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Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed?
FunkeyMonk writes "The Christian Science monitor has an article discussing the gap between music fans and audiophiles when it comes to portable music. Would you pay a few cents more to have lossless downloads from iTunes and other online music retailers? As a classical musician myself, I choose not to download most of my music, but rather rip it myself in lossless format."
...just with no quality loss. Perhaps the question is "Does portable music have to be lossy?"
Actually I'd like to be able to get an "original" image a la the CDs you buy, but allow single CD tracks. Would I pay more for that? I don't know. I've never bought any of the DRM'ed crap because it's DRM'ed, so I don't know how badly (or well) compressed they are.
If there are audible compression artifacts anywhere in today's downloadable DRM'ed music I'd probably insist the compression be less or not at all, after all I'm paying for music, and a compression artifact (to me) is analogous to stuck pixels in a monitor or camera... my threshold of tolerance is zero for that.
(I had one of the very original SONY Mini-disk recorders, and remember a passage of a Doobie Brothers track where some high pitched bells instead of sounding like high pitched bells sounded like someone sneezing... unacceptable... completely altered my experience of MD (along with numerous other things about SONY).)
So, bottom line, DRM aside, I consider it the responsibility of the music industry to deliver what they claim they are delivering... music (usually). I'm willing to bet what they are delivering has artifacts... I wouldn't pay more to get rid of that, I'd demand they replace the defective product.
The nice thing about my CDs and my derivative mp3 collection (recorded at 320 VBR) is if I hear an artifact in my track, I have the unedited original, I rip it at higher quality until the artifact isn't there.
(As an aside, I think the article makes an exceptionally great point not directly related to the users:
So, in addition to short-shrifting consumers with less-than-perfect (to the ear) product, the movers of downloadable music thumb their noses at the collective profession of sound engineers and engineering... pretty rude.
Granted, a lot of the music out there is crap -- it's no justification for compromise on the medium.
Oh, and re the subject line of my post... I'd pay a little more for non-DRMed music, not uncompressed music.
I've challenged my local audiophile friend to a blind test several times and he refuses to give it a go [especially since he listens to the audio really loudly which will mask most tones anyways].
... use flac. But that's not what this article is about. It's about downloads for listening not remixing. And even then, uncompress the high bitrate mp3/mp4 to WAV, work with that [or store it as FLAC] and STFU.
192+ kbit mp3 with a decent codec (e.g. lame q=2) sounds just like the original for the music in my collection.
Yes [since I know someone will bring it up], if you plan to remix it
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It depends on how you intend to listen to your music. If you're going to be listening to earbuds while you're outside or working out at the gym or whatever, then compressed files are fine. Enough ambient noise will be getting through that you'll barely notice any compression artifacts, if at all. However, if you intend to listen to music through a nice set of headphones or speakers in a quiet listening environment, then you'll want it to be as uncompressed as possible. The same generally applies for music with wide dynamic ranges, such as classical/orchestral music.
This guy's the limit!
What's the point? The bottle neck on MP3 players is not the audio files but the decoding/playback hardware and even more important the headphones. You simply can't hear the difference after a certain MP3 bitrate like you can on real audio systems with proper equipment.
Whenever I buy a new MP3 player I spend a few minutes to find the sweet spot where I simply can't hear any difference with a higher bit rate let alone lossless audio. This is almost always 128 kbps, even with quite good head phones.
I would personally pay a few cents less to get CD Quality music. Often when I buy CDs they are priced anywhere from 7.99 to 13.99. I think that if you average it out, the CD ends up being about the same price as iTunes, possibly a dollar or two more. But for that extra dollar, you get a physical copy, that's lossless, and doesn't contain any DRM. I try not to buy CDs with copy protection, and even for the few I do, I can still easily rip them, by disabling autorun. The only advantages of iTunes and other music services are, the ability to buy one track, and the ability to have it right away. I don't usually buy music from artists who can't fill up a whole CD with good music, and I'm not that impatient that I can't wait for the CD to arrive from Amazon, or wait until the next time I happen to be in the mall. Sometimes, if I know I won't be in the mall for a while, I'll download the cd in MP3 format and then buy it later. So, I could buy off iTunes, but i'd get music that was of inferior quality, and locked by Apple, which means that I couldn't play it on another MP3 player without degrading the quality even further.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, the poster of this article obviously doesn't consider CD quality to be "lossless." How far we've come from the OLD audiophiles who wouldn't touch anything that wasn't a meticulously cared for LP -- or better yet, reel-to-reel tape in your home rig.
How much longer before we consider 128-kpbs MP3's to be the "standard" for quality music, especially as we're moving to more and more of a "download on demand" compression crazed society?
Won't anyone think of the children!
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
I can't hear the difference between a q5 Ogg and a FLAC even with high-end headphones. And the Ogg takes 1/10th the time to download.
But it should be lossless nonetheless. Right now downloadable music isn't worth paying for at all, as far as I'm concerned.
And it should be DRM-free, naturally, but you can't have everything.
We're getting there, but even relatively modest MP3 collections by modern standards still can consume entire laptop hard drives, let alone some of the dinky MP3 players.
Until everybody can put their entire collection onto at least a laptop hard drive, and still have room to put other things on there, we'll still want compressed music.
I say "laptop hard drive" because CPUs are pretty much at the point where we could read in FLAC and spew out a customized MP3 for a smaller portable player, so I don't think that's as important, but it is also a factor. (We don't do that because we still assume the hard-drive MP3 will already be compressed; as we move away from that we'll develop live-encoding infrastructure. If you can still hear the artifacts from a portable player from a 320Kbps mp3, you must be listening with $200 headphones in some sort of silence chamber.) It'd be even easier to deal with uncompressed music if I could dump my entire FLAC collection out to a flash-based player.
(We'll also eventually want multi-channel music, but even in the worst case scenario that only roughly doubles music size, and as I understand it that's not how multi-channel music is encoded anyhow, certainly not if you're going to FLAC or FLAC-alike it..)
I doubt any representative of the RIAA could keep their blood pressure down with the words 'losslessly reproduceable content' and 'internet' in the same sentence. Given the disputes over uniform music cost and how much they resisted distributing even lossy DRM'd audio in the first place, what are the odds we'll see this?
I demand songs downloaded in 24/192! I'm sure it'll be awesome when combined with my new $2500 iPod charge cable made of oxygen free copper.
Oh, and apparently two "experts" in the article say they prefer WAV. Maybe they have magic ears that can tell the difference between WAV and formats that are mathematically lossless.
To be perfectly honest, no. 128 KB MP3 is good enough (although I do hear a difference).
For it to be really worth it, we'd need source files of higher quality. I rip at 192kbs and have a hard time telling the difference in most recordings. Then again, I don't have really high end equipment either. What happened to "Super-Audio" CD's I remember hearing about it but never see them on shelves?
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
For me music isn't to be just "consumed" where you replace last months listening with something new. When I look at what I listen to often there's both year old stuff as well as some that I bought some 20 years ago.
Today mp3 is the reigning format but what about 10 or 20 years? Will any new formats come and replace it or will there be significantly better equipment that will easily expose the quality difference between mp3 and lossless? And if new lossy formats come along you risk getting audible artifacts when converting from one lossy format to another which is no good for me. And who knows which of todays drm will work in 10 to 20 years.
So in those cases where I can pick it's going to be lossless and non-drm for me.
So yes, some people out there would pay extra for a digital file that is uncompressed or losslessly compressed, but as most people use crap cans or speakers, most of those people would be wasting their money. If you want maximum fidelity, stick with the physical CD or vinyl.
I though all digital formats were lossy!?! ;-)
The right way to answer this question is with double blind testing.
"Audiophiles" like to make all sorts or ridiculous claims that lead to things like $2000 speaker cables, gold CDs and just a general proliferation of nonsensical technobabble.
Psychology simply has too strong of an effect on questions like this to get an actual answer from a forum like this.
What you'd really find is that as the bitrate of an mp3 goes up, the number of people who can tell the difference goes down. At some point the number of people who can tell the difference becomes a statistically insignificant sample. This would be a good project for some grad student.
Life is too short to proofread.
I choose not to download most of my music, but rather rip it myself in lossless format.
And risk getting another rootkit from Sony?
Personally, I would only purchase music if it were lossless and DRM free. All other music is completely unacceptable to me. Otherwise just get the CD and rip my own lossless copy. I don't want ot be hindered down the line by degraded audio from recompression or worse, cock blocked by onerous DRM.
Oh yeah, and I use Linux so fuck Windows Media Player and Apple iTunes DRM. Even a Linux DRM would be unacceptable because I could pick up and move to Solaris, BSD (DragonFly some day), or, God willing, a completely new OS that doesn't suck.
We're already receiving an inferior product to what we get on audio discs. Are you really going to try to sell to me that it costs more to store and transfer FLAC files than it does to produce, transport, and store an arbitrary-number of CDs across the globe? No, you just want to obtain more money for a comparable service to what I get from going to the music store, which is one of the three ways that I obtain physical media and encode it in whatever format is convenient for my purposes. If you sold FLAC files for the same price that the iTMS sells AAC files, I would buy those. Otherwise until all audio discs are encumbered with proprietary DRM formats, I will continue to do my music shopping the archaic way. To be fair, though, I blame the recording industry for this state of affairs, and they would only make it worse if they could. I'm sure the next round of negotiations with Apple will entail conflict over an even more retarded set of conditions.
First off, ANY digitization is going to introduce a finite, hopefully imperceptable loss. It's just the nature of the beast. If you sample at frequencies used by most manufactured CDs, and record and play back using only the best equipment, only the most discriminating human ear will be able to tell it's not a state-of-the-art analog recording.
Second, even state-of-the-art analog recordings are limited by the recording equipment and playback equipment. Recording equipment isn't an issue for professional studios, but your average person doesn't have super-hi-fi professional playback equipment and speakers.
Fortunately - or unfortunately - for most of us over 20, the human ear becomes the limiting factor. There's no point in spending big bucks on high-end equipment if our ears can't tell the difference between $50 headphones and $500 headphones.
The bottom line:
Buy the best speakers that will make the music sound better FOR YOU.
Buy the best recordings that will make the music sound better FOR YOU.
Don't spend more than that, you are just wasting your money.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There's a fairly good reason why the audio files sold by iTunes isn't lossless. It isn't a matter of bandwidth; the amount of bandwidth required to upload larger files is a fraction of a cent apiece. The real reason is because these songs are meant to be uploaded to an iPod, and their memory space (even the 60 gig models) is limited. Putting lossless audio on them would cut the number of hours of audio they can hold by 75%, and users would revolt. Letting people downsample the files would be problematic because of the DRM, and letting people choose between lossy and lossless would complicate things. Therefore, they made a decision.
