allflac

I am normally happy when I can get my music at a reasonable price. However with this site something is clearly fishy. And I don't like to be part of it. So I will avoid in my downloads - unless it's become clear that it is 100% legit business.

Mike-B posted:

+1,  plus the endless everything in the music section is all in need of a rethink.    

If it all stays in that one thread and doesn't infect other threads, perhaps the Music Room can still be useful.

There clearly are some compulsive actors, and I do wish them well. So long as they can afford it, there are worse compulsions . . . 

But no one should think that allflac downloads are anything other than pirated.

Selling Pirate stuff, there no honor even among the pirates anymore! Tidal is the way to go  

Emre posted:

Selling Pirate stuff, there no honor even among the pirates anymore! Tidal is the way to go  

No - it's not actually.
If you think about it, you pay quite a lot of money to listen to the music that you never own.
I'd rather buy it outright...

If it's reggae, would that be pirates of the Caribbean?  

Bart posted:

Erich posted:

I downloaded 7 albums, checked the metadata with metadatics, frequency spectrum and other recording parameters with musicscope. Less than US$ 6 avg. Listened them wiith MacBook Air/Audirvana/Hugo/HD800.

3 x cd quality: Good quality. With these downloads I also obtained mp3 and m4a.

2 x dsd 64: Good quality. Only listened to them. No musicscope analysis because I didn extracted individual tracks from the iso file.

2 x 24/96: one upsampled, one Ok.

Metadata in different styles and with different levels of completion. Not bad but need a lot of editing.

Why don't you just bittorrent -- equally pirated and you're not paying anything.  I don't know why anyone would PAY for pirated music.

You don't know it is pirated. After this experience I have some facts to conclude that the site coul be selling pirated music. This site is not very different than others that are supposedly legal.

I have tried two different ISPs this evening, BT and O2 and they  both would appear to be intercepting the HTTP and HTTPS traffic either to or from  www.allflac.com although the route itself appears not blocked. The site does seem to have a valid SSL certificate issued by COMODO CA Ltd based in Manchester, UK, although it appears  to expire after  the 22nd August 2016 - so would be interesting to see if it gets re issued. 

The allflac.com servers appear to be in the Czech Republic run by Itself s.r.o.

Simon,  there is www chat re Comodo & fraudulent SSL certificates,  can you have a look & give us your expert opinion.  

Also I found an allflac server address in Fort Lauderdale.    

Ok Mike I am not a net security expert - but Comodo appears a  respected and trusted Certification Authority. There was an incident some time back in 2011 where it looks like there was a security breach or compromise  where nine certificates were requested. However all those certificates have been since revoked and so would not appear as valid certificates and Microsoft have black listed them as well - and perhaps Apple have done the same.

The current allflac.com certificate was issued 22nd August 2014.

Allflac.com resolves to  212.96.178.58 - which are internet addresses in Cz belonging to a company called  Itself

Erich posted:

Bart posted:

Erich posted:

I downloaded 7 albums, checked the metadata with metadatics, frequency spectrum and other recording parameters with musicscope. Less than US$ 6 avg. Listened them wiith MacBook Air/Audirvana/Hugo/HD800.

3 x cd quality: Good quality. With these downloads I also obtained mp3 and m4a.

2 x dsd 64: Good quality. Only listened to them. No musicscope analysis because I didn extracted individual tracks from the iso file.

2 x 24/96: one upsampled, one Ok.

Metadata in different styles and with different levels of completion. Not bad but need a lot of editing.

Why don't you just bittorrent -- equally pirated and you're not paying anything.  I don't know why anyone would PAY for pirated music.

You don't know it is pirated. 

I'm willing to bet that it is though...

Erich posted:

Bart posted:

Erich posted:

I downloaded 7 albums, checked the metadata with metadatics, frequency spectrum and other recording parameters with musicscope. Less than US$ 6 avg. Listened them wiith MacBook Air/Audirvana/Hugo/HD800.

3 x cd quality: Good quality. With these downloads I also obtained mp3 and m4a.

2 x dsd 64: Good quality. Only listened to them. No musicscope analysis because I didn extracted individual tracks from the iso file.

2 x 24/96: one upsampled, one Ok.

Metadata in different styles and with different levels of completion. Not bad but need a lot of editing.

Why don't you just bittorrent -- equally pirated and you're not paying anything.  I don't know why anyone would PAY for pirated music.

You don't know it is pirated. After this experience I have some facts to conclude that the site coul be selling pirated music. This site is not very different than others that are supposedly legal.

If you want to put your head in the sand because you can buy music there much cheaper than elsewhere, and feel good about it because you're "buying" it rather than just downloading it for free, do that.

