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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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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It has been discussed to replace the outdated lossless codec shn in the bootleg community etree.org, since it offers better compression and the possibility to compress higher resolution (24bit) and/or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.
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
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).
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
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
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.