Slashdot Mirror
Phish Moves To FLAC
sethadam1 writes "Due to customer feedback, Phish, who have served as pioneers in the pay-per-download online music arena with their livephish.com site, have recently converted to FLAC compression for their high-quality download offerings. Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?" And fans were using it long before ;)
no, probably not.
It's good to see OSS solutions being used on a commercial basis. Maybe this will let FLAC get more publicity, along with the whole OSS movement :D
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
... if they just noted that the tedious jam from Tuesday gig at the Cleveland Enormodome is not different from the Thursday's tedious jam at the Philadelphia Giganto-park, in any musically interesting way.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Does it make my computer smell like Patchouli?
Heck, Why not GIF...the patent just expired, and I hear it's great compression.
I wonder how FLAC compares to other compression methods (namely mp3 and ogg) in terms of quality and size... Is there a 'neutral' test somewhere?
(then again, I haven't been able to deal with internet show traders ever since CD-R enabled them to be even more demanding about recording quality.)
Phish has always been cool about their audio property. They have no problem with people recording their shows and trading their music. See there policy at: http://www.phish.com/print/guidelines.html
Logic, macros, and more
It's all about someone taking the first step. Most end users won't install new codecs for anything unless they absolutley have to (like divx), or if it's included in the player/program they're installing (like mp3 in winamp).
More sources start releasing their audio in FLAC, then more software developers will include support for it, and even more audio will be released, and so forth.
It's always that first step that's the hard part, after that, good solutions often spread themselves.
mov ax, 4c00h
int 21h
This is great news for all music lovers, being a lossless, open-source audio compression algorithm. FLAC is also one of the most efficient lossless codecs.
Ummm, I think that's all I have to say. Let me check, first.
Oh yeah, down with the riaa. and microsoft, too.
Slashdot karma whoring checklist: [X] Pro open-source [X] Anti [RI|MP]AA [ ] Anti Microsoft
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
It has been discussed to replace the outdated lossless codec shn in the bootleg community etree.org, since it offers better compression and the possibility to compress higher resolution (24bit) and/or multichannel files.
I'm not trying to troll but I did a very quick experiment last time FLAC was mentioned on here and was not impressed in the slightest.
I took one CD and ripped it to a single standard WAV file. I then compressed it with both FLAC and WinRAR and the results only differed by 20-30MB in favour of FLAC.
I was not impressed in the slightest.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
more than anything else
Most 'artsy' firms optimise for IE not for standards.
....my eardrums are bleeding!
How many people could even tell the difference between a FLAC encoded live concert and a properly encoded 128-192kbs AAC/256kbs MP3 via LAME with the advice of r3mix.net/whatever the hell settings you ogg guys use for archival quality.
I mean, do I really need to hear a lossless version of your live concert? If anything, I bet it would make me notice any noise that might get subtly masked by the psycho-acoustic models used by MP3/AAC/Ogg. Stuff like dirty power in the recording equipment or mics, things of that nature.
Even with that said, how many of you will actually be listening to your FLAC encoded audio in a proper listening environment with a properly laid out, quality audio setup?
Nah, odds are you're just going to take your FLAC and then transcode it to MP3 or perhaps AAC if your an iPod owner or Ogg if your one of those wierdos who uses it (I think Ogg is a cool idea but honestly MP3 and AAC now are good enough for me and what I do)
And you'll do this why? Because how many portable and/or home stereo components play FLAC? I'd venture a guess of: none. But many units do play MP3, or WMA (ick, altho WM9 is nice), or recently AAC.
Of course I'm sure some of you will say: "But I run my computer audio to my outboard A/V reciever surround sound system via optical TOSlink out" For these people, this very small, limited audience market FLAC will be great, sure. I should know, I am one of those people. But even I can't tell the damn difference most of the times between the lossless and lossy audio codecs. Heck, I'm one of the people who finds the 128kbs AAC files from the Apple iTunes Music Store to be superior in quality to the old 192kbs VBR MP3s I made of the same CD track with LAME and the great advice from r3mix.net.
So, yeah I'm glad someone is doing this but I honestly think the market they are speaking to is so small and niche that its going to be lost in the statistical variance of the overall group.
Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?"
Of course! "As Phish goes, so goes the Music Industry," everybody knows that! As a matter of fact, they were discussing this very same trend during Phish's appearance last week on TRL.