Still, don't fret people. CD prices can't maintain this price level, so audiophiles will be able to buy the tracks and rip them themselves without paying too much more for their tunes.
WAV? He uses WAV? Why on god's green earth would you bother using WAV to listed to your music when there are a plethora of lossless codecs out there? You can get roughtly 2:1 compression with any of the codecs - heck he could even use wavpack if he was so stuck on having wav in the name. Heck, most audiophiles worth their $3000 interconnects are appalled at the harsheness and "cold, digital" feel of that 44.1khz/16 bit crap that was forced on the public when we got CDs.
Lossless is coming soon to most of us. With the 5.5g iPod at 80GB and the Zune hackable to 80GB as well, all but the top 3-4% of all consumers can fit their entire (legal) collection on a single portable device in lossless compression. I've got about 6500 tracks, most as FLAC rips, and I'm right about 81GB (plus about 40GB in books, but those are all low-bitrate). If I jettisoned the extra downloded stuff I have that I didn't like (but didn't get around to deleting), I'd probably drop to 75GB or so. I suspect that my entire family (three of us) buys less than 5GB worth of content each year. There's no reason to expect that the size of the players, in capacity, will not continue to decrease. As for those with bigger collections...well, just get more portables, or learn to live with a smaller subset on your player (or a higher compression).
As long as the high-qualtiy masters are available, portables can become a calculated compromise. Since my threshhold for accuracy happens to be at about 256kb/s LAME, that's where I transcode my FLAC library for my portable. If I had a car player, it would probably be more like 160kb. Heck, it's practically impossible to hear artifacts at 128kb in my Pilot at 70mph at a normal volume. My wife's 8GB flash player will be encoded in the 160-192 range, becuase I know she doesn't have the gear to hear much more, and she's just not that picky. With good music managers, you can automagically sync and transcode at the same time (I use mediamonkey). Transodeing is a bit slow right now, but as PCs get faster, the sync/transcode process will get better and better.
I do agree that it is a travesty that the online services will not offer home-archival-quality tracks, but I'm probably a top-10% listening geek. I buy all my music on CD, and rip to FLAC. Okay, okay - I've bought some at AllOfMp3.com, too, but I can get lossless there. The key is that the studios will continue to have qualtiy masters - but will they be willing to sell that quality to the public?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Lossless compression is the way to go, especially as cheap mass storage becomes increasingly ubiquitous. But would I be willing to pay more for it?
No. The 'market rate' of one dollar per track, ten dollars per album, is already overpriced, even for current lossy compression. The entire point of digital distribution is to cut out the costs associated with physical production, distribution, storage, and marketing. More direct marketing should produce more money for artists, cost less money from consumers, right?
Presently most artists see maybe TEN PERCENT of the revenues from digital sales. Granted, that's a few percent better than major labels give for physical CD sales, but still the overwhelming majority of money goes to line the pockets of middlemen, the same middlemen fighting to lock down fair use rights so they can milk their chattel on one side into paying for the same thing over and over and over again, while at the same time they milk their chattel on the other side into producing 'shepherded' content for subsistence wages.
Right now digital music sales are a terrible value proposition. Inferior product, marginally-less-expensive, substandard usability, forced obsolescence, less features, and no backup data nor license should anything ever go wrong. Its only arguable standard of success is the convenience of instant gratification.
When someone offers lossless, DRM-free music at less than half the cost of a physical compact disc, digital music may be worthwhile. Until then, sorry, ripping one's own CDs is the way to go.
It's spelled "karma". Now give me some for pointing that out.
Oh wait, I'm an AC. Nevermind.
I wouldn't consider paying more for better quality music as I already don't buy any crappy quality download music, but I would at least consider it if the quality went up and the price remained the same.
I blame geof's speakers.
From TFA
The sheer number of variations in compression technology. The array of audio file formats includes Apple's AAC and Dolby's AC3, as well as WMA, OGG, FLAC, AVI, and others.
AAC is not "Apple's". WMA is a container, not a compression codec. OGG is a container (usually used for Vorbis and FLAC), not a compression codec. FLAC is both a container and lossless compression codec. AVI is a container and not a compression codec. The man complains about audio quality, yet 4 out of 5 things that he discusses have "nothing" to do with audio quality.
For his own use, Mr. Goddard, like Willens, favors WAV, a "lossless" compression format that renders sound accurately but has some drawbacks - notably the tremendous amount of storage space it requires: some 50 to 60 megabytes per song, versus about two for an MP3.
Wav is not a lossless format. It is limited by in it's dynamic range (bits per sample) and sample rate. Compared to analog or a raw sound source, raw wav/pcm data loses a lot of the sound. FLAC and other lossless codecs produce identical byte-to-byte output when compared to wav/pcm.
I believe that this guys priorities are a little messed up. We should be focusing on lowering the noise floor, increasing the dynamic range, increasing the sampling rate, and getting the music industry to stop producing albums that are ultra compressed and "loud". You're not going to get decent fidelity out of an iPod when it is limited to 16 bit output and a 44.1/48khz sampling rate with a -90db noise floor. We need 24/96 players with a -110db noise floor, and a decent set of ear buds. Not that it would matter for consumers that listen to the typical tizz and boom being produced today.
BBH
I think it depends on the music. If I'm listening to Mahlers 'Resurection' on my iPod, I'm going to want a lossless rip of the CD. If I'm listening to Kid Rock, I could care less.
I think this isn't so much of an issue as it was 5 years ago. When you have a 5gb iPod, that's only 8 CDs...when you have a 80GB one, that's over 100. Big difference. I STILL only load 5-6 at a time on my iPod, because I don't feel I need to carry my entire collection around with me everywhere I go. I don't listen to 1/8 of my collection in a year anyway...why would I want to have it all in my pocket?
But then again...that's just my opinion.
My
I've always ripped lossless. I don't care how much space it takes up. My friends give me crap cause they don't like sharing large files -- even now storage for thousands of lossless wma/flac files is very affordable. It really comes down to cost of storage and cost of transmission - which in 10 years will be nada. The only downside is that my mp3 player has little storage, I simply convert on the fly when loading it to 128kbps simply for storage (cost) reasons. My headphones are junk, 96kbps is also acceptable through walmart 16$ headphone special.
This fails to take into account that, if I remember correctly, 256kbps MP3s (and we aren't even talking with VBR here), are indistinguishable from the original CDs to audio professionals in a blind test.
So, unless you're going to be re-encoding, I would say that anything indistinguishable from the original CD should be considered "good enough".
Just because many people choose to encode with more compression, doesn't mean the entire concept is flawed, it just means those people are choosing file size over quality (or, more likely, never took the time to understand the relationship in the first place.)
and I've got to say - 128k mp3's are the absolute minimum we can play on the air. You run into some wierd problems playing compressed audio over FM - due to the way stereo channels are transmitted, you can get some bizzare stereo artifacts.
Biggest problem with lossless compressed codecs is that there's shit for support for 'em. Most semi-pro or pro audio software won't recognize anything but WAV and MP3, and AAC and WMA if you're lucky. Most of 'em won't support OGG, either...
And please don't get me started on Audacity - it's great for quick editing, but the interfaces are probably 5 years behind pro software. I truly wish it was better - I'd love to not have to support Windows audio production machines, but until we have a piece of pro-quality OSS audio editing software that beats at least entry-level proprietary Windows stuff, we're stuck paying hundreds of dollars per seat for the basic stuff. For mastering live CDs and doing 5.1 mixdowns, software can easily run into the thousands of dollars.
To sum it up, I'd love to have lossless audio be better supported - we've got a several thousand disk collection that I'd rather have sitting on a fileserver for easy access, and be able to download a song and play it on the air without someone's shit encoder make the song go futzy, but it'll take a hell of a fight to get FLAC supported on players. OTOH, with the impressive size increases in flash memory these days, maybe it's time to start looking at it...
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
If you are listening in ideal circumstances, you benefit from having the best fidelity. On the other hand, listening to your mp3 player on the subway, the ambient noise makes high quality audio pointless. You might as well lose some audio quality and use file compression so you can fit more tunes on your portable player.
With the new players that can store many gigs, the benefit of file compression becomes less important. In a few years, compressing audio files will be pointless because the storage capacity keeps going up.
Bandwidth isn't going up as fast as storage so that reason for compressing files may still exist. There could be a point for charging a bit more for uncompressed files to pay for the extra bandwidth. I don't know how much it would be but it probably wouldn't be much.
The kind of compression that would be useful for portable audio is audio compression. The volume of the quiet passages is increased so you can hear them over the ambient noise.
I favor good audio as much as the next guy, but if you're completely happy with what you have, don't upgrade. I can ABX to about 160 kbps LAME MP3, and so I encode at 224 VBR to be safe. I used to encode my music as FLACs until I realized that I was running out of space in my poor 80 GB hard drive. Now I could have went out and bought a 500 GB hard drive and kept going, but what's the point? I can't tell. I'm happy with my current setup of iMac + KSC75's. I may upgrade to some SR60's someday, but right now, I want to spend more money on buying CDs, not putting more money into the CDs I already have. I don't really see the point as lossless-as-backup either; if a CD of mine got lost, broken, or stolen, I would re-buy just to have it. Maybe that's just me, but I like owning CDs. Plus, most consumers tend to use the headphones that come with their players. It would cost a fortune for companies to include headphones that would make consumers hear the artifacts of 128kbps.
Just my two cents.
In the late 70s I was a college dj with a rock 'n' roll show. A handful of cassette recordings of my shows have survived and on the stuff I'm still listening to on cd, like Beatles records, one can hear (on nearly 30 year old cassettes) that vinyl was warmer or better sounding. I was working professionally at a classical music station when the first, imported, compact discs arrived and I found the high strings and high horns to be funny sounding (I think the phenomenon was called aliasing and arose from the choice to use 41.1K as the sample rate). So my point of view is that we compromised fidelity for convenience back in the 80s at the dawn of digital. Two areas where digital outperformed vinyl: the quiet of quiet passages, and the delivery of power for lower registers.
Now, if my hearing wasn't shot from age and the choices of youth (playing in rock and roll bands) and I could appreciate the full dynamic range of recorded acoustic instruments, and if I was listening to acoustic music that was truly recorded dynamically, I'd be putting lossless on my iPod as well. A lot of ifs. Yesterday I bought a compilation of Woody Herman tracks and I'm guessing that the masters for the original discs were mixed hot, decreasing dynamics by using equalization and compression. In addition, who knows what noise reduction, noise gating, limiting, equalization, compression, or aural excitement they added while mastering the compact disc. So, I think I'll be fine with trading off file size (at 192 kB rip) for the dynamics that may or may not be there and the fidelity I may or may not be able to appreciate.
