What do you know about audible watermarking?

[slane]

I bought a deutche grammaphon CD download, flac format, for my husbands birthday and was disappointed to discover that its watermarked. I didn't think it was a wonderful recording which probably has nothing to do with the watermark, but I did pay for a lossless download so I'm not happy.

Does anyone know if labels other than UMG put in watermarks?
QOBUZ has this question on their site and answer "Its not our job to watermark files but the publishers may" (more or less in French) and they sell DG so yes some of their files are watermarked, but what about say Harmonia Mundi, which they also sell?
What about all the labels on the theclassicalshop. They are non-DRMed but what about watermarks?

[faulty_damper]

I've never heard of an audio watermark before this thread.  Can you describe exactly what is audible?

[slane]

well if you google UMG audible watermark there is quite a bit of outrage at lossless files being corrupted this way.
https://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark

I haven't paid enough attention to the files I downloaded to see if I can hear the artefact, but none the less I wont be downloading from UMG again.
I've emailed theclassicalshop to see what they say,
According to the online community, the fluttering effect is very audible for piano recordings.
And one study of watermarking using blind listening by "golden" ears showed that once you know what you're listening for, you'll always spot it, which would drive me mad!

Ah ... just read some more of the outraged forum posts on the subject and it seems that UMG don't watermark files from their own website ... so its just not a very wonderful recording in my case.
It seems from the UMG site that the watermarking is supposed to prevent reviewers uploading pre-release files to the net. (which strikes me as a really unprofessional thing to do) Doesn't say anything about 3rd party download sites having watermarks in their files.

[faulty_damper]

Thanks for the link.  Now that I know what to listen for, I've realized that I've heard it a lot.  It's freakin' annoying because it noticeably degrades audio quality.

[faulty_damper]

Now that I'm aware, I'm getting paranoid about the music I've downloaded.

[slane]

Got this rather disappointing respoonse from theclassicalshop

to the best of my knowledge, none of our labels use watermarking. Although we do not use this at the moment, we may in the future, as it does not degrade the audio in any way and does not stop the customer making legal copies of the audio. For us it would be purely a method of finding where illegal 'share sites' are getting there copies from.
I hope this helps.

[faulty_damper]

I lot of the music on Youtube is audiomarked.  Sometimes, it's purposefully distorted.  I always thought it was just some glitch in the video-making.

[slane]

But Youtube movies are heavily compressed right? So you expect the audio to be so-so.
A paid for FLAC file is a different matter.
The was some speculation that this passionato website was doing something dumb like converting mp3s to FLAC files and flogging them as lossless. Which is literally criminal. ( I've been to that website and can't find any downloads, at least with a cursury look!) the people complaining list a bunch of other sites where these artefacts are audible but none of them AFAIK have lossless downloads. Itunes and amazon don't so ... maybe people are getting confused between compression artefacts and watermarking.

Think I'll stick to theclassicalshop for now where they don't muck around with region restrictions everythings straightforward to download and they have a great bunch of labels. The files I downloaded from DG had some quirk in them that FLAC frontend couldn't handle and if FLAC frontend can't convert them then they're wrong.

[quantum]

Thanks for this.  I'll be watching out for it on future music purchases.