We've all read about how the legit online music sellers have to compete for catalogue content, how slim the margins are, how Apple fights hard for exclusive content, and how some artists only want their music on some online services.  And we've all read about the geographic restrictions (Qobuz cannot sell into the States; HDTracks cannot sell into many countries.)  And Apple and Google and Amazon still don't sell lossless files . . . .

But somehow the music labels have done deals with allflac to put lossless, hi res, SACD rips, etc etc content on there for "cheap" and authorize it for sale widely? In what universe, other than the one one sees with one's head in the sand, is this "legal?"

Let's take a specific example - Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo."  It's a Tidal exclusive album - widely announced as "Tidal exclusive." It's not on iTunes. It's not on Amazon Prime music. Ohhhhh allflac has it in lossless for $2.99 for the entire album.

It's more intellectually honest to bittorrtent this stuff than to pay Russian / Eastern European pirates for it IMHO.

Bart posted:

Erich posted:

I downloaded 7 albums, checked the metadata with metadatics, frequency spectrum and other recording parameters with musicscope. Less than US$ 6 avg. Listened them wiith MacBook Air/Audirvana/Hugo/HD800.

3 x cd quality: Good quality. With these downloads I also obtained mp3 and m4a.

2 x dsd 64: Good quality. Only listened to them. No musicscope analysis because I didn extracted individual tracks from the iso file.

2 x 24/96: one upsampled, one Ok.

Metadata in different styles and with different levels of completion. Not bad but need a lot of editing.

Why don't you just bittorrent -- equally pirated and you're not paying anything.  I don't know why anyone would PAY for pirated music.

I'd phrase that slightly differently, I don't know why anyone would want to give their credit card details to a company selling pirated music (assuming they are pirates and the music is not legit)

What guarantee is there that HDTracks, Qobuz and others are really legit? I don't doubt that it's OK to buy from them, but there is probably no way these sites can prove to a customer that they are entitled to sell third party music?

All this reminds me of about 20 years or so ago being in Hong Kong, where I came across a shop selling softare so cheap it could only have been pirated - but I didn't need to guess when I saw one was marked © Pirates Inc! Copyright piracy - very enterprising. I always wondered if I could have been sued by Pirates Inc if I had bought and copied it to others...

jfritzen posted:

What guarantee is there that HDTracks, Qobuz and others are really legit? I don't doubt that it's OK to buy from them, but there is probably no way these sites can prove to a customer that they are entitled to sell third party music?

And Amazon sell pirated books.

Any Sky show pirated films.

Anyway, the reason that I started this thread was that allflac seem to have been going for a number of years without being shut down which did make me wonder.

jfritzen posted:

What guarantee is there that HDTracks, Qobuz and others are really legit? I don't doubt that it's OK to buy from them, but there is probably no way these sites can prove to a customer that they are entitled to sell third party music?

The issue you raise concerns your definition of "prove," not the legitimacy of Qobuz or HDTracks.  

One way to prove this could be with digital signatures: Eg Warner Music takes a cryptographic hash (eg SHA1) of the musical content of a track, concatenates it with the domain of the licensee (eg qobuz.com) and signs this with a private key from a Warner Music web certificate. The result can be added as metadata to the FLAC file. Using the public key from the certificate and comparing the hash of the musical content the customer can then check that the file was indeed licensed to qobuz.com.

Indeed, but the added album art and the metadata should be part of the hash digest.. and so the whole file rather just the encoded PCM should be signed, and so the hash would lie outside the file and perhaps be of the zip file or other container containing a group of wav or FLAC files.. I suggest that each media file  in the signed container  should contain the  publisher and distributor.

jfritzen posted:

What guarantee is there that HDTracks, Qobuz and others are really legit? I don't doubt that it's OK to buy from them, but there is probably no way these sites can prove to a customer that they are entitled to sell third party music?

As someone who works in the industry I can confidently say that HDTRacks and Qobuz are legitimate. 

King Size posted:

As someone who works in the industry I can confidently say that HDTRacks and Qobuz are legitimate. 

King Size, it's all a bit academic for us in NZ, isn't it? We can't download legal HD content from anywhere that I'm aware of.

Cheers,

Tim

Bart posted:

Erich posted:

Bart posted:

Erich posted:

I downloaded 7 albums, checked the metadata with metadatics, frequency spectrum and other recording parameters with musicscope. Less than US$ 6 avg. Listened them wiith MacBook Air/Audirvana/Hugo/HD800.

3 x cd quality: Good quality. With these downloads I also obtained mp3 and m4a.

2 x dsd 64: Good quality. Only listened to them. No musicscope analysis because I didn extracted individual tracks from the iso file.

