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It has been discussed to replace the outdated lossless codec shn in the bootleg community etree.org, since it offers better compression and the possibility to compress higher resolution (24bit) and/or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