Hello,
For those of you fortunate enough to have, for a lack of a better term, a high-tech library in your area, you may want to find out if they offer HOOPLA music streaming service. You'll need a library card and of course access to the Internet. You can go directly to the HOOPLA website and search for your library there. Or you can go to your library's website and look for a link to HOOPLA. Then all you have to do is sign into the service using your library card's login credentials (User name & PIN).
You can borrow 10 titles a month, each title stays for 7 days then goes away. You have to borrow ALBUMS - not just one song at a time. If you sign up more family members to your local library, then of course the number of borrows can double, triple or whatever. Yes, the biggest drawback is the (low) amount of borrows that you can do per month. Of course the good news is that the service is essentially FREE.
I use HOOPLA to supplement my CD and LP collection; I use it to discover music I have never heard before and go deeper into the music catalog of artists I like. (NOTE: I ripped all ((100s)) of my CDs to a HDD years ago and stream them throughout the house.) The catalog itself goes deep; newly released albums are ready to stream right away, and I'll be dammed if some of the most obscure albums I can think of come up when I do an artist search. It's crazy.
SOUND QUALITY: I cannot find any info on the what type of files are used or how the music gets streamed, but from just listening, I can say that things sound really, really good. I've compared some of my CDs to the same album from HOOPLA, and there is virtually no difference. In fact, in some instances, the audio is better. Here's how:
I have the Black Sabbath BLACK BOX set from nearly 20 years ago on CD. Now most Sabbath fans hate this set because of its poor production values. Some songs are louder than others on the same album and all of tracks have some audible problem like tape hiss or a weird distorted soundstage. I liken this set to if you or I decided to record an album ourselves and didn't quite get things right - very
amateurish.
The Black Sabbath albums offered by HOOPLA are the latest 2014 remasters. And it says it right in the titles:
Paranoid (2014 remaster). Sabbath Blood Sabbath (2014 Remaster). Master of Reality (2014 Remaster).
From what I've read online, Sabbath fans are generally happy with these remastered Black Sabbath albums. I too enjoyed them. They definitely have a more refined audio quality to them. A pretty big step up from the BLACK BOX set anyway.
So there you go. HOOPLA is a great little streaming service. It's free through your library, and the audio quality is on par with CD. The only drawback is the amount of borrows per month, but the catalog itself goes deep. You wanna listen to POLKA music??? HOOPLA has got you covered!
For those of you fortunate enough to have, for a lack of a better term, a high-tech library in your area, you may want to find out if they offer HOOPLA music streaming service. You'll need a library card and of course access to the Internet. You can go directly to the HOOPLA website and search for your library there. Or you can go to your library's website and look for a link to HOOPLA. Then all you have to do is sign into the service using your library card's login credentials (User name & PIN).
You can borrow 10 titles a month, each title stays for 7 days then goes away. You have to borrow ALBUMS - not just one song at a time. If you sign up more family members to your local library, then of course the number of borrows can double, triple or whatever. Yes, the biggest drawback is the (low) amount of borrows that you can do per month. Of course the good news is that the service is essentially FREE.
I use HOOPLA to supplement my CD and LP collection; I use it to discover music I have never heard before and go deeper into the music catalog of artists I like. (NOTE: I ripped all ((100s)) of my CDs to a HDD years ago and stream them throughout the house.) The catalog itself goes deep; newly released albums are ready to stream right away, and I'll be dammed if some of the most obscure albums I can think of come up when I do an artist search. It's crazy.
SOUND QUALITY: I cannot find any info on the what type of files are used or how the music gets streamed, but from just listening, I can say that things sound really, really good. I've compared some of my CDs to the same album from HOOPLA, and there is virtually no difference. In fact, in some instances, the audio is better. Here's how:
I have the Black Sabbath BLACK BOX set from nearly 20 years ago on CD. Now most Sabbath fans hate this set because of its poor production values. Some songs are louder than others on the same album and all of tracks have some audible problem like tape hiss or a weird distorted soundstage. I liken this set to if you or I decided to record an album ourselves and didn't quite get things right - very
amateurish.
The Black Sabbath albums offered by HOOPLA are the latest 2014 remasters. And it says it right in the titles:
Paranoid (2014 remaster). Sabbath Blood Sabbath (2014 Remaster). Master of Reality (2014 Remaster).
From what I've read online, Sabbath fans are generally happy with these remastered Black Sabbath albums. I too enjoyed them. They definitely have a more refined audio quality to them. A pretty big step up from the BLACK BOX set anyway.
So there you go. HOOPLA is a great little streaming service. It's free through your library, and the audio quality is on par with CD. The only drawback is the amount of borrows per month, but the catalog itself goes deep. You wanna listen to POLKA music??? HOOPLA has got you covered!
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