Overuse of headphones has probably damaged your hearing if you can't tell the difference between 192kb/sec MP3 and the original source. MP3 compression at that bit rate produces demonstrable artifacts, especially in the high frequency range (but that's the first part of your hearing to go bad, so maybe that's why you can't tell). Your "audiophile" firend is probably well on his way to The Land of Eternal Silence, too.
:-)
No, I'm not another consumer with an opinion. I have years of professional experience with audio and was the guy responsible for (among other things) evaluating and specifying compression codecs for one of the downloading jukebox companies (the kind of juke you find in taverns, etc.).
Compressed media is OK for casual listening. I have an iPod for our car and record vinyl to Minidisc; both formats are fine for their intended uses. Just don't kid yourself that there's no difference.
I suppose I should envy people like you since I wouldn't "need" such nice speakers if I was half deef.
Working in the consumer electronics industry, I've met a few audiophiles over the years. The ones that are truly anal about sound quality can all be collected together in a single hotel. In fact, they are! Go to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and hop on over to the Venetian hotel where the high end audio guys congregate. They get their own special show where they can show off their $200,000 pairs of speakers. (To be fair, I did see those speakers for $185,000 as a show special). You'll know you're in the right place because it'll be crowded with grey beards and tweed jackets. MP3 audio is NOT FOR these guys. Who cares if they refuse to buy it?! Download lossless audio, like WAV files, for a "few cents more"? Ya right! Those files are something like 20x the size! Just like Audio Note has no plans to make an $80,000 tube amp with iPod interface for a teenagers bedroom, Apple, emusic and whomever else need not make any plans to satisfy the 100 or so people in the world who are REALLY into hi fidelity.
If you are on dialup, you tend to want to get the smallest file possible. If you have a have a 6 meg DSL, the larger files aren't as much as an issue. Also, if you have a Creative Zen Nano with 512 Mb, you are going to want some good compression, however, if you have an player with a hard drive in it and 20 - 40 gig of space...this isn't so much of an issue.
I myself, have about 40 - 50 gig of mp3s, the biggest majority legal, since I have about 400 to 500 cds, and I usually rip to 128 kbps. I usually listen while riding my bike, and they sound just fine to me. If I need high quality, I could always dig out the CD it came from...but you know what, I rarely find myself wanting an audiophile experience pure enough for me to dig through my CDs.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
You should look at one of the systems (about $150) that let you connect the pod directly to your head unit. Mine connects to it in place of the factory cd changer. At any rate, you lose an incredible amount of range going through the cassette adaptor.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
In my experience, it's only pretentious audiophiles that really care about uncompressed music. For a serious classical musician, the primary problem with a recording is not any slight--or imagined--differences in quality, it's the fact that it isn't live. And any serious classical musician will prefer even a noisy 78rpm shellac recording by a great artist to a technically perfect recording by a second rate modern musician.
MP3's at 160kbps are more than good enough for anybody. And they are way overkill for any kind of portable player, given the kind of suboptimal listening environments portable players are used in.
Ditto. And as I've said before, most of us listen to compressed music on pod's while walking down the street, in a car, on the subway, at the gym, or at any number of other places where the ambient noise levels are going to drown out any perceived "superiority" in sound quality anyway.
IF you're recording for use on your home stero system and IF you have decent speakers and IF you've got the storage space to burn and IF the kind of music you listen to hasn't already been under the sound engineer's knife... THEN you might as well do loseless.
Note that there's a lot of "ifs" in that sentence...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
"I would expect most people's collections to fit on a 100GB drive (laptops got to about 160 now, iirc) as lossless."
Please note that a few people need the occassional Word file and Excel spreadsheet as well. Most can't waste all of the space on their notebook on music...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I buy the CD for anything I deem worth the best sound reproduction my system(s) can produce (I also buy Vinyl - with the MFSL Master of Madeleine Peyroux's Careless Love my most recent vinyl acquisition).
e rtest.htm/
As it happened, I had never heard Peyroux (she is fantastic and appears to channel Billie Holiday on a couple of cuts) until she was showcased on Bill Shapiro's Cypress Avenue show on NPR. I bought the iTunes copy the same day.
After a week, I bought the CD.
Within a month I bought the MFSL Master on Vinyl.
I know what I like. I know what I can hear. Do you? Here is a test: audio geeks try this at home - lightly rub yout thumb and forefinger together - it makes a "whispery whisking" sound and is an effective test for high-end hearing loss. The trick is to have somebody do this from behind you -starting an inch or so behind an ear. You can't see - but if you hear then the test goes on - alternating ears and distance - you can have a pretty good approximation of your hearing acuity if you can hear the whisper 5 inches (12.5 cm) away from your ear(s).
If you can't hear it - forget about fidelity - you can't tell with your instruments (ears).
As for me - I'll give my stereos and speakers the best rating and for portable I think my 1st Gen iPod Shuffle (1Gig) with Apple Lossless encoding and Etymotic ER-6 or B&O Form 2 'phones come as close as any portable ever will (the ER-6's sound better than the B&O but they are a pain to properly seat; require frequent replacement of soiled components; and, are uncomfortable for long sessions - but the sound and isolation are worth the trouble).
Why the shuffle? Better fidelity - http://home.comcast.net/~machrone/playertest/play
I have a 5.5 gen 80 Gig and the Shuffle still sounds better.
Sorry, I didn't format my previous reply:
There was a time when I couldn't hear a bit difference between a redbook CD track and the same song ripped as an MP3 at 192k. Then I went to school to get my BS in audio production. It is amazing how much more detail you can hear in music when you are trained to do so for four years. I would have never believed for a second that my advisor could hear things in music that I couldn't, until two years later when I 'saw the light'. Over time I began to pick out subtleties in music, even if I was hearing the piece for the first time.
All of the high end audio products generally have no benifit for the average consumer, but in a studio setting, when trained ears are listening, that expensive gear tends to be more valued. There is an inherent problem with this situation, though. Is it reason enough to justify buying equipment that is significantly more expensive because my collegues and I find it more pleasing to listen to, while the average consumer of the product can tell no difference? I don't have an answer to this, but I know that there is actually a growing market for DVD audio (with 5.1 mixes as well). On a DVD disk we can store music at such high qualities that it rivals the best master analog tape s out there.
The bottome line is that your ears are trainable. Listening to music is a learned process, much like wine tasting. At first pass, you may think is all tastes like sour grapes, but over time, with effort, you will discover flavors you never knew existed. For the record, I have been a part of quite a few 'blind' tests juxtaposing certain audio formats, and I can certainly tell the difference between an mp3 at 192/16 and a redbook track. Step than mp3 up to super high quality vbr, and I have some difficulties, unless the music is of the classical genre.
Doug
Beatport.com specializes in electronic music, and they sell (for a higher price) lossless uncompressed (yes, .wav) files alongside lossy .mp3 and mp4. I always get the lossless versions, but unfortunately the .wav files cannot carry any metadata, so I am reduced to re-entering everything by hand. I contacted them to try to persuade them to switch to FLAC; hopefully they'll listen.
A while ago I ripped our entire CD collection (about 1200 discs) to FLAC, a lossless codec. Each minute of audio takes approximately 5.5MB, so it lives on a 750GB drive (x 2 because I mirrored that sucker -- don't want to have to go through *that* again). I then did a batch down-convert to OGG/Vorbis to go onto my iRiver player (no, not all of it). I ripped to FLAC so that if/when better lossy codecs come along, I can simply do batch down-convert without reripping. Note: you do *not* want to convert one lossy codec to another lossy codec; all you will get is the worst of both codecs in one file.
I became curious about just how the various compressions stacked up against each other. I knew Vorbis was better than "normal" MP3 by a long shot, but newer MP3 variations have definitely gotten better. Here are the formats tested: WAV (straight from the CD), FLAC, Vorbis, and about 15 different MP3 variations (VBR, CBR/ABR, 32k to 320K). I tried both down-convert from FLAC and ripped-direct-from-CD (there should be no difference, and I certainly couldn't hear any). This was done on a variety of material, choosing particularly demanding/revealing passages from acoustic guitar, cafe jazz trios, brass ensembles, Beethoven's 6th, piano (jazz and classical), rock and vocalists (Streisand, Baez, Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody).
I did a few tests and verified that I could not distinguish between WAV and FLAC -- no surprise there -- so for convenience the other formats were compared to FLAC as the baseline.
I did extensive A-B, B-C, A-C, etc., etc. comparisons using my main system (Marantz A/V amp with Magneplanar MG-IIIa speakers) and also with Sennheiser HD595 headphones. Below 128k, MP3 is complete crap. Starting at 128-CBR, it got more difficult to hear the difference. At CBR/192 or VBR/medium, I could rarely distinguish MP3 from FLAC, although sometimes the high-hat cymbals sounded like they lost a little bit of brilliance.
Although I'm a fairly discerning listener, I do have high-frequency hearing damage in my right ear. So I brought in a friend who is a serious audiophile. We did a lot of listening and comparing (many hours over several days because your ears get "tired"), both on my system and back at his house.
The Verdict: Vorbis is good, really good. But MP3's produced by Lame at VBR/Medium to VBR/High are also really, really good, maybe even better. MP3/VBR/Medium is approximately the same size as Vorbis/Normal (-q 4.99) at about 1MB/minute -- 1/5 the size of the FLAC files. Although there are players out there that can handle Vorbis, there are many more that don't.
Ps. We're not going to throw out the FLACs, because something better *will* come along. By that I mean 'smaller than' MP3/VBR/HIGH.
It's a function of reconstruction errors. In recent articles published in the journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), engineers addressed the misconception that aliasing is itself a function of digital sampling compression. This is not always the case. Even when a decent encoder is used to compress a video or audio signal, its the reconstruction errors that take place during decoding that constitute the greatest cause of aliasing/artifacts.
AES engineers determined that Dolby AAC at 128kbps is perceptibly indiscernible from 16-bit dithered LPCM (CD Audio). AAC is a perceptual coding algorithm that, in essence, differs from MP3 in that it doesn't simply discard data indiscriminately. Perceptual coding algorithms like AAC and AC-3 (Dolby Digital) work to reduce the necessary data to reconstruct only that which is demonstrably perceptible to the human ear and within a dynamic range compression schema and lowpass filtering (at 20kHz for Dolby Digital main channels) that, by further reducing the bandwidth requirements, minimizes artifacts upon reconstruction.
Rather than trying to sound like an advertisement for Dolby Laboratories, I'm using an example of a company that closely manages the quality control of its licensed encoders and decoders (both hardware and software-based) to contrast it with the myriad MP3 and MPEG-4 decoders that may have poorly defined encoding AND decoding algorithms that result in greater errors upon reconstruction.