In a related story from the same Styles page, Michael Crichton and J. K. Rowling have announced they are going to have their nipples pierced to better emulate their idol, Poppy Z. Brite.
That only compares other lossless formats.
The xmms playlist makes it around to bouncing around the room (ogg:), reload slashdot, ahhhh.....
A great man once said "If the Grateful Dead were like watching a beautiful sunset, Phish are like a blowjob."
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Monkey Audio (APE) is better in compression and does not take much longer to encode/decode.
I don't know if it is streamable, though, something I tend to find very important.
but I can't seem to find a player or plugin for .flac files on the Mac that will allow me to play the files I create without decompressing them first. This is probably the one thing I miss after switching back to the Macintosh. (That and good CD ripping software, like Windows' EAC.)
But did the Mayans do it first? Knot, knot, no knot, no knot, knot, knot, knot ...OK Tahmas, that's a b-flat on the pipes....
AT&ROFLMAO
I'm not sure if I support this... if you think about it, very few phans have ever heard a live Phish concert in high fidelity. Take me for example: at the last Phish concert I was at, I saw the music emanating from the speakers as green clouds, which then coalesced into a giant steel Beethoven, who proceeded to eat me--all to the tune of "jingle bells", played backwards at a high tempo on the kettle drums. As you can guess it made concentrating on the latter 2/3 of the set very difficult. Hence I download these new high-fi with much trepidation: what has Phish actually been playing for the bulk of all those live shows? No one I know has any idea...
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
"Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?" "
Yes. Or maybe no. Clouded, the future is. Outlook uncertain.
Whenever an article like this is posted, when someone is going above and beyond a 128kbit mp3 to try and offer improved sound quality, a few individuals will always say that it's stupid because no one can really hear the difference and will go on to demean all those that say they can.
Any way you cut it, although Apple's iTunes store is a step in the right direction, you're buying an inferior product from that which you could purchase in a store. A lot of people spend a lot of time mastering and remastering audio to sound its best, and a lot of that work is just thrown out the window with an mp3. Not that this is a crime against humanity and that mp3s are bad, but I would rather not purchase for the same price a product that is by definition inferior.
Now, if I go buy a Phish concert, I can burn it to a CD and have as good a copy as I'm going to get. If I want to convert it to mp3 for my portable player, I can do that. If I want to convert it to a high-VBR ogg for my computer, I can do that. It's flexible. If I got the mp3, well, I'm stuck. I don't have those options.
Isn't consumer freedom good today?
Did they switch for legal reasons? No.
Did they switch for technical reasons? No.
Did they switch for political reasons? No.
So why did they switch? Obviously, Phish just happen to be fans of the logo.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So Laugh.
Just curious, how does FLAC compare to the SHN format it is replacing? Better compression? Are there any more factors that make one lossless compression format "better" then another?
Also, kudos to phish for being inovative and embracing technology, rather then running screaming and kicking and yelling bloddy murder to the RIAA.
everyone who trades live shows of the artists I listen to uses SHN, period. as with "Ogg Vorbis" (that's the name, right?), the only place I've ever heard of FLAC is on Slashdot.
:P
basically, I'm saying "pfft" at your silly audio formats that nobody uses.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
how easy is it to convert to MP3?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Two of the biggest Phish download sites on the net:
http://phatphiles.org
http://firsttube.com
Both ogg-vorbis only.
...at least it is easier than actually listening to Phish.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Cool, I've never been much of a fan anyways, so no big loss.
Will all their nomad fans be following them there too?
BTW, where exactly is FLAC? I hope its somewhere cold. Summer Phish concerts mean hippies in armpit hair revealing clothing. *shudder* At least somewhere cold they will bundle up
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I've been out of the live music trading scene for almost a year now. What happened to SHN? Wasn't that a lossless compression?
- tom -
Yes. They suck.
Phish puts unacceptable restrictions on fan sites -- although I'm not sure how they would go about enforcing them. For example:
"Newsletters, web sites, clubs, or any other communication forum facilitating audio trading cannot accept advertising, offer links for compensation, exploit databases compiled from their traffic, or otherwise derive any commercial proceeds in any form."
