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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 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
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.
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.