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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 ;)
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
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
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.
ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.
I have yet to see any scientifically valid, double-blind test in which users could distinguish between a CD and an MP3 at 320kbps. Many of the people that complain about MP3 are doing so for one of three reasons:
1. They heard a low bit-rate MP3 (e.g, 128kbps) or one encoded with a flawed encoder and then judged the entire compression scheme by that.
2. In a vain attempt to sound and feel superior, they complain about a format that satisfies so many others.
3. They understand that the compression is "lossy" and, therefore, convince themselves that they hear losses even though they cannot.
Or it is some combination of numbers two and three. It reminds me of the high-end audio market, which is based on the power of suggestion, people's vanity, and the insecurity that makes many people unwilling to admit that they can't hear a difference. That's how they sell AC line cords for over $500! It's how they convince people that they need to spend $1000 on a device to "break-in" their audio cables. One company even sold a digital clock that was substantially identical to a $30 clock sold by Radio Shack. But this clock sold for $270. They claimed that plugging the clock into an AC outlet caused the electrons in your house wiring to properly align themselves. (No, I am not kidding).
So, you have people trading crappy live recordings made through sub-standard microphones, placed 100 yards away from the performers, that picked up the sound from so-so PA speakers and fed a consumer-grade portable recorder insisting that they need lossless compression for the audio treasures that they that they exchange.
the myth is, of course, that such examples scale. they don't. i wouldn't ever want to see half the artists i listen to in person and many of the others make it impractible because they're half a world away. phish and the gd are clearly exceptional in that they attract a large number of people to their concerts, often for reasons not directly related to the music per se.
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.
Its for archiveing, and haveing a source file you can treat as if it was a WAV from the mic/CD/whatever.
For just listening yea, its a bit much, but if you archive/want to use many codecs
or simpley never have to rerip again like me and have space a plenty, then its a worthwhile thing to do.
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.
How does Exact Audio Copy compare to CDex when CDex is configured for maximum paranoia?
Right, people cant do that sort of comparison by themselves to make up their own minds about what they want because, errm, that would require, ya know, actually using your ears and stuff.
You can make up your mind about anything you like. People have made up their minds about tarot card readings and decided that such readings are valid way to plan their lives. Others have made up their minds about magnetic bracelets and have decided that the bracelets are an effective treatment for arthritis. Still others have made up their minds about power cords and decided that $500 power cords improve the sound of their CD player.
Sure, you can make up your own mind, but, having done so, there is no guarantee that the conclusion you have reached is correct.
And as we all well know, actual listenig to stuff is best left to like, scientist type people and stuff.
It's this kind of ignorance of science that scares the hell out of me. Did they even teach science in your school? A scientifically valid test does not mean that the participants are panel of scientists. It means that the test is not flawed or biased.
If you take a group of people and tell them that they are going to hear a CD first and a "lossy" MP3 second, you can play the exact same recording twice and many people will claim, and believe, that the "MP3" was audibly inferior. That's the power of suggestion at work and why it's important to devise a test the rules it out.
You would have enjoyed the dark ages. Back then, there was no "scientific method" and everyone thought the way that you do.
Have a look at this:
http://www.rex-guide.de.vu/
It should answer your questions, mpc is extremely faithfull music compression!
Recommend you try it.
Sub-standard microphones? So Neumann U89s and the Lunatec V2 preamp and the Apogee AD1000 ADC and the Tascam DA-P1 are either sub-standard or consumer grade? I think not, and that is just the setup that Phish's New Years show (all 10 CDs worth of music) from 2000 was recorded with. Please don't comment on something you don't know about. I far prefer audience recordings to commercial releases, as they aren't compressed to hell and actually have dynamic range. By the way Neumann U89 microphones are roughly $5000 for a pair, and the other equipment is not cheap either.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I have yet to see any scientifically valid, double-blind test in which users could distinguish between a CD and an MP3 at 320kbps
I'm not sure what you consider "scientifically valid" but I have done blind testing with my own equipment and I can hear a difference between 320kbps MP3s (yes encoded with lame, not that it matters) and WAVs. I think the differences are quite clear on sufficiently good equipment. It is mostly a loss of "life", "richness",a certain airiness or "soundstage", and high frequency detail that is apparent. I cannot tell the difference unless I am listening from an at least half decent source with a good pair of headphones or speakers.
People use the term compression "artifacts", but I feel that is misleading. What I notice the most is what I don't hear, what I'm missing. Of course I can only notice this when I also have the original uncompressed music to compare it with. Without that I certainly cannot tell the difference between compressed music and just a bad recording.
In a vain attempt to sound and feel superior, they complain about a format that satisfies so many others
I don't think it's the format that they are complaining about but rather the removal of 80% of the music that they were enjoying, based on what some computer program decided wasn't "important". Just because you may not hear something doesn't mean that others are attempting to "sound and feel superior" because they do.
They understand that the compression is "lossy" and, therefore, convince themselves that they hear losses even though they cannot.
Another rationalization on your part because you don't want to believe that anyone else is better than you are in a perceptual sense. That anyone can distinguish differences that you cannot.You do realize that all of these points would apply just as well to 64kbps or 32kbps MP3 files as well. "Properly encoded" (I love that phrase)64kpbs MP3s sound just fine to many people with poor audio equipment, insensitive hearing or both. If you disagree, you are just being a snob, trying to feel superior, and convincing yourself that it sounds bad because you know its compressed.
It reminds me of the high-end audio market, which is based on the power of suggestion, people's vanity, and the insecurity that makes many people unwilling to admit that they can't hear a difference.
I'm not sure what you consider "high end", but most audiophiles are quite willing to admit that for a given product there are price points above which the law of diminishing returns starts to apply. I suspect that you simply have poor audio equipment and don't want to spend any money on anything better and feel the need to rationalize this. The reason that you cannot hear a difference is because your cheap equipment masks the differences that would otherwise be quite obvious. It also depends on the type of music you listen to. Certain genres like heavy metal or, say, rap, would not lose much from lossy compression.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
First off, even on my crappy AIWA stereo I can hear the difference between a 256k mp3 and a losseless file. I am by no means an audiophile, but I am a musician. Mp3 compression has a very noticible impact on the highs and lows of an audio track. The cymbals sound tinny and the bass muddy. This is noticible with standard audience recordings of live music, as well as with professionally produced tracks. The livephish series are soundboard recordings of the concerts, which make compression loss even more apparent.