In other words, if I run a site that facilitates tape trading among phans, I can't have banner ads on that site. I can't even try to cover the costs of running the site.
There's more:
"All sites with such Phish-related content must agree to the Statement of Compliance provided below, and clearly display the following: "This site voluntarily complies with the Phish fan web site policy at http://www.phish.com/statementofcompliance.html""
Hmm... must...voluntarily... comply. That's interesting use of the english language.
"Fan sites must not contain any defamatory, offensive, illegal, and/or otherwise actionable content, nor may they allow such content from any user."
Not only is a fan-site operator's right to free speech taken away, he must also take away his users' rights.
Whoa brother, like it's not cool that their not being tight-asses but cool that they're not being tight-asses , 'cuz, you know, they are not being tight-asses. Get it? It's a contraction. It's like compression, brother. The "'" replaces the " a". It doesn't compress much, kinda more like FLAC than ogg or mp3. Haha. Speaking of kind, you got any? Let's burn one! My bro grew these nugs. It's his own hybrid strain he calls Trey An!
And you know besides "their" and "the'yre" there is "there"? Not to come down on you too hard bro, but you kinda got that one wrong in the grandparent post. Remember this?
So yeah, brother, like the first "their" was right on! But it's their policy, like their music. Yeah, it blows my mind too! Like, I would use "there" to communicate things like "there goes some tasty sisters--wonder if they got any gooballs for sale?" or "I was standing over there when I spilled the liquid acid those kids fronted me".Does it all make sense now? Cool man, I'm gonna get back to burning these Lemon Wheel shows for some kids I just met...
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
How does Exact Audio Copy compare to CDex when CDex is configured for maximum paranoia?
A couple of months ago I was playing around with lossless audio codex just to see how well of a job they did on the compression side of things. I mainly ended up using Monkeys Audio and FLAC as they ended up being the most compatible with the program I was using. What surprised me though was how much faster Monkeys compressed in comparison to FLAC...with monkeys having slightly smaller files no less. Am I the only one seeing this or is this common..or most importantly what was I doing wrong?
Another morally superior Phish phan. Mods, take him away!
A site that "facilitates" trading is fine. But a site that offers *downloads* can't accept advertising. I don't know why that's not fair -- if you run a site that offers their work, not far off from these discussion of "IP," to use a buzzword, you can't generate money. It's free or it's not allowed.
Why is that bad? Don't want to use your own cash? Don't redistribute their music.
FLAC may be your only option soon. WinRAR is a tool used by the online "warez" community for the purposes of illegally distributing software. For this reason, there are currently two bills pending in the US Congress that would make use of WinRAR and all other file formats without "redeeming social value" illegal.
Don't believe me?
H.R. 1950 (attached as a rider)
S. 671
Read 'em and weep.
They let people bootleg their music at the show for free, and they don't care about filesharing either. Phish makes a lot of their money by touring, and to sell out a huge stadium they need a large fanbase. This is partially created by allowing their fans to freely trade music and generate more intrest in phish. The other part of the fanbase is there, because phish is fucking awesome.
I can't wait till the concert in Atlanta July 26.
That's what this discussion needed: A knot-knot joke. Knot!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
that's like making software that only works with xp and not win2k
That's a totally false analogy. Mac OS X is based on a completely different kernel than OS 9-. It's more like saying making software that only works with Win NT, and not 3.11 (or even 98), which there was definitely examples of.
And it's open source, is it not? Someone could port it to OS 9. OS X is just easier because it's *nix-like.
FLAC?
badum-tchhh. Thank you, I'll be here all week, tip your moderators.
I kill me.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Most 'artsy' firms optimise for IE not for standards.
IE on Mac, if they're _really_ artsy.
...if they changed the name to Absolutely Free Lossless Audio Compression...then they could do tv commercials where this duck wanders around quacking their acronym...oh wait, already been done.
First off, let me state that for the vast majority of people (myself included), CD is superior to vinyl.
That said, vinyl has a superior frequency response (potentially 5Hz-27kHz) than CD. To someone with odd hearing (yes, I knew someone who could hear that high) this makes a difference, provided the source material was also analogue, or at least sampled fast (e.g. 96kHz).
CD blows vinyl away on signal-to-noise ratio (98dB vs. ~40dB) distortion, wow and flutter, and, most pronounced, media durability.
