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It has been discussed to replace the outdated lossless codec shn in the bootleg community etree.org, since it offers better compression and the possibility to compress higher resolution (24bit) and/or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