The truth is, I have not met a self-professed audiophile who can CONSISTENTLY tell the difference between AAC and 16-bit LPCM when blind-tested. I've heard zillions of anecdotes, but no real scientific evidence to demonstrate that, fundamentally, the average person can tell the difference between these two formats.
That is not to say that there are NO differences between any two formats... Put the average listener in a room with 16-bit LPCM and 24-bit LPCM, and yes most of them will be able to hear a discernible (read: obvious) difference that they don't have to be squinting their ears for or making up what they think might be a difference. But I don't hear a lot of audiophiles pissing and moaning that few if any recordings are ever mastered to 24-bit uncompressed linear PCM. Even SACD at best produces results that perceptibly sound no different than 19-bit LPCM.
For casual listening, I find 128 to 192kbps AAC to be pretty sufficient. For critical listening, 24-bit LPCM is my preferred format... but good luck finding a vast array of titles mastered to this format. DVD-Audio is currently the only physical medium that supports it on standalone players. I don't know how many softwares support it but I can tell you that iTunes does in fact support playback of 24-bit/48kHz LPCM. For this reason alone, software-based codecs are still far superior to physically fixed standalone players and discs because of the ease in upgrading to incorporate newer codecs. Furthermore, the myriad other artifacts that audiophiles claim, including digital jitter, are generally not a problem for modern CPU's and DAC's that have their own internal reclocking of the buffered signal to prevent exactly those kind of errors from ever being heard.
I generally do not trust audiophile claims... these are the same people who will tell you that $300 per foot speaker cable is better than $1 per foot... failing to understand that the only two things that affect inductance and resistance are the thickness and length of the cable (assuming it's all oxygen-free annealed copper, which can be purchased for less than a buck a foot)...
Previous poster has some great phrases.
... simply draw from my pre-selected A-list at home with moderate grade surround phones.
"Calculated Compromise". Finally, someone noticed that large swaths of the music out there doesn't need insanely expensive equipment because the style it was recorded in mimics the garage sound, or doesn't attempt complex harmony, and so on. Therefore, per each person's taste, songs from your "Grade B" list that you only "kinda like" may not deserve luxurious full-size storage. Better to free up that extra space to put something else on there.
The 80 gig models offer the room, but those using the smaller models *because* they are less risky to lose, the "calculated risk" factor skyrockets. These things are marketed for the on-the-go lifestyle, so ambient noise will long since cover artifacts.
When I decide it's a good day to play audiophile, I
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Everyone has different limits for what is tolerable but i think most people can tell the difference betweeen 128k aac and 192k aac. The problem with paying "more" for lossless is then it becomes obvious you are paying more than the CD, rather than just paying for something that is the same as a cd (psychologically) just in a downloadable format.
The irony of 128k aac, is there are now podcast shows (such as mine) that remix songs that are of higher quality than itunes actually sells. I picked 192k aac as that was the limit of me being able to tell (and bandwidth is dirt cheap, lets face it). For storage, i rip at 320k mp3 (non vbr), i think we are almost at the point where just saving to FLAC is feasible since drive space is practically free.
Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed?
Yes
Ripping CDs and getting all the tags set right is such a hassle that I only wanted to do it once. So, I have a media server with lossless FLACs with all my CDs. You can fit about 3 CDs/GB and with 300 GB drives being about $100, why wouldn't you store it losslessly? These are also what gets played on my mid-range audiophile quality home system.
Then, for the 10GB iPod I received as a hand-me-down, I use MP3. Would rather use Ogg, but I can't. These are generated in batch mode from the FLAC, so it's easy. Later on down the line when we've got 200 GB "iPods" what play ogg or even flac, I can use that easily.
Next stage is to buy another HD so I can back up all the ripped CDs. As I said, I only want to do it once!
The Shuffle supports Apple Lossless? It isn't listed in their specs.
The only reason I stopped buying from iTunes is the poor audio quality the results from over-compressing the music. I'd pay a little bit more for higher quality, or even better, losses, audio.
I put lossless content on my iPod sometimes. The main problem is battery life.
Yeah, lossless content can be compressed, but it's not compressed as well as it would be with lossy compression. So, on my iPod, the hard drive spends a lot more time working when I listen to lossless content. The result is a significantly lowered battery life. Go ahead and test this yourself if you have an iPod, or other drive-based MP3 player.
It's not as bad as it is with completely uncompressed content, but it's a good deal worse than it is with AAC and MP3 content.
IMO, lossless is the right choice for media centers and other applications that are able to draw power externally, and lossy is the right choice for battery-powered playback.
"You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means."
.zip are good for data files. Otherwise, they would be toast. You can't compress Excel spreadsheets, etc. with a lossy compressor because the original has to be restored intact. The same can be true for image or audio files. "Lossy/lossless" refers to compression, not encoding!
You're confusing fidelity with compression loss, I see this all the time. "Lossless" doesn't refer to fidelity to the source material-- it simply means that when you decompress, you get back out exactly what you put in, GUARANTEED.
Fidelity is a separate issue. For example, you have to quantize the audio when you digitize it. Because it's discrete information about a continuous waveform, you will inevitably lose some fidelity. However, you can easily sample at a resolution beyond the ability of the amplifier to reproduce it accurately, so that's not really an issue. This isn't "compression", it's just encoding.
Now, you compress the encoded audio with a lossless compressor. The digital waveform you get when you decompress will be exactly the same as the original sampled data, bit-for-bit. You can losslessly compress a low-fidelity original and get it back intact. It will take up just as much space.
If you compress with a lossy compressor, you toss out some information for the sake of greater compression ratios. This may lead to further reduction in fidelity, but that has nothing to do with the fidelity of the original encoding. You have to re-encode to get this kind of compression, and you discard the original encoding.
"Lossless" compressors such as
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled banter.
I buy from iTunes but not in large quantity. That would change if I had the option of buying the original non-lossy version. I would also pay to use an option that said "download the non-lossy tracks for this album today and receive the retail CD in the mail later". That way, if I want the whole album, I could also get the liner notes and photos for our CD collection as well as, in effect, a backup of the music. I would also like downloaded tracks to include all the composer information found on the retail package. Often I have to add them so I can search by author when I want to. That way iTunes also becomes an information database.
I would use these options even more if I could buy albums from obscure wind and brass bands across the world. We have a large collection of legally-purchased CDs, many of them have groups we'd never get to hear of if we didn't travel and bring them home with us. Why shouldn't the internet provide this?
My wife and I can hear the difference between even 320 AAC and Apple Lossless with the music we usually listen to. AAC is pretty good, but in blind testing we can hear the difference. We listen to wind bands and orchestras and vocalists a lot. We can't explain what we are hearing, but when asked "which sounds better" we pick the non-lossy version every time. We are both musicians who play wind instruments so perhaps we listen for the joy of the sound color itself more than some people do.
While this is up: Are there any portable devices that support FLAC? Or any that supports a firmware upgrade or software upgrade such that FLAC will be available?
I don't get it... Why wouldn't you compress? The space saved is always worth it and even audiophiles can accept higher quality compressions -- especially if you have a good enough player to support FLAC or other lossless formats (I do.) Yet, the amount of music in the world will always be greater than the amount of storage you have available, so it will remain true that for every bit of compression you use, you can fit a little bit more music onto your player. I guess if you just listen to the same music all the time that's no big deal, but, most of us need variety, so need to have a player full of various different musics and being limited to a smaller amount of music is always a bad thing for us.
No!
Why should I pay more to get the non-downsampled version of a music I bought?
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC
* http://flac.sourceforge.net/
Folks here are concentrating too much on listening rather than archiving. In my 33 year lifespan, I've seen vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, dvd's, DVD-A, SACD, and downloads come and go as formats. The reason I want lossless audio is not so that I can listen to it, but so that I can archive it. Sure, CD quality audio can't truly be considered lossless, but for most material, it is the best quality we've got that can be duplicated bit for bit. Sure, I've got a few hi-def audio disks in both DVD-A and SACD, but for the most part, my library is 16bit/44.1Khz. I don't expect that I'm likely to see sudden release of a higher quality digital format any time soon, so CD quality is the best I'm likely to see for most of the material in my library in my lifetime.
Given that I am 100% positive I will see at least 10 format changes in the years to come, I want to archive my cd quality digital files so that I can use them as a source for subsequent transcoding. Go through a couple of serial lossy encodings and it will sound way worse than analog to analog copies. Which is exactly why I don't want to download a 128kbit lossy compressed file. I would surely pay a little extra for losslessly compressed audio, but the music industry will never allow it because they are counting on selling the same music to me several more times during my life. I intend to do everything I can to stop them. That means archiving the 2,000+ cd's in my collection in a lossless format and only buying new material that can deliver 16bit/44.1khz or better.
And incidentally, I do listen with high quality headphones (Sennheiser HD650) when listening to headpones, through a high quality amp and DAC (headroom). I've got the FLAC files streaming around the house to various squeezeboxes, one of which is plugged into a very nice home stereo - probably not audiophile quality to a true audiophile, but very, very nice, and lovingly constructed piece by piece over many years. I can most definitely hear the difference between FLAC and the lossy files I transcode to (192 VBR, mostly), although I could surely transcode to a larger size and get files whiich I couldn't differentiate. However, my complete library is already 100GB when transcoded to 192kbit, so it already won't fit on an ipod, and that doesn't include video or audiobooks. The two copies of the library occupy 600+GB on my NAS. I do listen to the entire library, at least in the context that I frequently have things on random and Iike to have the largest possible library to get random selections from, so I tend to keep my 120GB laptop USB drive in my bag with the lossy library on it.
So, it isn't about listening to 'audiophile' quality recordings. It is about archiving the best possible quality in order to futureproof my music collection, which also allows me to use lower quality files on my portable.
To call a "CD quality" download "lossless" just shows people haven't got a freakin' clue what "audiophile" really means.
If you want audiophile grade media, you need to go with SACD or DVD-Audio at much, much higher bitrates and resolutions than a crappy sounding CD.
So, emphatically NO, I would not pay extra for a CD-quality PCM stream. I wouldn't pay for any degraded media downloads, regardless of format. Even buying a CD is something I think about before plunking down any cash.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Ahh, but you will find that wine ratings are reproducible (blindly) to a much higher extent than audiophile ratings of esoteric equipment.
It doesn't matter how meticulously cared the LP is, its quality is below that of a CD. Find the best vinyl pick-up ever made, it will not reach the levels of distortion and noise that the average CD player will give you.
