Any legal source of Tamil and English Hi-Res (FLAC/WAV) music or CDs?

swamytk

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Hi audiophiles,

After becoming a new member of this wonderful forum, I just got my computer audio system upgraded from cheap Creative 2.1 + MB built-in audio to Fiio E10K DAC + Edifier R1280DB Active 2.0 speakers. It is just amazing mostly due to Speaker upgrade and also due to DAC. It is worthy enough - Sorry, I can't express in audiophile jargons.

Now it is time to look for Hi-res music. So far I have only MP3 collections sourced legally from Flipkart (this service is closed now). I have a few music CDs, which I ripped as FLAC using my Linux machine. The sound quality is amazing. Having tasted this here are my queries about legal sources of music:
1. Which online streaming services provide Hi-Res music in Tamil/English? - paid and free if any.
2. Any web site allows download of Hi-Res music with nominal fee?
3. If CD is the option where can I source CDs online? I am in Pune, I don't get Tamil CDs.
4. Please share how you guys manage to source Hi-Res music?

Thanks for your time and efforts!
 
You can download WAV files from Saregama


English CDs are available on amazon.in

You can refer to this thread. Old albums(70-80s) may be upsampled mp3s. New ones should be fine

 
Several threatd on this :)
 
Thanks, @sandeepss . I just registered and purchased a few HD songs. The quality of them is very bad - par with MP3 or worser. Am I alone?
Quality is a mixed bag with Saregama. They don’t have the studio masters for old albums before 1990. They’re using mp3s as source while pressing CDs and even Vinyl. Newer albums must be uncompressed. I don’t know about Tamil, but with Hindi ghazals (some) and old bollywood this is the case
 
Quality is a mixed bag with Saregama. They don’t have the studio masters for old albums before 1990. They’re using mp3s as source while pressing CDs and even Vinyl. Newer albums must be uncompressed. I don’t know about Tamil, but with Hindi ghazals (some) and old bollywood this is the case
Yes, you are right. My purchases are of mostly 1980s album. Let me try new albums too.
 
Yes, you are right. My purchases are of mostly 1980s album. Let me try new albums too.
For Hindi old songs, I found Gaana+ streaming to offer better quality than the WAV from saregama. It streams at 320kbps AAC. You can try that too for Tamil classics
 
In their infinite wisdom, the bosses at saregama digitised all their priceless collection of old music to mp3 (to save on storage space :( ).
So, when they lost most of their masters to neglect and a fire on the premises, that was all they had left.
Calling it HD for their website downloads or writing on CDs for physical media does not make them wav :D.
Of course, there are many albums which do sound very good.

EDIT: Above is for Hindi film music. No idea how the other languages have fared.
 
For Hindi old songs, I found Gaana+ streaming to offer better quality than the WAV from saregama. It streams at 320kbps AAC. You can try that too for Tamil classics
Quoting you from another thread :)
gaana streams at 128kbps and downloads at 320kbps. Also I notice that they have very good masters of some old albums like Masoom, Lekin, Saagar, Libaas etc, Ironically the Lekin version on Gaana+ is better than the WAV version on saregama :)
 
Gaana paid account and Spotify seem to sound the best as of now to me. Even Amazon Music with the prime account does not sound too bad. Its better to download the tracks and then listen, somehow they seem to sound better than when streaming.

MaSh
 
Yes, you are right. My purchases are of mostly 1980s album. Let me try new albums too.
There’s a YouTube channel called The Mastering Project run by sound engineer Sreejesh Nair. You can check out few Ilaiyaraaja and AR Rahman tracks which he has remastered
 
In their infinite wisdom, the bosses at saregama digitised all their priceless collection of old music to mp3 (to save on storage space :( ).
So, when they lost most of their masters to neglect and a fire on the premises, that was all they had left.
Calling it HD for their website downloads or writing on CDs for physical media does not make them wav :D.
Of course, there are many albums which do sound very good.

EDIT: Above is for Hindi film music. No idea how the other languages have fared.

Not at saregama though, ... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html
 

Try the above link its a paid subscription were we can download music flac/digital cd rips of tamil telugu malayalam ,hindi and kannada

Using it for the past 3 months quality so far so good
 

Try the above link its a paid subscription were we can download music flac/digital cd rips of tamil telugu malayalam ,hindi and kannada

Using it for the past 3 months quality so far so good
Thats legal ?
 
Thats legal ?
No it isnt I would never download wav from any website, you never know the condition of the cd in which it was ripped from and also if any eq or mastering was done on the ripped content.
Ain't worth spending the money on sites like hd.hirestracks.com.
You don't have the CRC checksum as well and CDs might be burst ripped instead of secure mode ripping. You are forced to believe that sold flac or wav files are from the original CD, which cannot be always the case. Some times they download from another web site and then sell in another website .

Legally these websites don't hold copyrights to sell lossless media online if reported they could be fined for violating copyrights.

You can spend on good streaming services like TIDAL.
 
I would disagree with Saregama being of poor quality altogether. I listen to many Saregama albums via Tidal, and many are excellent quality. For example listen to Sholay or Sharaabi. I've also compared them with vinyl rips and at least for me the difference is pretty minimal
 
Buy from India's official online dealer!
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