I would propose that those who say that vinyl sucks have not listened to vinyl on a GOOD turntable. I would also propose that the reason CD rocks is that you don't need to spend a fortune to get good equipment.
I suspect that the love of vinyl is a mixture of wanting to be unusual and of nostalgia. For the record (no pun intended), I do play vinyl, but my MP3 collection gets the biggest workout, most of which was ripped from my legitimately-owned CD's. I encode at 192kb/s, and it sounds very nice.
www.wavefront-av.com
One of the points made by our good friend Lessig in The Future of Ideas is the following:
Guess what happened before it was practical for bands to travel the world? OTHER BANDS would learn their songs, and play them locally.
Think about this, for bands that aren't largely cult-of-personality based, there's no reason why some local band can't play their songs at least as good as the original act. It's more efficient, cheaper, easier to access, etc, etc. And you can even see them in a smaller venue with better acoustics than your local hockey rink, more than likely.
This could all work if people weren't so tight-assed about their originality and copyright. That's why I like seeing Gob live so much, they don't give a crap if they play their own songs all the time, or if they get to pump the new album. They play what people want to hear, everyone has a good time, and they get paid.
I've downloaded shows from LivePhish.com using Mozilla and Linux without any problem, and I'm more of a Windows person anyway.
I have a portable Minidisc player for listening to music in the car. This player uses it's own compression scheme. I want to download some audio, and I download from two sources, and MP3 and a lossless compression program.
Since the MP3 was encoded at a high bitrate and used a decent encoder, I can't tell the difference on my computer.
I burn them to CD, and I can't hear the difference on my stereo.
I copy them to the Minidisc player, and I can hear a few nasty audio artifacts.
Let's say I loan those CDs to a friend. They rip them to MP3. The CD burned from the lossless source sounds like just the same on his equipment. The CD burned from the MP3, when ripped, sounds terrible.
It's the same reason people tell you not to convert your MP3s to OOG Vorbis, but to rip the original CD instead.
Whenever you take a lossy audio file in one format and encode it into another, you get layered audio artifacts.
To get a visual representation of this, take a JPEG of a photo and put it through several file format changes. Save it as BMP, then open the BMP and save it as something else. If you keep opening the resulting file and saving it to a new format, you'll start to see pixilazation and compression artifacts, until the image is a fuzzy disaster that looks nothing like the original.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
as one of the fans that questioned the original use of shn over flac, i am quite pleased to see this change.
Anything you say will be held against you.
Shouldn't that be phidelity?
~Idarubicin
Will FLAC work with my Britney and Justin HitClips player?
Are you kidding me? I have been using mp3 players for years, and I can absolutely hear the difference. Most rips these days are 192 full stereo, and there is always noticible loss or slight distortion. I have heard the same thing with higher bitrate rips as well.
music lover since 1969
all those funky jam bands that put Shorten (.shn) files on etree.org will hopefully start to switch over to FLAC as well
DO IT NOW
I'm glad Phish listens to their fans rather than Slashdot on their issue. For technically literate community, I'm suprised there's so much misunderstanding. I'll try to make this short and simple.
I don't think Phish wants to host all of their shows in every conceivable bitrate of OGG, WMA, MP3, ACC, etc. And what happens when you bought the OGG version, but you want to play it on your iPod. Do you buy the MP3 version? But your friend convinced you that ACC is better. Now do you buy that one too?
This is a good thing because with non-lossy compression, I am left to choose whatever lossy compression format is right for me.
People want to use different formats.
You choose the format and bitrate you want to use for you.
You use your own computer to put it in that format.
Having saved the original FLACs on a data CD, you later decide to use a different format. No problem.
WAV provides this flexibility.
SHN provides this w/ compression.
FLAC provides this w/ more compression.
Consumer choice. Good.
the majority of the posts here are just flat missing the point. Many of you have portable MP3 players or just sit at your computer all the time, but the target audience has regular CD players. The reason you want lossless compression is so you can make your own CD that's the same quality you'd get in the store. Yes, MP3 at 320kbps is indistinguishable from CD.... But try burning that MP3 to an audio CD, then re-ripping to mp3, aac, etc... If you start with a perfect digital copy, the second generation is much, much better. This is because digital artifacts tend to multiply when re-encoding via lossy mechanisms. Ripability has become part of the value of a CD, so if you're actually selling CDs on line, it's a good idea to use losless compression for the initial format.