The basic mistake is when people think "digital sound is quantized, analog sound has infinite resolution". That's not true, because nature itself is quantized. Analog sound has limited resolution because electric current is carried by electrons, you cannot have a fraction of an electron. In any good electronic engineering course there's a subject called something like "Probabilistic Models" where one learns how to calculate the noise contributed by the random movement of individual electrons. Since in digital audio each bit is recorded with the full power available, even the least significant bit is far above the noise floor.
And then there's distortion. Vinyl is flexible, when the groove pushes the needle up, the needle has inertia and forces the vinyl surface slightly down. To make the needle point small enough to follow the high frequencies means the pressure on the tip is very high, even if the total force is less than a gram. There are some ultra-high-cost turntables that read the groove by a reflected laser beam, but those are sensitive to reflectance variations in the vinyl itself.
Reel-to-reel tape at high speeds (15 ips or more) is better than vinyl, but still not in the CD quality range. Magnetic tape is formed by discrete "domains", and therefore noisy. And the material in even the best magnetic cartridges has at leas some non-linearity which will distort the signal.
OTOH, digital sound can be encoded in such a way that the very small "quantization noise" is shifted out of the audible band, look up "Sigma-Delta modulation" to learn how this is done. With Sigma-Delta techniques, the resolution of the digital signal becomes effectively as infinite as a theoretically perfect analog signal. If you look into the datasheets for the A/D and D/A converter chips used for audio, you'll see that most of them use Sigma-Delta.
But, in the end, the highest source of distortion that most people will find in their sound equipment is the final stage, where the electric signal is converted to air vibrations. Loudspeakers and headphones, even of the best quality, have surprisingly high distortion figures.
Since it seems you fooled your mods with handwaving, I'm going to explain what you mean and why you're wrong.
Taking an analog signal and representing it digitally is an application of Nyquist-Shannon sampling. The important bit to understand (for those of you who've never heard of it), is that the Nyquist rate is twice that of the sampling rate you want to record.
A 44.1Khz sampling rate perfectly records a 22.05Khz signal, 48 Khz does 24Khz, etc. Human hearing peaks out at 20Khz for most people, and many people spend a good chunk of their life destroying their upper hearing range with various tools (rock concerts, overly loud headphones, etc) anyway. 48Khz is marginally better, but 44Khz is more than enough to sample anything most people can hear perfectly.
"Let's not perpetrate the myth that music can be recorded losslessly in the first place. All sampling is lossy." -- so, since we're directly sampling (sector-by-sector) the raw bit values, or sampling a perfect reconstruction of a 22Khz signal, there is no loss either way (although the 2nd one has to deal with cables and other noise in the electrical system, since you pass through DAC -- analog -- ADC). At least, not loss humans can hear.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The fair price for recorded music, compressed or not, lossy or not, is ZERO. That is the only amount that I am willing to pay for recorded music and I will get my recorded music for free no matter what. I will also help others in getting their recorded music for the same price. With the technical edge squarely on our side, laws passed to the contrary are irrelevant and therefore null and void. Period.
The only music I am willing to pay for is live performance. People need to be compensated for their work. No argument about that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the article:
WAV, a "lossless" compression format
From the parent poster:
Wav is not a lossless format.
Yes, it is. If you're going to claim that it's not lossless because it doesn't capture the vibrations of the air absolutely perfectly, then tape, vinyl, and eardrums are all lossy, and therefore there is no need for the word "lossless" because nothing actually is. Some might call that nitpicking. It counts as lossless because it's not going out of its way to remove things that people allegadly cannot detect anyway, and because you can reconstruct the recording of the CD bit for bit.
If you want to nitpick, what wav isn't is compression - it's just a very long list of the positions the speaker cone needs to get into, raw and uncompressed.
Most people cannot tell 192kbps from uncompressed. However, I can tell 192kbps vs uncompressed.
At 4:1, it becomes difficult for me to tell.
I work at a radio station, we just went fully uncompressed with our entire library. 1000 songs take up about 40 gigs. That's not bad. Not bad at all, and really worth it for the difference in our overall sound.
We sound much louder, dynamic, punchy, and clearer.
In the future, compression will be totally unnecessary unless you're short on storage, or if it's a bandwidth issue.
Not as far as the the human ear is concerned, anyway. We humans can only hear in the range of 2 kHz to 20 kHz. Nyquist's theorem says that an A/D conversion will be lossless if and only if the sampling frequency is at least twice the bandwidth. For a CD sampled at 44 kHz, this is not a problem, unless you can hear above 22 kHz (which almost no one can).
I believe that this guys priorities are a little messed up. We should be focusing on lowering the noise floor, increasing the dynamic range, increasing the sampling rate, and getting the music industry to stop producing albums that are ultra compressed and "loud". You're not going to get decent fidelity out of an iPod when it is limited to 16 bit output and a 44.1/48khz sampling rate with a -90db noise floor. We need 24/96 players with a -110db noise floor, and a decent set of ear buds. Not that it would matter for consumers that listen to the typical tizz and boom being produced today.
So you think we should replace CDs with a higher fidelity format (such as DVD-A or SACD), then convince everyone to listen to music with a greater dynamic range? I think your priorities are also misplaced. CDs are rapidly becoming replaced by a lower fidelity format, because the public seem to prefer convenience to fidelity. Although 128kbps MP3 and AAC files don't sound as good as CD audio, most people don't care because they're listening to heavily compressed music with hardly any dynamic range at all. Until the day when classical music is higher in the charts than pop music, or pop music evolves in a more interesting direction (which, given the nature that it's marketed at people who don't like to listen to music all the time for its own sake, it probably won't do), there's no point in trying to convince the masses to use a higher fidelity format. They won't personally benefit from it.
What really matters is having a good quality signal in the first place from which to encode into the format you require.
Losslessly-compressed (or uncompressed) CD quality audio is a nice starting point, I find. Yes, I can hear the difference between low bit rate MP3 and OGG/Vorbis and CD.
Lossy compression introduces "artifacts" into the signal, much in the same way as JPEG compression does with images. If you have an MP3 file and wish to convert it to another lossy format, the signal you're starting from already contains artifacts and is missing other data which will be emphasised in the new signal following the conversion. If you've heard an MP3 that has been uncompressed and recompressed a couple of times it sounds absolutely terrible, dull and hissy.
I've been listening to some old analogue cassettes recently, having only listened to digital music for months. It's amazing how bad it sounds. I'm glad things have moved on.
However, they days of lossy compression are nearing an end, thankfully. Flash memory is very cheap nowadays, and fat Internet connections are becoming ubiquitous. There is no need for lossy compression any more. We don't need to make the files that small.
I buy CDs and rip to FLAC.
Stick Men
Just before anyone tries this, it's probably worth pointing out that speakers are essentially big magnets, so magnetically levitating them probably isn't a good idea. The same goes for leaving tapes or any other magnetic media next to speakers. The sand bags and Faraday cage should be OK though. :)
I remember the article awhile back from here on slashdot.m l?tid=141&tid=188
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/01/1533235.sht
Unfortunately, the original article is dead. A guy analyzed various cd's from rush from 1984 to 2002. Somewhere along the lines in the music biz, it was decided louder is always better. So the overall loudness of a track gets increased to a point where it kills the dynamic range. The article was great at visually demonstrating this but I can't find a mirror.
"Doesn't sound too bad, and if I really want to hear my music losslessly I can just go to the CDs on my shelf. Done."
Actually, that's not the point. If you own the CD, then you always have the "reference" sound that you can re-encrypt to any format that comes along. I do that myself. It sounds fine, and on earphones in the gym, you can't hear the difference. In fact, I've let iTunes re-encode some WMA files and they're fine on the headphones.
The trouble is if you go to Apple, but it in aac (m4p) at 128, and you either (a) decide 128 isn't good enough or (b) some new format becomes popular. YOu can't really do anything about it at that point. If you re-encode, it certainly won't sound *better*
But I recently ran into a dilemma. I finally connected my iPod to a good stereo that I just set up in my office and 128kb is very "fm-like". So I experimented and on good speakers, I need to go up to 192 or higher. So now I either live with sound that isn't that good (which will drive me crazy over time), or do I reencode the CD, which is drudge work to do a couple of hundred CD's not to mention the fact that I'll give up almost half my storage space.
But at least I have the option of re-encoding. If I buy a locked in format, that option is gone.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I'm a musician in my spare time, and pretty much have noticed that other musicians really don't care much as to the Quality of the recording that they listen to. Recording songs in a studio is an exception, but what I've noticed is that many of my friends just listen to their music on crappy boom boxes, etc. Is it a function of being poor - nope haven't seen that. But what I have noticed is that a majority of "audiophiles" are not musicians. Yes, of course we'll see the few exceptions, to prove a point, but generally musicians are interested in the chord progression, melody, rhythm, instrumentation, etc. The recording quality is the last thing we care about when listening to a song.
..........FULL STOP.
No, I wouldn't pay extra for lossless format files. I think the music should always be available in both lossless and lossy formats for the exact same price. People can then decide what they want. Most people would choose lossy anyway because they don't want to make conversions and they want the easiest way to get as much music as possible on their iPods.
Another point nobody seems to have made - most of the "real" music, which is rock and rolls from the 60's and 70's (and early 80's, if we stretch it) was created with state-of-the-art recording equipment for its time. The art just wasn't in a good state. With a CD like "The Best of CCR" you can hear the progression from the earliest to the latest songs as the background hiss slowly disappears with the coming of better and better equipment. Remember when CD's had that AAD or ADD labels?
"Quality" older music, like the Beatles stuff, comes from serious digital post-processing before the CD was released. So, this suggests all we need is a digital "Music Massager" box and anything will sound good no matter how it was recorded. The "vinyl is warmer" arguement, IIRC, is attributed to the practice of using record master tapes to press CDs. The record master had the highs boosted to compensate for the inadequacies of the vinyl-needle sound repoduction process - which fell off at high frequencies. Once this was corrected (CD decodes all frequncies at the same volume) CD's sound much better.
K-Fed rap in glorious lossless whatever is still crap.
I have not done any serious tests, but I have found that most people (including myself) don't notice much difference between CD's and 128K MP3's.
I remember how a friend was convinced to buy his first CD player. We were listening to a brand new CD digital recording of Beethoven piano music. It was so clear, you could hear the piano pedals squeek as they were pushed. At that time, on most record players you could hear the needle grinding through the groove.
This is my other concern. Once the quality of something reaches near perfection, where's the need to improve? Why bother? stereo or surround is fine for most people (Remember failed quadrophonic?). CD is almost perfect and was 100 times better than vinyl in every way that mattered - quality, durability, convenience. Thus, attempts to sell an improvement on CD's have failed - how many people buy that SuperCD or AudioDVD stuff? The only thing that has improved on CD's is digital - for convenience and portability.
