i would actually prefer to download full audio cd's. full sound quality when compared to mp3. but none that i can find on torrents unfortunately.

I do see some torrents that feature FLAC files. Since FLAC files are "lossless" audio files, you could download the FLAC files, then convert / recompile them back to an audio CD without any loss of audio quality.

Yes, FLAC and APE, any "lossless" sound compression format, can give you CD quality or better. If 16-bit sound source is compressed FLAC'd and then decompressed, it will be an exact copy of the original. The thing that makes FLAC better than zip or rar or shrtn is that you can play a FLAC file just as you can an mp3, if you use a player that supports FLAC. More and more do support it now.

If FLAC had been around in '99, then Napster would have started a FLAC craze instead of MP3 I think.

Demonoid had a lot of FLAC torrent sources, and so does piratebay. Not all trackers do, though. This new thing called tunebully has very few, and I wonder if torrentbully is the same. I would tend to think that most really private trackers would have lots of FLAC, and maybe CD/wav stuff as well. I can't say, however, because I have no clue how to get invited to them!

I'm just waiting for on-line retailers to start selling their music in FLAC for the same price the put on mp3's. Hey, remember when cassettes used to cost more than LP's? Maybe MP3's should be more expensive!

yeah just read more about FLAC. yes thats a possibility. excellent idea. the question now is what would be a good converter from FLAC to audio? and what is a good light player for FLAC?

tigerbeer, dbpoweramp will do the job of converting flac for you.
google it, its free.

Try here

www.mp3safari.com

did some downloading of FLAC just now. winamp plays it as well. the million dollar question would be that the file size of flac seems to be almost the same as audio files, so whats the use of FLAC?

According to WikiPedia: "Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced in size 40 to 50 percent."

This post has been edited by Rice_King: 2008-01-02 14:43:03

MP3's are smaller because they throw away a lot of musical material. You may not notice it with a cheap boom box, or lousy mp3 player ear phones, or uneducated ears, but mp3 technology attempts to get rid of sounds that our ears theoretically won't miss (such as something that might occur after a very loud sound, or musical overtones etc.). So you get a simple approximation of the music but not the real thing.

I've made CD's from cassette tapes and from mp3's. Although the issues a different the result goes into the same "better than nothing" category, but a long long way from hi-fi.

Well, very high bit-rate mp3's might be "okay" sometimes, but then they are much larger too.