- Some people are playing it on their PCs or iPods and can use high-bandwidth formats, so they want near-original quality.
- Some people are playing on their pocket MP3 players, so they want 128kbps or even 64kbps, and they want to use the best encoder they can to make it. Other people will use whatever encoder they happen to find lying around free.
- Some people want OGGs. Better to make them from the original, not from an MP3.
- Some people have Brand X Portable Music Players which have Brand X Really Tight Coding, but they need originals to encode from; converting a 128kbps-coded-badly MP3 or even 128-kbps-coded-well into 64kbps BrandX isn't going to be anywhere near as good as compressing raw bits, because the lossy coders have different models of what kind of audio damage is supposedly "imperceptable".
If people are redistributing compressed formats, there'll be multiples of them floating around, and it'll be hard to know which 128kbps format was from which encoder, and different people will distribute multiple formats, and you'll end up with almost as much data being passed around and lots more indexing. Might as well just use the lossless formats.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Should I read that as (de facto) ((lossless (audio compression)) (standard)) or as ((de facto) lossless) ((audio compression) standard)?
Looking over the PHISH FAQ under....
What are the recommended specs for enjoying Live Phish Downloads?
Under Unix it says...
Unix
You probably don't need our advice.
Barnaby
In other news today, Metallica has switched to AFLAC.
When asking the band, why they've decided to use AFLAC, they were quoted as saying, "Because f***ing James keeps setting himself on fire!"
Hetfield could not be immediately reached for comment, as he was getting treated for second-degree burns and talking to a duck, who was apparently his insurance rep.
I know, it's been done...but I couldn't resist.
One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duck tape to make them stop. ~G.M. Weilacher
Hmmm, I'm not a phish fan, but lets think about this for a second.
Phish doesn't want other people making money on their free music. Sounds a little like GPL doesn't it. Are you Anti-GPL? Its a serious question, I'm just curious because in the world of file swapping it is real easy to do this:
1) Set up a phish website with a banner add and copy all of phish's free music to the site for download.
2) Get a hit on the banner add every time soneone comes to your site.
3) profit!
Phish wants its free music free.
As for free speech, defamatory speech amounts to slander or libel, which is not protected under the first amendment. Illegal speech and actionable content come under the same header. Not all speech is protected, and basically what phish is saying is in order to offer this content you can't have any speech which is not protected by the first amendment, such as slander or libel (and quite possibly speech made "illegal" by the DMCA, but thats the DMCAs fault). You aren't losing any rights because you didn't have those rights in the first place. Its a pretty simple legal clause to protect Phish from "endorsing" such speech.
As for offensive, this is a bit broad, but minors can download these songs, and Phish doesn't want to endorse excessive swearing, or even worse, racial or ethnic slurs.
So all in all, it is my opinion that your reaction to their EULA is an over-reaction and Phish is covering their ass by simply saying "We don't ensorse your sites if they do things which are illegal or do things which parents might object to, or are trying to make money off of our free music." Simple as that.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
OGG is a damn good codec. Like mp3, it takes advantage of psychoacoustics of human hearing to gain huge compression ratios. OGG is superior to mp3 in pretty much every respect. I doubt FLAC can better than 60% similar to other LL codecs. What about patent encumbrances? Audiophiles are just as smart as they are spend-thrift.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
...it mentions >>
PURCHASE MP3 $9.95
PURCHASE SHN $12.95
a typo maybe?
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
I noticed the following: RARred WAVs are the largest, followed by SHN (Shorten), followed by FLAC, followed by APE (Monkey's Audio). The differences in size were not huge, but they were significant (~10MB from one to the next on a ~350MB CD). One interesting thing to note is that SHN compressed MUCH faster than the competition, but I wasn't considering CPU usage, so I picked APE.
According to what I've read since starting the project, FLAC might have been a better choice, because although it is slightly less space-efficient, it tends to use operations in decompression that are more friendly to portable implementations of the decompression algorithm. I am presently reading up on this. Fortunately, if I decide to switch, I will (as previous posters have observed) lose no quality if I choose the more convenient option of transcoding my current rips over the alternative of starting over.
