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 ;)
Unfortunately, I bet this gets far less mainstream press coverage than if they were shouting to the heavens and anyone who would listen that their fans were evil criminals.
:o)
Good, but we have a long way to go yet..
....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.
Parent is probably a troll, but I'll bite.
On average, lossless compression can do 2:1 ratio, so that's 20-30MB out of 300MB worth of wav. I'd say 7-10% is rather impressive considering WinRAR recognizes audio formats and does optimisations on them. Try comparing against ZIP or something.
Furthermore does RAR allow you to stream the audio? Seek (sample-accurately)? Error resistant (a small error won't affect the whole stream)? Can you play the RARs in your favourite audio player? Well I guess Foobar2000 can , with it's zip/rar support but then it has to decompress the whole (10MB/minute) track before being able to play it, while it can play a FLAC directly from any point in time of the track.
most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources
Well, sure, I'll give you that - many mixes come out with undesirables, but the issue is not one of the music needing that extra bit of quality that a lossless compression scheme supplies. Rather, the use of such compression addresses the issue of multiple generations. By trading with SHN (or FLAC) we can then make an _exact_ copy of the master copy; each generation does not add any noise/distortion to the mix, as it might with audio tapes.
If a lossy compression were regularly used, and people burned to disc, encoded to OGG/MP3, decoded and burned again, distortion and data loss would be added to that copy of the source, which is unaccptable. That's why we also use MD5s as well.
The time of day is 29:33.
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?