Re: Oldfield watermarked at qobuz?
Reply #25 – 2016-02-29 16:08:34
I bought a "lossless" album from them too when I heard people recommend it. I picked an album I had on CD so I ccould reliably confirm if it's properly lossless. It turned out to be lowpassed and the tracks even had silence between them when the transitions should have been gapless. I didn't know to check for watermarks. I heard about something similar but not sure it was on qpbuz. The watermarked 24/44.1 Studio Master has broken gaps while the 16/44.1 cd hasn't. I will try to ask if we get it online.Instead of the delta file, can you post some 30 seconds clips from the files you mentioned in this thread as well? So that all of us can examine them. I am not 100% sure how legal 30sec samples are. Here in germany it costs license fees even for 4 beats or as soon a song can be recognized. We had more than 5 Million sued people for music copyright things here in the last years and this is a big business assisted by our lawgivers.I am afraid that watermarking is a pretty universal strategy among music download sellers. I read the book 'The mp3 story' recently written by a Fraunhofer Institut insider. From that I took that watermarking is the technology which overcame copy protected downloads which mean strong restrictions for playback. Guess that's the price we have to pay. As long as it's really inaudible (or very very close to) it's an acceptable price to me (especially as I do lossy codec download - iTunes AAC most of the time). For lossless codecs it's a different beast of course. I am afraid i see this completely different. A lossless file should be lossless leave alone something sold me as Studio Master. Do you really want to look for non watermarked for every purchase? I will always prefer the non watermarked. Seems like there are albums sold on HDtracks with watermark in where the CD and the qobuz version has none. What version do you prefer? Imagine the theory about The Killing Fields album is correct and they compressed the hell out of silent parts only to fit the watermark in.