2 x 24/96: one upsampled, one Ok.

Metadata in different styles and with different levels of completion. Not bad but need a lot of editing.

Why don't you just bittorrent -- equally pirated and you're not paying anything.  I don't know why anyone would PAY for pirated music.

You don't know it is pirated. After this experience I have some facts to conclude that the site coul be selling pirated music. This site is not very different than others that are supposedly legal.

If you want to put your head in the sand because you can buy music there much cheaper than elsewhere, and feel good about it because you're "buying" it rather than just downloading it for free, do that.

We've all read about how the legit online music sellers have to compete for catalogue content, how slim the margins are, how Apple fights hard for exclusive content, and how some artists only want their music on some online services.  And we've all read about the geographic restrictions (Qobuz cannot sell into the States; HDTracks cannot sell into many countries.)  And Apple and Google and Amazon still don't sell lossless files . . . .

But somehow the music labels have done deals with allflac to put lossless, hi res, SACD rips, etc etc content on there for "cheap" and authorize it for sale widely? In what universe, other than the one one sees with one's head in the sand, is this "legal?"

Let's take a specific example - Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo."  It's a Tidal exclusive album - widely announced as "Tidal exclusive." It's not on iTunes. It's not on Amazon Prime music. Ohhhhh allflac has it in lossless for $2.99 for the entire album.

It's more intellectually honest to bittorrtent this stuff than to pay Russian / Eastern European pirates for it IMHO.

Your replay is out of context. Above in this thread I reported that I was going to issue a virtual credit card with a small amount of money in order to buy  a few files. After that I reported in this thread an in other one that after reviewing the files there were enough reasons to suspect that the files were pirated. All the files I bought I have in cd, HD or LP, so after the analysis I did, there is no reason to maintain them.  Nobody hurt except my pocked with $40 less after learning (curiosity) what exactly you get from that site for $2,?? a cd quality file or $10,?? a sacd  or hd pcm quality file.

In my collection I have a good number of files bought from HDtracks, Linn, NAim and SOS. I don't have a single rip from a CD tht I don't have the physical disc. I have no file downloaded using torrent or similar.

I have no reason,  nor the desire to have pirated files (music, software, books, ...) for free, cheap, or expensive.

King Size posted:

jfritzen posted:

What guarantee is there that HDTracks, Qobuz and others are really legit? I don't doubt that it's OK to buy from them, but there is probably no way these sites can prove to a customer that they are entitled to sell third party music?

As someone who works in the industry I can confidently say that HDTRacks and Qobuz are legitimate. 

To be clear, I do believe that sites like HDTracks, Qobuz et al are legitimate (being a Qobuz Sublim subscriber myself), but it's difficult for them to prove this to the customer. There are only indications, e.g. a good reputation, a professional web site, location in the EU or US, still in business and that they bother to block some content for customers (wrong geo-location, some labels not available for streaming etc.). 

HD Tracks have just announced that the LINN Records catalogue is available through them.

ECM has also made its catalogue available on HD Tracks.

The indicators of illegitimate sites shouldn't be rocket science. Cyrillic characters on the web page are probably a good red flag for US and Western European downloaders.

The music industry has watchdogs, an unfortunate need as the costs take away from royalties that can be paid to the artists. The watchdogs can only be as effective as the willingness of a site's host nation to pursue complaints. Caveat emptor, and if a deal seems to good to be true, etc., ... You end up cheating the artists in the end and why place your financial information in jeopardy for a seamy download deal?

Legitimate - as in paying the royalties etc - has been avoided in many marketplaces since Noah were a lad.  Maybe not so much with vinyl,  but just look around Asia, ME & FSU & legal CD's (previously cassette tapes) are as rare as rocking horse chips.   However compared to audio the rip/copy video industry is absolutely huge.  Pirating downloads is just 2nd nature to these people.  Allflac are pirates for sure, all the signs are there & if these pirates are the same as the video rippers,  welcome to the world of major crime, drugs, prostitution, etc..  they are not getting my money.

Talking of which; I am as keen as anyone for a bargain,  but the "legitimate" download companies do not do themselves any favours with their pricing.    

e.g. for 24-bit  

Aqualung (Steven Wilson remaster) all in GBP (USD = 1.29/GBP)

HighResAudio (UK) £12

Qobuz (UK) £14.99

HDTracks (UK) £16.50

HDTracks (USA) $17.98 = £13.94


However there does seem to be some better order in some places were pricing has become more standardised  ...

HighResAudio have a more or less flat price of £12

Linn seem to be set around £15

Naim £10.99

And the odd ball has to be Blue Coast $39 = £23.25