless of OS because it's web-based, though if you don't use Windows or Mac you have to download each song or album individually, which is in our case a small price to pay considering the outcome.

I loaded a qobuz flac song right after a MP3@320kbps and the sound difference was stunning - even when using aac@128kbps as our stream output!

I'm aware with Tidal you can download third-party software to convert the song streaming to flac, but this seems to me to be not only dodgy but now a waste of time considering you can just buy and download the track from the site to your PC.

But, have a look anyway. https://www.qobuz.com/nz-en/shop

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Baldrick.