"Using up to date encoders, for the vast majority of people, for the vast majority of tracks, 128 kbps is indistinguishable from source."
Particularly when listening on cheap speakers that are connected to a PC.
I mean, I wish I could listen to 64kb/s encoded music and say "sounds just like source" because it would be cheaper all around and I would be happy.
A perfect example (to me) is Sirius satellite. I like their programming. But their bit rates are so low that it sounds like shortwave radio. I have their service in the car, and if not for the talk stations I'd drop them. You certainly can't listen to music that poorly rendered and enjoy it. On the other hand, I hear people telling me "it's CD quality", so I suspect there are some people who really can't hear the difference. God bless them, they're much happier overall than I am.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Word.
Finally someone who makes some sense in this discussion. I agree with most points you made (I will disagree with one a bit further down). "One cannot hear a difference" is one of the most annoying /. memes to me, regardless of whether it is applied to lossy codecs or good audio equipment in general.
/. because it has been bugging me a long time: /. anymore? Sound recording and reproduction (that is, turning a complex air vibration into an electric current, storing it in some form, and later turning it back into an air vibration again that sounds as close to the original as possible despite this happening in a completely different room situation) is an extremely complex topic. And, like it or not, there is still a significant analogue part to this, and will be for the foreseeable future. This means that you have to live with the difficulty of interacting with the real world in a less deterministic way. Only recently has it become possible to simulate microphones, amps, and speakers digitally, and sound reproduction has benefited tremendously, especially by making good gear much cheaper. But until then the only way to become better was to design analogue gear and try it out, relying on basic measuring equipment and your ears to assess the sound quality. This IMHO is hardcore geekdom worthy of honorable mention on /. and not ridicule. There were and are serious practitioners out there like Nelson Pass or the naim guys who have dedicated d
About lossyness:
I agree with you that ears can be trained, and that you won't miss stuff if you don't know it should be there in the first place, or don't care whether it is. When I decided how I want to encode my music I did a quite extensive test and I found that to me even high-bitrate mp3 encodings made by lame can sound noticeably different from the CD. For example, I encoded the first track of Mike Watt's Contemplating the Engine Room CD. It starts with an e-bass solo, and using reasonable lame presets there were no artifacts and I certainly could hear the notes played. Somebody expecting nothing more will probably be happy with the compressed sound. However when you know how a bass can sound and listen to the CD, you realize that there is so much more in Watt's bass sound: it is full of harmonics that make the bass come alive and turn it into the recognizable Watt bass in the first place. And these harmonics are gone even in the highest lame preset. (And oggenc adds a nasty hiss which makes the song completely unlistenable.)
About equipment:
You said "All of the high end audio products generally have no benifit for the average consumer, but in a studio setting, when trained ears are listening, that expensive gear tends to be more valued", and that's where I disagree a bit because you make it sound as if only a professional sound person could appreciate good gear. I's agree that someone who is not particularly interested in music has no need for good gear. That's pretty obvious. If you're going to listen to music only as background noise while cooking, go with the cheap stuff by all means.
However I would argue that everyone who likes music and spends time actually listening to it will profit from good gear. To everyone who doubts that I can just recommend to grab a few favorite CDs and make an appointment at a good hifi shop for a listening session. "Good" means "a shop that has solid equipment from the lower to very high price ranges, but that will not rip you off by trying to sell you air conditioners."
Not directed at you, but I need to say this once on
To those discussion contributors who lose all ability to differentiate when they hear the word "audiophile": one cannot deny that wackos exist in this field. On the other hand, since when is being an analog geek not allowed on
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I'd definitely pay extra for lossy, so when I convert it to the non-drm'd format of my choice (usually vorbis) I don't have to take the quality hit of running it through 2 lossies.
The Nyquist rate, or twice the highest frequency, is adequate for a signal that doesn't change. However, audio consists of a set of frequencies that are constantly changing, and this reduces the highest frequency that is accurately represented at a given sampling rate.
While I don't have any reference to give you, I find it a matter of common sense. If you sample a 1hz signal @ 2hz, you'll see consistent peaks & valleys, and the signal can be assumed almost immediately, after 3 samples (ignoring issues of quantized amplitude sensitivity over time). If you sample a 0.9hz signal @ 2hz, you'll see peaks & valleys alternating as before, but their amplitudes are both approaching zero, then cross zero, approach peak, and repeat. After analyzing this signal for a duration, you could assume it was a 0.9hz signal because of the relationship between the rate of amplitude change and the rate at which those amplitudes cross zero.. although this also assumes that you'd never see a 1hz signal simply increasing and decreasing amplitude at that same rate - considering this condition places stipulations on both frequency AND amplitude over time, whereas a 0.9hz signal only stipulates the frequency over time, we can only make a definitive assumption if we know the frequency doesn't change over time.
Hence, considering the frequencies are changing over time, we can't possibly accurately reconstruct an audio signal using a sample rate at twice the highest frequency, unless you get very lucky. As we consider a lower and lower highest frequency, our chosen sampling rate becomes more and more accurate, though I don't believe you ever reach perfect 100% reconstruction because of the irrational nature of true time-varying frequencies. One could, theoretically, calculate the accuracy of a given sampling rate for a given maximum frequency - I'm sure someone has at some point.
In fact you could analyze the typical audio signals that are digitized today, and develop some rough statistical analysis of how often a given frequency changes at a rate that could be interpreted as another frequency. This would likely vary depending on the individual frequency, the relative location within a song, and the musical genre. You could use these numbers to select an appropriate sampling rate to achieve N% accuracy of frequencies up to a X-hz maximum.
"A 44.1Khz sampling rate perfectly records a 22.05Khz signal, 48 Khz does 24Khz, etc."
Er, no. Two samples per period of a waveform is nowhere near perfect. The 2:1 ratio rule between sampling and f(max) is an aliasing issue, not a quality one.
A common mistake, though a little disappointing to see it in a headline written by the Taco Man.
Here's what a lot of people don't get: it's possible to compress data without discarding any of it. You just transform to a scheme that doesn't use 8 bits for every byte. Byte values that are extremely common (like the letter "e" in a word processor file) use fewer bits, while less common values have more. That, in an oversimplified nutshell, is lossless compression.
To understand lossy compression, you have to understand that the human brain is really good at putting in data that should be there but actually isn't. For example, everybody has a defect in their eyes that creates a blind spot in their field of vision. Usually it doesn't matter, because your eyes are always moving. But if you stare at a fixed point, your brain adds in the missing details you should be seeing. And sometimes it gets it wrong.
Lossy formats like JPEG, MPEG, and MP3 all discard some of the data they convert. They use mathematical formulas to select data that can theoretically be spared because the human brain will just interpolate it back. In practice, the perceived quality of the image or sound depends on the acuity of the audience and the amount of data discarded. Exactly how much data gets discarded is determined by a parameter which is usually an adjustable software parameter. It's instructive to fiddle with the parameter when you save a JPEG or rip a CD.
I feel like running some tests of my own, but all my music is from CDs -- even losslessly compressed, it's still only 16bit / 44khz to start with. Does anyone know where I can get some super-high quality source material from? (24bit, 96khz, flac; or something like that)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Yawn...
Compressed at .5 wps (word per sentence), error correction enabled
"The problem that sampling perfect, i.e. quantisation. when a conversion, do things: first sampling, second quantization. the leads information, even the given the rate. summarise: digital representation a limited does have information do perfect of original, signal."
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The article confuses many terms and standards. The following is my amateur understanding, based on substantial research a few years ago:
Almost all digital audio you hear, including on CDs, is recorded using Pulse Code Modulation (PCM).
Audio on CDs (CD-DA or "Compact Disc Digital Audio") is stored using the Red Book Audio standard.
A WAV file does not reproduce the bits on the CD; it reproduces the bits output by the CD reader. The Red Book standard uses out-of-order and redundant bits to preserve integrity; the reader interprets the Red Book data into a simpler stream of bits, like WAV.
By the way, if you want to get a perfect rip of a CD, try Exact Audio Copy (EAC).
I think we should be focusing on eliminating poverty, disease, famine, exploitation, and oppression.
[This message has been brought to you by Idealist Pricks Taking Things Way Out Of Context, Ltd.]
You mean this I think.
t m
http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicdeath.h
As a huge classical music lover, I could spend thousands of dollars buying every CD recording of Bach's works and still not have the entire collection. Let's not forget Mozart, Haydn, Vivaldi, etc. Naturally, I want to be snobbish, exacting and demand the highest possible format obtainable. However, I refuse to deprive myself of excellent music because I cannot afford to purchase every CD, so what do I do? Here is a plan that works well for me:
1. "piecemeal" my collection bit by bit using my subscription to eMusic.com. Their lossy mp3 files are good enough for my needs at the moment, and their classical selection is practically unlimited. It costs about $10/month for 40 high-quality mp3 files. (No DRM, XP/IE requirements, etc)
2. Puchase new CDs from time to time to replace the mp3 files I most enjoy and rip them to my preferred OGG Vorbis format.
This allows me to collect the music I love immediately, enjoy it extensively and know that I'll eventually replace them with true CD quality files as my budget allows for it. About half my collection is "backed" by CD. One might argue that the $10 monthly expense could be applied towards purchasing CDs, but I consider it justified.
Your situation may be different.
A typical MP3 is better than the next most common format--FM radio--but I don't remember hearing people bitching about FM radio for the last few decades.
A better question: are audiophiles *ever* happy? I think the answer is "no." Gamers are never happy with how fast their rigs are, hot rodders want better cars, horny teens want more sex, hippies want more wood chips in their granola, etc etc etc. Basically, most people are never happy with what's most important to them.
And this particular question is as dumb as they come. A 6-GB MP3 player held a certain number of 128k MP3s. A 60 GB player today holds the same number of WAVs or AIFFs. So the answer, OBVIOUSLY, is "Yes, you can carry around perfect CD-quality songs." The only question is how many. Not enough? Wait a couple years.
Next?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
When carrying wax cylinder music, it's important to not compress my music, or it becomes so lossy I lose it.
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/
Oh You POS
We are not going to start debating the content of The Christian Science Monitor here.
If we don't nip this in the bud, then I fully expect to log on tomorrow to see:
"Is Vista truly the manifestation of Lucifer separating the masses for the rapture?"
"Which Linux distibution would Jesus roll with?"
"Does that papal blessing of his powerbook actually signify the transubstantiation of the Li-Ion cell to the mitochondrials of the holy spirit?"
