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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 ;)
no, probably not.
... if they just noted that the tedious jam from Tuesday gig at the Cleveland Enormodome is not different from the Thursday's tedious jam at the Philadelphia Giganto-park, in any musically interesting way.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Does it make my computer smell like Patchouli?
Heck, Why not GIF...the patent just expired, and I hear it's great compression.
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..
(then again, I haven't been able to deal with internet show traders ever since CD-R enabled them to be even more demanding about recording quality.)
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
Logic, macros, and more
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
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It has been discussed to replace the outdated lossless codec shn in the bootleg community etree.org, since it offers better compression and the possibility to compress higher resolution (24bit) and/or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
....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.
Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?"
Of course! "As Phish goes, so goes the Music Industry," everybody knows that! As a matter of fact, they were discussing this very same trend during Phish's appearance last week on TRL.
In a related story from the same Styles page, Michael Crichton and J. K. Rowling have announced they are going to have their nipples pierced to better emulate their idol, Poppy Z. Brite.
The xmms playlist makes it around to bouncing around the room (ogg:), reload slashdot, ahhhh.....
A great man once said "If the Grateful Dead were like watching a beautiful sunset, Phish are like a blowjob."
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
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.
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).
But did the Mayans do it first? Knot, knot, no knot, no knot, knot, knot, knot ...OK Tahmas, that's a b-flat on the pipes....
AT&ROFLMAO
I'm not sure if I support this... if you think about it, very few phans have ever heard a live Phish concert in high fidelity. Take me for example: at the last Phish concert I was at, I saw the music emanating from the speakers as green clouds, which then coalesced into a giant steel Beethoven, who proceeded to eat me--all to the tune of "jingle bells", played backwards at a high tempo on the kettle drums. As you can guess it made concentrating on the latter 2/3 of the set very difficult. Hence I download these new high-fi with much trepidation: what has Phish actually been playing for the bulk of all those live shows? No one I know has any idea...
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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?
Did they switch for legal reasons? No.
Did they switch for technical reasons? No.
Did they switch for political reasons? No.
So why did they switch? Obviously, Phish just happen to be fans of the logo.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Cool, I've never been much of a fan anyways, so no big loss.
Will all their nomad fans be following them there too?
BTW, where exactly is FLAC? I hope its somewhere cold. Summer Phish concerts mean hippies in armpit hair revealing clothing. *shudder* At least somewhere cold they will bundle up
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
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.
Whoa brother, like it's not cool that their not being tight-asses but cool that they're not being tight-asses , 'cuz, you know, they are not being tight-asses. Get it? It's a contraction. It's like compression, brother. The "'" replaces the " a". It doesn't compress much, kinda more like FLAC than ogg or mp3. Haha. Speaking of kind, you got any? Let's burn one! My bro grew these nugs. It's his own hybrid strain he calls Trey An!
And you know besides "their" and "the'yre" there is "there"? Not to come down on you too hard bro, but you kinda got that one wrong in the grandparent post. Remember this?
So yeah, brother, like the first "their" was right on! But it's their policy, like their music. Yeah, it blows my mind too! Like, I would use "there" to communicate things like "there goes some tasty sisters--wonder if they got any gooballs for sale?" or "I was standing over there when I spilled the liquid acid those kids fronted me".Does it all make sense now? Cool man, I'm gonna get back to burning these Lemon Wheel shows for some kids I just met...
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
Well then you should try browsing the net a little! ;o)
Seriously, though, every new format (audio or otherwise) has to build a base of dedicated users before it gets widely recognized. When PNG first started, it wasn't the most well-known either (though being developed by an international standards organization helped a little ;o).
When people begin supporting newer (I would say better in this case, but I'll leave that up to you to decide) formats then you only have positives because then people can choose what they want. If you want to continue using formats you're comfortable with, that's fine.
That's simply not true. Regardin Ogg Vorbis (which is a lossy format and so not comparable to FLAC anyway), if nobody used it then why does the newest version WinAmp support it natively? Not only that, but RealMedia has said they are going to support it as well. This is because they realize that people do use it, and that as the benefits of using an open standard (as opposed to mp3, which is proprietary) will reveal itself to more people in the future. FLAC is the same way -- Phish realized that 1) it is technically a better format than SHN (lossless and compresses smaller), and 2) more people are beginning to desire it.
There's really no good reason to say, "Well, not everybody's using it yet, so I'm not gonna either." What you should do instead is look at the merits of one format vs. another and then make a decision for yourself instead of relying on public opinion (which will screw you over every time).
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
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.
FLAC?
badum-tchhh. Thank you, I'll be here all week, tip your moderators.
I kill me.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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