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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 ;)
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
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It doesn't compare against mp3 and ogg very well since FLAC is loseless and the others not....
FLAC files will be way bigger....but won't loose any quality.
Jeroen
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FLAC is, in contrast to mp3 and ogg, a lossless compression method. This means that the quality is CD-quality, but the compression is not superb. Where mp3 or ogg roughly compress to 10% of the original size, FLAC compresses to 50%-60%.
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It has been discussed to replace the outdated lossless codec shn in the bootleg community etree.org, since it offers better compression and the possibility to compress higher resolution (24bit) and/or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.
Well, I used Mozilla 1.3.1, to d/l some live music, and din't have any trouble. I received the same warning.
FLAC is lossless, which means it is CD quality. Literally. It will be a bit-for-bit perfect representation of what you'd get on the CD. As part of the tradeoff, you get larger filesizes. FLAC will typically give 2:1 compression, compared to the 10:1 you're likely to achieve with MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, so your files will be around 5 times larger.
Also, Ogg is a container format, not a compression method. Ogg Vorbis is their flagship lossy audio compression scheme. Note, however, that FLAC is migrating to Ogg, so in future, FLAC files will come with a .ogg extension.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
You bring up some good points and yes, most people wouldn't be able to perceive the difference between a properly mastered liveset encoded lossy and lossless. But by providing a lossless version the consumer is given the freedom to choose what lossy codec to use for his portable/DVD-player (be it Vorbis, MP3 or even MPC). And there already is hardware playing FLAC files.
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.
r3mix.net, which has been spreading misinformation about MP3 and audio in general for a long time, has been dead for over a year now. The --r3mix setting has been deprecated by the code-level tweaked --alt-presets, which provide a way better sound quality tuned in many blind listening tests (ABX). For more information visit www.hydrogenaudio.org
More accurately, it means the audio stream that comes out of the FLAC decoder is bit-for-bit identical to the audio stream that went into it.
For those interested in backing up their music CD's, using Exact Audio Copy in a properly configured Secure Mode (For most people, this means: Drive caches audio, Accurate Stream, NO C2) and setting it to produce a WAV image and cuesheet with detected gaps, then FLACing the WAV and including the cuesheet in the FLAC with the relevent command line option should be just about perfect; burn it to DVD or store it on a HD, and put the original somewhere safe.
This has the added advantage of being a good source to play about with other encoding methods, since you can transcode from FLAC to other formats without any loss of quality; you can run ABX tests against the original and your encoded files to see if you can tell the difference, re-encode at a lower bitrate, and try again to give yourself an idea of what sort of quality settings you can use.
Nothing you can't also do with WAV, obviously, but FLAC's smaller
(Foobar 2000 comes highly recommended for cue/(flac|ape|wav|etc) images and ABXing with it's ABX plugin).
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.)
You have to realize your bias towards having a ludicrous amount of hard drive space in your home pc. Listen to yourself here:
"I have 500 GB in my PC now"
I have 120gb in my desktop, the laptop has 40gb. I do work on DVD's so I use a lot of that space for video I am editing and/or compressing or touching up. The *only* system I use that has 500GB is the main video capture station I use at the media lab I help out at that has a 3ware Escalade RAID card with 8 IDE drives in a RAID 5 array totalling 500GB in size (give or take a few dozen GB).
Granted you can get 250GB hard drives now and I hear 300GB drives are coming up soon around the bend those drives still command a price premium over your 120GB/160GB hard drives.
If I had 500GB of storage on my personal desktop I might be inclined to store my music in FLAC just as you do.
If you are backing up your FLAC's to DVD that means you must be getting about 11 FLAC encoded CDs to a single 4.7GB DVD-R, is that about right?
As far as your "bite" and "punch" goes I will have to give FLAC a try and see if I can tell the difference you speak of here. Typically I am unable to hear the differences but I am willing to learn something new!
You are obviously confusing "normal" md recording to lp, minidiscs don't record lossless.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
In a sense, maybe my site isn't entirely "free" (freedom), but not having any advertising ensures that the music itself stays "free" in just about every sense of the word.
It's the music that's most important to fans of the band, and to operators of fan sites. I've never had a problem with the fact that I can't make money on a product the band gives me for free.
Even if I could, I wouldn't.
Jon
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.
Basically, FLAC has better sampling rates - 24bit, 96khz (a cd is 16bit, 44.1khz) so it is more likely to be a relevant format in the future, is streamable, is compatible with ID3 tags, has an OSI approved license, has integrated checksums, this list goes on... And FLAC does it all in a smaller file size than SHN.
There is a discussion about the practicality of its use as well as a technical comparison for you to glean more information from.
Oh yeah, and FLAC is now a part of Xiph.
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
Also, odd. They provide CD booklets in PDF format.
Good.
There are seperate versions for Mac and PC. The PC version has a larger left margin.
Bad.
What does the 'P' in PDF stand for again?
Well, part of that will be that r3mix is bogus; it's going in the right direction, but the lame --r3mix option is by no means as good as MP3 gets at those bitrates.
I, like you, once thought r3mix ruled, and ripped all my CD's with it.
Then I discovered the --alt-preset settings and EAC and.. well, ripped my CD's again, using --alt-preset standard.
Then OGG Vorbis arrived, and I re-ripped (with EAC normalization) to Vorbis -q6.
Then I discovered ReplayGain, and, joy of joys, re-ripped again. Guess what? A few of my CD's have been damaged becase they've been stored badly or dropped during their lifetime.
Now I've got MusePack and new Vorbis encoders tuned to higher bitrates, and I'm looking to rip them *again*, and some of my music's stuck several formats behind.
The point is, codecs change, codec tunings change, software changes, hardware changes, and *people* change, and everyone experiences these changes differently -- I get a new hi-fi and start noticing artifacts in some of my encoded MP3's; you get a new portable and start wanting 64kbps MP3 files. Your portable gets a firmware update and switch to Vorbis; Vorbis 1.1 comes out, and I want to benefit from the higher quality at lower bitrates.
With lossless sources, everyone can burn a perfect original to CD and generate precisely what they want on their HD without the evils of transcoding lossy formats, and they can change should the need or desire arise. Not so if they just get a 160kbps MP3 to play with.