Once digital recorders became widely available and we started moving this stuff into the computer environment, it was possible to do lossless coding using Shorten or later FLAC, or you re-create the authentic taper experience by getting a 128kbps MP3 file converted from some other format using a lousy compression program, thus the popularity of passing around lossless copies and doing any lossy compression for your own music player only.
Jerry's been gone these last 11 years, but there are a number of other bands that tour and allow tapers, and there's a lot of concert material available. Bittorrent makes it fairly practical to actually distribute files online now, and sites like e-tree.org are big on this technology.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Rather than get caught up in the philosophy of digitally representing a sound wave, let's define "lossless" as a sampling rate and precision that matches the CD that is commercially released. True, this is not purely lossless because digitizing analog is always lossy to some extent, but we need to choose a practical cut-off point.
If a technique can produce a bit stream that matches the original CD, then we will call it "non-lossy", even if it is stored more compactly using Huffman encoding, etc. Thus, if the original stream is 101101011..etc., that stream can be recreated as that again regardless of the lossless compression technique.
Lossy is going to compress much better than lossless compression, but one could *not* recreate the original 101101011... string. It is only an approximation of the original sound and thus the 1's and 0's will be different.
Lossless compression techniques focus bit-per-bit on saving space by representing repetition in more compact formats, such as saying "1011 is repeated 8 times here" instead of actually repeating it 8 times.
Lossy compression, on the other hand, tends to use an abstraction of what is being represented, such as treating it as music or images and ridding information that does not significantly change how *humans* perceive it. Thus, lossy tends to make some assumptions about human psychology and physiology to know what can be cut out without much notice. Dogs or aliens may perhaps notice problems and artifacts much more than humans because the lossy compression that we use is not tuned for dogs and aliens.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm not sure if all of this has been posted before, but this is my take:
First, compression does not have to be lossy. There exist lossless codecs, the major open-source one being FLAC. But there are also more proprietary, DRM-supporting formats like Apple Lossless and WMA Lossless.
Second, the modern lossy compression algorithms, when used with a quality encoder, can produce relatively high quality audio at reasonable bit rates (~128 to ~192kbps). Variable bit rate is inherently better, but the encoder is what makes the difference. LAME produces quality MP3, aoTuV produces quality Vorbis, Nero produces quality AAC, etc. For most people, lossy compression is not something to scorn--it can generally produce high-quality audio at a fraction of the bit rate of CDs (1411kbps), and barely a hint of the uber-quality 32-bit float, 96kHz audio that makes digital audiophiles drool (over 6000kbps).
As for the issue of whether or not lossless audio should be available from iTunes and the like, I think they avoid it because of the fear that some users will always use just lossless--which will certainly use more bandwidth (even the best lossless compression usually only cuts the bit rate by 50%). Now, it might not be a bad idea to sell two "versions" of the song--say 0.99 USD for just the lossy, 1.49 USD for the option of either. They get more money to pay for more bandwidth, and users who want the lossless can get it, albeit on a song-per-song basis.
I also think they should offer more formats, either lossy or lossless, but that's another discussion.
I think every audiophile would agree that they'd rather listen to an MP3 of bach vs DVD audio of britney spears and the other pop dreck of today that pretends to be called music.
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
Be wary of buying "high end" audio equipment. Most of it is not worth the money and the high cost far outweighs whatever baloney benefits the salesman tries to push on you. A salesman at Best Buy was trying to sell me an SACD player a while back, claiming incredible "sonic-integrity," whatever the crap that means, because of a 128 KHz frequency spectrum. Sure, it might have more bulk to it's audio signal, but the human ear tops out at about 22 KHz, and as you age, you lose much of that. My old man has a nice, single speaker bose station that interfaces with his IPod, and, even at higher volumes, compressed audio still sounds very good.
Tangentively: as males age, they lose their highs, and females, their lows. Females get higher pitched voices as they age, and males lower as a result. Evolution's cool like that.
The only real thing you should be worried about when buying an audio system is the amplifier. And even then, you don't need some mumbo-jumbo audiophile who pays $60 for a 4-foot stretch of monster cable to give you advice. He/She probably could, though. There's a reason most electronics stores have displays set up where you can test out audio equipment; If it sounds good, and you like it, that's all that matters. Don't let so called "sound engineers" tell you that listening on something that costs less than a new Mercedes Benz is heretical. You want to listen to the music for the sake of the music itself, not for the equipment.
By definition its just a *sample* of the real thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No, that's not the one. As I mentioned the article I referenced went through examples exclusively from rush. I wish I kept the article as it was really informative. But thank you for this one as well, Anyone just skimming over it can visually see how they are ruining cds.
So again I ask what does lossless matter when the fidelity has already been seriously compromised? And maybe even more insidious, I read an article about one of the first cd's done in sacd was a rolling stone album, and unlike the cd version, it was mastered properly with the dynamic range intact.
Unless you're dealing with a recording that was recorded and mixed at 24/96 PCM and then mastered down to CDDA, which runs at 16/44 PCM. The mastering involves a lossy compression process: it raises the noise floor to roughly -93 dBFS, loses all frequencies above the brick wall filter at 20-22 kHz, and reduces the data rate by 77 percent.
Hello!?!? Bueller? Parent's body text doesn't support its summary/conclusion. What parent wrote suggests that he would be willing to pay MORE for CD quality audio from iTunes if they offered it.
Deconstruction follows.
Translation: A typical CDs costs slightly more than buying all their tracks on iTunes (implied: because most CDs have some tracks that aren't worth buying from iTunes).
Translation: That's because CDs are worth more to me than iTunes.
Translation: I try not to buy CDs that are worth less to me than the sum of their songs on iTunes.
Translation: Don't get me wrong: I understand the value that iTunes provides (implied: I wish iTunes offered lossless and DRMless music).
Translation: CDs a better value than iTunes for my personal music preferences.
Translation: But CDs cost more (of my time), so sometimes I turn into a cheap bastard and pirate the MP3 (implied: I really wish iTunes offered lossless and DRMless music, because then I wouldn't have to resort to piracy).
Translation: If iTunes offered lossless CD quality music without DRM, I'd be willing to pay MORE for it.
Professional recording studio equipment may measure the sound coming from the vocalist at 24 bits, 96 kHz. The mastering process converts this down to 16 bits, 44 kHz. How is this not lossy compression of a signal?
>>A 44.1Khz sampling rate perfectly records a 22.05Khz signal
... Sampling without aliasing is not a perfect recording.
>NO IT DOESN'T.
There's no musical signal allowed into the analog/digital converter at the
22.05 kHz frequency, because filtering must remove all/almost all of 22.06
kHz and the filters aren't abrupt.
And, if it was the case t hat you needed 22.05 kHz digitized, remember
that you have (equally important) terms
A Sin(22.05 kHz *t) + B Cos(22.05 kHz *t)
and a sampling at 0 and 180 degrees (i.e. two samples per cycle) will
measure B and never measure any value for A.
The Nyquist limit isn't a 'it's perfect-here' point, it's a 'never-above-here' limit.
You lose half the information at the Nyquist frequency in this example.
Audiophiles want to talk about the limit, but engineers just want the limit
to be above the musical reproduction range. The engineers win every time.
I'm a mathematician, I just cringe. A lot.
For portable music players, I'd venture that most of the time you're in a moderately noisy environment. Add to that a lighter pair of cans (though I suppose big expensive honkers would make really great earmuffs :P ) not being powered under optimal conditions (think you're getting a linear Class A amp? ;) ) and you're going to miss a lot of subtleties in the audio anyway.
Another issue is that a data converter with 16 digital pins is not always 16 bits. The ENOB is critically dependent on the design of supporting circuitry (temperature invariant bias, full scale inputs, etc.)
Are there people really worried about "lossless" portable music? I can understand caring if the copy you play on your home audio system is of the higest quality. As far as portability goes, as long as youre listening on headphones, does it really matter? Those crappy little earbud speakers arent exactly "hi-fi."
I will admit I am one who thinks a properly encoded 128kbps 44kHz mp3 sounds just dandy. I just can't understand the disconnect between demanding the highest quality source, only to pump it through the jalopy of speaker systems.
thats the problem. i'd like to buy the highest quality possible, and encode to whatever device/quality i have available at the time. that would give someone who will eventually buy a nicer stereo a bonus for buying quality, they can use it now, and benifit later. but drm slams the door shut on future uses really. imagine if cd's were drm'd, we wouldn't have ipods. sure you can buy hybrid sacds, but you can never in the future rip to a high quality audio player in your car or whatever you want in the future. and because its so restrictive the devices..the whole ecosystem required to make music easy and everywhere doesn't get built. these music companies effectively squeeze the life out of these high quality formats, they marginalize them to those willing to sit back and listen to albums one by one old fashioned style at home when really the people want ipod convenience.
and well, the music industry really wants you to have to rebuy your music for every format and device you own. they want to double triple quadrouple dip people. and so they continue their behavior that sabotages their own higher def formats..and we are still stuck with cds, when we could have been enjoying wide spread hd audio format years ago if they had only not copy protected the hell out of them. if they had set their format free it would have become a selling point, espif it were priced right, and easy use/compatability would have just made it the new default.
oh well the audiophile market also has a problem with price. as other technology prices go down and you get more for your dollar, speaker prices and tech remains rather stagnant, with prices based more on fashion industry type desirability than any real benchmarks. the really high end prices are practically arbitrary, its designer markup type nonsense. we have seen advances in computer audio sure, look at the bang for the buck change we've seen there in the last decade. but home audio? car audio? stagnant. especially car audio where advances are rare, look how long it took for those decks to get mp3 cd capability long after cheap portable players could do such things. anyways, all this is a barrier for people to experience get used to and then demand great sound.
It is not possible to express a sine wave as a combination of triangle waves. A sine wave by definition consists of a single frequency component. A triangle wave by definition consists of an infinite series of frequency components, one at each integer multiple of the fundamental. No matter how many triangle waves you sum up, you cannot end up with a waveform consisting of a single frequency component. The set of complex sine functions forms a basis for expressing any arbitrary continuous signal, triangle waves are not such a basis.
No it isn't, but perhaps he is SPECIFICALLY talking about Apple's implimentation.
Completely wrong. ASF is the container used by WMA and WMV files.
WMA is indeed the name of the audio codec, and WMV is a video codec.
He didn't say these were codecs. Included in your own quotation, he said: "audio file formats."
Yes it is. You'll get exactly the bits out that you put in. Your complaints are about DIGITAL SAMPLING OF ANALOG AUDIO AND HAVE NO SPECIFIC RELEVANCE TO WAV.
