Top 9 Albums I've been shoving down my earholes over the last month.

track info @last_fm
collage tapmusic.net

#music #albums #top9 #collage #charts #playlist #mp3 #flac #wav #albumart #tunes #vinyl #lp #ep #cd #sounds #albumcover #albumartwork #musicians #listening

🎵 Ohhhhh! Trop, c'est comme pas assez? 😄
Pourquoi je n'utilise pas les applications de musique en ligne?
Je garde mon local en 127.0.0.1
1177 heures!!!
Ça fait 49 jours de musique non-stop! 🎵💀🤟

🎵 Ohhhhh! Too much is like not enough? 😄
Why don’t I use online music apps?
I keep my local library at 127.0.0.1
1,177 hours!!! That’s 49 days of non-stop music! 🎵💀🤟

#MP3 #FLAC #Musique #Music #NoGAFAM #VLC

Immersing into Music with Offline FLAC Music Player

Recently, I bought a Offline Single Purpose device. It is a Music Player.

I am trying to be away from the smartphone, and the social media. Limited the phone usage with “ScreenZen” and “StayFree” apps. Still, the hook of phone is there. I use it to read the news from news websites and RSS feeds.

For few weeks, I stopped completely reading any news, in phone. The only major usage is music.

When I am in Gym or walking, I hear music, French learning podcasts. But ending up hearing technical/news/political podcasts.

Realized that a complete offline music device will help. Enjoying Music is my all time favorite. I had my teen days completely immersed with music and books. There was no internet at that time. Only Cassettes and Books.

On those days, I have spent all my savings/pocket money on the search of good music. When the duplicate cassettes were normal, easily available, One day I purchased a original music cassette of the movie “Kadhalan”. I still remember the freshness it provided. Even in a Panasonic Stereo Music Player, I can sense a great difference between the original audio cassette and its duplicates.

From that moment, I started to buy the original cassettes, even they cost 3 or 4 times more. I have spend so many evenings and nights immersed in music with a Sony Walkman player.

In few years, the CD era came. I moved to buy and collect the original CDs. When MP3 came, I can sense the difference between Original CD version and MP3 version. But MP3 wave took ever me due to the cost/storage issues.

I had a Sony w700 phone ( https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/w700i ) and Sony digital Walkman NWZ-B183F ( https://www.amazon.in/Sony-NWZ-B183F-Walkman-Player-Built/dp/B00JX8W23S ) for few years.

They both are the excellent mp3 players I ever used.

I used apple iPod for a week. But, it was not compatible with Linux on those days. So I sold it. I think, after the apple wave, the Sony stopped producing affordable mp3 players.

Life also took its own turns. As I grow in age, the time for music is reducing. Social media, Smartphone are taking all the time.

When I want to take back the time, from the internet, the offline options are helping a lot.

Kindle, is one of the best inventions of this century. It gave back the reading habit. Nowadays, I am reading more physical books too.

To hear music, I explored the offline music players and found the “HiFi Walker H2” ( https://hifiwalker.com/products/h2 ) is a good one.

It has a processor to work on the audio. It can play HiFi audio formats like WAV, FLAC.

FLAC is a open source Free Lossless Audio Codec. When MP3 compresses the audio to the highest possible level with tons of loss, FLAC gives lossless compression. It gives the same quality of the original audio CD.

A 5 min song in WAV is around 150 MB. FLAC is in 50 MB and MP3 is 5 MB. FLAC magically gives the same quality of WAV.

I still can not believe what I hear with FLAC songs. The same MP3 version is giving only 60% of the sounds. The FLAC gives crystal clear audio. We can hear what the music director hears. All the instruments, different layers, small fillings are audible now. Hearing music is become a good addiction now.

We need to have a wired headphone, to get the best from HiFi audio devices. Bluetooth adds its own compression. A wired connections conducts the audio to the highest quality. My Sony WH-XB910N headphone is a wonderful pair for this HiFi Walker h2 device.

Internet gives plenty of FLAC audio. But, there are many fake, mp3 up-scaled FLAC files too. We can easily find out them.

When a regular MP3 gives 128 kbps of audio, a good FLAC gives 1k-2k kbps audio. Even youtube is giving the audio with 128 kbps only by default.

If you want to enjoy the world of music, I strongly recommend, HiFi walker h2. You can buy any HiFi/HiRes audio player with separate processor for audio. Think it as a GPU for graphics. With special audio processor, we can hear the HiFi audio with a difference in images of VGA to 4k.

All you need is, some money to invest on the device, good headphone, time and mind to immerse in the audio.

With more single purpose offline devices, we can take back our time and life from the internet.

Update :
Many friends asked for the price.
I bought HiFi Walker H2 in Canada for 180 CAD in amazon.ca . It is 12,600 INR. But the same costs around 25,000 INR in amazon.in

Explored for similar devices in amazon.in around 15k.

– https://www.amazon.in/SHANLING-Support-Bluetooth5-0-Tablets-Tatanium/dp/B0F59WMGLG – 15,000 INR

– https://www.amazon.in/MECHEN-M30-Lossless-Resolution-Card%EF%BC%8CGold/dp/B0DMF9MCDC – 16,200 INR

– https://www.amazon.in/Pro-MP3-Player-Bluetooth%EF%BC%8CDigital-Player%EF%BC%8C1-54/dp/B0DJRJ67GR/258-5837001-0042630 – 18,000 INR

These are costly, but good devices to escape from internet and immerse into audio world.

I love the fact that in this day and age of subscriptions and streaming services, I can still legally purchase and download MP3s and FLACs from 7digital.com

#music #mp3 #flac #selfhosted #7digital