>> Please note that there is currently no FLAC software for any Mac OS prior to OS X.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
the point for me (and most of etree) is to create the highest-possible quality CD's of live recordings by taper-friendly bands. if I were only listening to these concerts on my computer, of course mp3 is preferable, for the reasons you cited. but burning a CD that is a PERFECT CLONE of a first-gen digital source guarantees that when I *do* play it in a friend's $10,000 sicko home stereo system, I'm getting the whole shebang.
Equally (or perhaps even more) important:
with a higher barrier to entry (e.g., new codecs like SHN and FLAC, and higher bandwidth costs) you end up with a self-selecting community of audiophiles who by definition are more concerned with the initial quality of the SOURCE recording.
FLAC and SHN are for the real audiophiles/geeks, and this leads to all kinds of side-effect goodness.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Anyone can purchase the specs, and there is reference code.
It is open, but patent encumbered.
That's because they're moving from SHN-->FLAC.
-The Wiz
FLAC doesn't exclude anybody. It's an open format. And even better than that, the implementations that read/write are open source. How is that exclusive?
If a Mac OS 9 port doesn't exists, its because not enough people care. Mozilla had the same problem trying to find a maintainer for Mac Classic builds. No one cared. People care enough to make QNX builds, and BeOS builds, and apparently even to bid for Amiga builds, but not OS 9.
I don't claim to know the disadvantages of SHN, but if people are caring enough to switch its because they exist. According to FLAC's webpage SHN has a somewhat restrictive license, so that might be part of the reason.
So someone CAN port FLAC to OS 9, but perhaps someoned would actually be truly excluded from porting SHN to say, an XBOX, for some reason or other. No one's excluding OS 9, they just haven't joined the party.
True Dat! I am overjoyed to see how many bands out there are now utilizing the mini trampoline with vacuum set up. Phish is always on the cutting edge, except when the are ripping someone off! Man it was so cool when the covered the National Anthem, I thought they were going to go into Low Rider, and then maybe a tasty segue into Rift before breaking into an all out space jam man. Or wait, was that Widespread, or String Cheese maybe. Shit, I better go puff before I start to think again.
...the format will also undergo a name change to PHLAC. Otherwise the Phish-heads won't let it into the circle, man.
-Shane
but the point is that a "successor" to SHN shouldn't exclude people who used SHN. for os 9 users, there's no succession. it's just an end
It's an excellent, reliable, well-supported, well-documented format.
.cdr/.toc, then sox to convert .cdr to .wav, then flac on that. My CDs compress to about 250MB (they are not all 70 minute epics) on average so I can archive gobs of them in a spare hundred or two GB (10+ on a DVD-R), but I can still recover the exact original. Meanwhile I can make 192kbps oggs for playback.
Currently I am ripping CDs with this somewhat involved process: cdr2dao giving me a
Go FLAC! The good (lossless) format seems to have won out!
-joseph
monkey audio files are slightly smaller then FLAC files see this comparison on how it compares to other lossless compressions.
Just demonstrating what a troll actually is, since nobody in this thread actually seems to know. This troll was too low-visibility and posted too late to be effective.
http://www.livephish.com/feedback/default.asp
heres mine:
why cant you suport modern browsers like galeon safari firebird opera or konqueror. Internet Explorer is still stuck in the dark ages, it doesnt support pop up blocking doesnt suport any w3c standards, its only avalible on one platform, and it doesnt even have tabs! crikey how primative! I realise you have to support legacy systems but come on!
Maybe you live in interesting times
You seem to be describing the web of '99 where all that crap you hate was everywhere. It seems to me that things have improved a great deal over the past few years.
This is probably because all of those 'web designers' who went for 'cool' over 'works' no longer have jobs, and the ones that went the other way now do a whole lot more work.
+&x
You gotta get out more. As has been mentioned to death, a major limitation of SHN is that it will only compress WAV files at 44.1KHz/16-bit. Even limiting my experience to the tight "jamband" scene, active "hobbiest" tapers are recording multi-track to hard disc, 96KHz/24-bit. SHN won't compress these files. FLAC will.
People adopt FLAC because it does things at SHN won't. Once there is wider acceptance of audio distributed on a larger-capacity disk (DVD-Audio?) that can be burned by home burners, you'll see FLAC all over the place.