FLAC is not a lossless format. It is limited by in it's dynamic range (bits per sample) and sample rate. Compared to analog or a raw sound source, FLAC loses a lot of the sound.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Also, many of the older formats were not nearly as bad as you might think. Remember that when we listen to 78s we are hearing many decades worth of wear and cruft. Additionally, 78s are usually reproduced these days with entirely inappropriate reproduction curves on modern equipment. I recently heard some original 78s played back on a mechanical (i.e. non-electric) Victrola-style turntable in good condition, and the sound was remarkably clear. Quiet, but surprisingly pleasant.
-Aaron
Journey onward.
Mindawn (www.mindawn.com) has FLAC format for $8.99 a CD, which is lossless. Works on Linux, Mac and Windows (the client) and a nice assortment of music, including classical.
For all this talk about (digital information) compression, not many people seem to realize that dynamic range compression is typically waaay worse these days. Yes, it's a whole different kind of compression we're talking about here. And it affects the mastering almost all newer CDs, which is what we all use as the source for rips and (digital) compression. Regarding this matter, I found the writings of Bob Katz to be quite clear and enlightening.
magnetic grooves has been selling WAVs for a year and a half now. pretty sure they were the first actually
On another note: Why specify "portable?" I don't know of anyone that actually buys LP's any more, and I could've sworn that CD's are very much so portable.
I admit I only surf Slashdot at 4, but at that level, a search showed the word "live" has not come up in the discussion.
...and on and on. Sometimes I grab the controls and back up a few seconds when I lose a whole passage to a bus going by or plane overhead, but mostly I accept that the music is background and what I'm doing out there is foreground, suck it up.
If you really, really, want music quality, support live music. Quality is about more than the studio and the recording and the codec and the player. All those could be perfect and it still wouldn't be live music. The best classical recording I've ever heard doesn't *touch* a concert hall. (And our local orchestra is struggling to fill the seats. And I don't need to talk about how poor most rock musicians are.) I think a lot of guys (emphasis on "guys") like to go overboard with their music technology more for bragging rights than because they could actually pass a double-blind test to distinguish their beloved perfect sound system from something that costs a quarter as much money and time and trouble.
I think the guy who actually gets out of the house and hits a club (or a concert hall) and hears live music in all its imperfect, bouncing-off-the-walls glory has more bragging rights than the lot of them.
Second, the question is about PORTABLE music. I see ZERO point in spending effort on high-quality sound for my portable. I hate cranking the thing way up, and even with those keen soft-silicon noise-blocking ear buds, the music is usually competing with:
a) traffic
b) wind
c) my own feet thumping down as I run
d) the sound of the earbud's wire rubbing against my clothes
"Would you pay a few cents more to have lossless downloads from iTunes and other online music retailers?"
No, I won't buy any audio downloads until they're offered lossless.
Listen to Desperado ripped at 128kbps and then tell me you can't hear the difference between that and a cd. For the record, I'm hard-of-hearing and if I can hear the 'flattening' of the guitar solos then I'm pretty sure you will too (unless you're really deaf.)
I wouldn't care about quality for some stuff but as an Eagles fan I definitely care when it's not up to scratch. However, each of us have our own favourites so everything should be lossless. It's not just audiophiles who care.
10 LET M$ = "Microsoft": REM subject length is limited
You can't compress Excel spreadsheets, etc. with a lossy compressor because the original has to be restored intact.There are levels of "intact" that we are prepared to deal with. Exporting a .xls or .doc file to another format is lossy, but it often preserves just enough for the file to be useful.
Internet Archive link:
Over the Limit
It's slow but it works. Most of the images are still there, too.
It's a FLAC Jihad! Where have you all been? I spent about $20,000 on my two channel audio system and swear by FLAC. I use a expensive Bel-Canto DAC (http://www.belcantodesign.com) and a rather inexpensive TCP/IP based transport which supports FLAC natively (http://www.slimdevices.com). FLAC is the future! Even Les Claypool, Metallica and Phish use it now (yes indeed, even Lars has bowed down to teh FLAC). The .wav is over, FLAC has won over the hearts and minds of at least the entry level audiophile. The others, well they are still on deep grain vinyl and tubes :)
:P I only rip what I buy into FLAC!
We'll see what Blu-Ray and HD-DVD can do for music. Will I have to upgrade my DAC from 24bit/192khz to something higher or am I safe!
The CD was and is "perfect sound forever", FLAC just makes it more convenient. Tags and all that metadata do wonders for the music historian
By "cut out the costs", did you mean "shift them to the consumer"? A lot of people still don't have $630 per year for a computer with high speed Internet access.[1] This might change if record stores include kiosks to burn discs of independent music for people who don't have a computer.
More direct marketing should produce more money for artists, cost less money from consumers, right?That might happen once I can listen to Internet radio on the bus. The major labels drum up demand for their products at inflated prices by advertising their works through "independent promotion" (pronounced "peh-ee-oh-lah"), which too many local bands can't afford.
Presently most artists see maybe TEN PERCENT of the revenues from digital sales. Granted, that's a few percent better than major labels give for physical CD sales, but still the overwhelming majority of money goes to line the pockets of middlemenUnfortunately, the middlemen own the exclusive right to those radio frequencies that reach people in moving vehicles.
substandard usabilityIs Internet radio more usable than traditional radio or less usable than traditional radio?
[1] Calculations based on a $600 computer purchased every four years, and high speed Internet access at $40 per month.
this has been a pretty interesting page, but none of you are addressing MY real concerns: just how does one compress the Musikverein to carry it around?
hereyou go, sans pics - there is also this at Archive.org, but you may be waiting forever for the pics to load.... :)
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Perhaps you didn't notice the different formatting, to indicate I wasn't serious?
They are FLAC losses every bit as much as they are WAV losses. (ie. they aren't)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yes, I know there are other players available, and I know that the iPod supports lossless AIFF and with third-party hacks it can even be made to support stuff like FLAC, but that's a pain in the arse, which is the whole point. Firmware hacks and other players are inconvenient, and MP3 files are conveniently small so I can carry my entire library on the device. I normally compress music to 160kbps, as that's a good trade-off between quality and size. I certainly can't tell the difference between that and uncompressed music when I'm using earphones on the bus.
If I ever want them in a lossless format, I can easily re-rip the files from the original CDs.
I have made several purchases on the Apple iTunes Music Store...mainly a single or two and the occasional freebie of the week. But recently, I have stopped doing so. I have a relatively nice stereo at home and therefore enjoy listening to CDs over MP3s. As such, I find the "lower" prices on iTunes do not adequately reflect the difference in quality between CDs and the tracks received from iTunes. Compared to the amazon marketplace, its not much cheaper to buy music on iTunes...sometimes its even more expensive. As soon as Apple starts selling lossless quality tracks, I'll start buying full albums. The music industry is more to blame for this but it makes no sense to pay $1 per track for degraded quality music. Granted most people dont notice the difference...but the difference is there.
Its like buying a porsche with a 4 cylinder honda engine.....non-aficionados may never notice the difference....but its still there...and ud still feel cheated if u found out later on.
I dont really know why Apple doesnt offer the Lossless option....im guessing to save harddrive space on their own server farm. But like i said before, start selling quality better than MP3/AC4 and u'll gain me as a customer. Until then...ill stick with my 7-10 $ lossless CDs from the amazon marketplace.
Yes, if there is no DRM. Otherwise, I simply buy the CD and make my digital music myself. iTunes and similar efforts appeals to me not at all as long as they continue to pretend they have any right to limit how I use my purchased music on any machine, any number of machines, any kind of machines, that I own or wish to use. They have no such right; no law can give them any such right, because no such right EXISTS.
When you buy DRM, you're only screwing yourself. Compression isn't even a faint shadow of the problem that DRM is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Why am I guessing that the only people who care about this are the same ones that claim to be able to detect the difference between brand X and brand Y stereo cables (one having gold plated connectors)?
Look, I'm listening to music in a nonoptimal room, with a 20 year old Sony receiver, playing through 25 year old floor speakers I got from Sears both tucked oddly out of the way, with some crappy stereo cable I bought from radio shack (unshielded, OMFG!). It sounds wonderful. I sincerely believe that I won't miss a little of anything.
You mean I missed the 'click' of the key from the 3rd seat clarinet during the 2nd movement of the Moonlight Sonata? Heavens, I think I'll go commit ritual suicide.
Not everyone has (or wants) a $25,000 'temple of sound' for listening to music.
-Styopa
the rest of my message is compressed in such a way that it can only be read by cats.
Agreed... I just bought some really nice headphones for the first time. AT ART-550 I think? The quality difference is impressive, especially spatially. I can make out distinct sound sources very well even in the dense parts of songs. I have done some tests comparing original CD tracks to those encoded with OGG @ 200 and even with the nice headphones it is difficult to hear a difference, whereas the difference between headphones was very noticable. If there is one thing lacking in audio reproduction in general it is dynamic range. If you want a recording that has an average volume of 1/4 the maximum, to accomodate very loud sections, you have lost 2 bits of accuracy right there. On top of that, with the amplifier turned up high enough to accomodate the loud sections, the noise floor is closer to the quiet sections. I think that amplifiers that work similarly to the very high contrast displays I've read about, the ones that have backlighting which scales with the signal, along with high bitrate recordings, could greatly improve reproduction in this sense. (Either have the amplifier intelligently change its level and shift the noise floor up and down as peak volume changes throughout the recording somehow, or include a signal in the recording which controls the level of amplification of the audio signal, which could be fed to the amplifier) With the exception of classical recordings, this would be mostly useless, though. Most modern recordings have a lot of compression and are very normalized. I think most people prefer music that has a small dynamic range because they can keep it at a volume they like, one that's easy to hear but not too loud to disturb anyone else.
Of course you don't HAVE to use lossy compression, or any compression to put files on your DAP. Hard drives are big, and you can fit a lot of wav/flac music on a 60 or 80 gig player. However, a 256kbps VBR mp3 is just fine. If you're crazy, you can do 320kbps. I challenge anyone to tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and the original CD on the same stereo in a properly conducted, double-blind test. Don't give me that crap about a golden ear you audiophile nutcase. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. If you think otherwise, why not apply for James Randi's 1 million dollar prize? You'll win if I'm wrong.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
And what human being can hear above 22kHz?
Interesting question - nobody can hear about 22KHz, but many people can sense sound up to 30KHz or so.
Some of the tiny bones that make up your hearing system will sympathetically vibrate in the 26-30KHz range, and impart a signal to your tympanic membrane. We've grown up with it so it's hard to winnow out but we're used to it and miss it when we don't "hear" it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I have some who play in small wind quartets, where the slightest imperfection in their playing is obvious and transparent, and friends whos band played at CBGBs (R.I.P.) the birthplace of punk. My own personal experience incorporates both musical experiences(I played classical and noise punk).
..........FULL STOP.