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Why We Should Buy Music In FLAC
soodoo writes "We have plenty of HDD space and broadband internet. Why don't we demand full CD quality audio in an accessible format from online music stores? The advantage of lossless compression is not only the small audio quality improvement, but better future-proofing and converting capabilities. FLAC is a good, free and open format, well suited for this job."
Seriously, I'm not sure what's so complicated about this. It's not like CDs are that much more expensive than buying stuff electronically. Plus, you have a backup copy that's going to outlast whatever media you rip it onto anyway as long as you keep it physically safe. Plus you have the booklet that goes with it.
That's rather a good point. Personally i've always just used spotify free to stream my music but this has the fairly major disadvantage of only being 160kbps vorbis. I only own one album in FLAC form and have to admit you can hear the difference between it and some of my higher quality mp3 albums. The fact that it's an open format will help it be future proof as well. Win Win situation.
I'm a proud owner of a Rockboxed Sansa e250. However, if I kept the music I listen to regularly in FLAC, both the internal storage (2GB) and external microSD fall short. No, hotswapping isn't a good idea, especially if you're treating yourself to music going long distance. That's why I decided to settle for Ogg Vorbis - quality good enough that I don't hear a difference between the source and the compressed file (as proven by several long blind hearing tests), and file sizes that make my collection that much more managable.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Isn't the fact that it's "good, free, and open" the exact reasons the publishers wouldn't use it? It kinda flies in the face of them being tyrannical mongrels controlling the media distribution if customers can actually meaningfully use it.
While that is true, it doesn't matter due to how easily audio formats can be converted, unlike many analogies raised here about competing hardware formats.
I tried converting my entire mp3 library to FLAC and couldn't hear any difference. It's just audiophiles circlejerking. I bet you all use golden audio cables and $500 cable stands, too.
You drag your songs from your music library to your portable device, and your music player automatically converts them if it needs to. I'm not sure what hassle is involved here.
Portable support is not the point. Being able to batch encode is. I've been ripping my CDs for years. When I gave up on the whole OGG Vorbis thing and went back to MP3, no problem. When I switched to iTunes + iPhone, no problem encoding to AAC. No decrease in quality transcoding from one lossy format to another. No doubt I'll want to re-enocde again in the future if there is an improvement in the encoders.
CD sound is compressed and leaves out "unneeded" bits of audio because it had to be processed by very early and cheap computers. You might as well say MP3 quality. Lossless copies of a lossy media are NOT the holy grail of HiFi.
No. That is incorrect. CD sound is uncompressed PCM; no bits are "discarded" except signal bits that were never sampled in the first place, due to the finite sampling rate, OR bits that were aliased due to distortion; all conversions to digital from analog require sampling. A frequency called the Nyquist frequency is defined to be half the sampling frequency of the digitally processed signal. It can be mathematically proven that aliasing can be avoided if the Nyquist frequency is greater than the maximum component frequency of the signal being sampled..
CD audio 16-bit 44.1kHz; which should be lossless up to the Nyquist frequency of 22.05kHz -- for most humans, the audible frequency range is 0 to 20 kHz, so the only audible difference should be the possibility of certain audio artifacts; not due to any 'compression' or 'removal' of information.
CD audio is not as good as the best possible DVD audio (24-bit 182 kHz)
CD audio is also not as good as LP audio; where the LP playback is done with a high quality pickup cartridge, and the playback is pristine (no record scratches, dust, vibration, hum, incorrect turntable setup, etc).
As to portable media players supporting FLAC:
Sandisk (Sansa Fuze, Fuze+, Clip, Clip+)
iRiver (B30, E100, E150, E200, Lplayer, P7, Spinn, S100)
Archos (Vision 3, 24, 28, 32)
Samsung (Yepp M1, YP-Q1, YP-Q2, YP-Q3, YP-R0, YP-R1)
Philips (GoGear Muse)
Sweex (MP470, MP480)
Transcend (MP860, Tsonic 870)
and last but not least,
Cowon/iAudio (all of them)
Prices:
The most affordable player capable of FLAC (and Ogg Vorbis), the Sweex MP480 Vidi 8GB, from GBP 22 (ca USD 35) in the U.K.
From TFS:
...better future-proofing and converting capabilities. FLAC is a good, free and open format...
We see here yet another case of mistakenly assuming a commonality of perception where history strongly suggests the opposite. The things listed above as features are actually perceived as bugs by the media distribution cartels.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.
--
BMO
Let's assume the producer has a master in 96kHz 24bits stereo, and you have audio hardware capable of playing that. Which of the following two options for distribution would you prefer?
Master is downsampled to 44.1kHz with the best possible filter to avoid aliasing. Then the samples are scaled and rounded to 16 bits, with a scaling factor carefully computed to give the best possible SNR. And you get this result on an audio CD or using a lossless compression like FLAC.
Alternatively you can choose to get the 96kHz 24 bits stereo sound compressed with a lossy compression (ogg, mp3, or anything you choose) at a bitrate of 1Mbit/s.
Which of the two would you choose? There is no doubt the first of the two options will give the best audio quality if your hardware is somehow limited to 44.1kHz 16 bits. But if your audio hardware can do better than that, I guess the second option will give better audio quality at one third the bitrate.
If you are optimizing for best possible sound quality, you have to know your constraints. Depending on the constraints you will get different result. If your only constraint is the actual hardware from the D/A converter to the speakers you will get a completely different result from when you are constrained to a certain bitrate but can choose audio hardware as you like. You'll get yet another result if you are constrained by cost of the hardware to do the playback.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
I download the FLACs fo the Phish shows that I've seen, and others that I want to have, and burn them to CD. My friends can't believe the sound when they're over for parties and such.
.mp3 files for download. I've downloaded Phish's show from the same night while in the parking lot waiting for traffic to clear out after the show.
Moe, Umphrey's Mcgee, String Cheese Incident, Govt Mule, and many other jam bands offer FLAC (and usually ALAC - Apple's proprietary lossless format) as well as VBR
Of course, jam band fans aren't your typical music consumer either... We are a crowd who actually appreciates the music itself, and isn't just looking for a simple beat to bounce around to.
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
The big issue with FLAC isn't just player compatibility, but storage. I have a few 24-bit/96kHz FLAC-encoded albums, averaging over a gigabyte each in size. Unless you're using one of the hard-drive equipped Archos devices or something similar (if anyone else uses HDD anymore), you're not going to keep many albums on your player this way.
You're also probably listening via earbuds, maybe some better cans if you really care, but still... there's not that much need for the higher quality on a portable device. Unless you're using a Cowon device, you may not have the audio chops in the device hardware needed to get much better sound out of these files, either. But it's nice to know you can play that latest HDtracks download without the need to transcode.
And for those living in the 21rst century (dedicated audio players being so 1990s), FLAC is also supported in many Android media players.
-Dave Haynie
I can here the difference on good headphones and certain songs. I've done listening tests on 3 headphones. Using Sennheiser CX300's ($30), I could barely tell the difference between FLAC and V0 MP3. In a blind test, I might not be able to tell them apart at all. Using Sennheiser IE6's (~$120) it is easier to tell the difference, and I can tell the difference on certain songs. Using my friend's Audio Technica ATH-M50's (~$120), the difference is obvious on many songs. All of this is listening coming straight out of a PC sound card. With the ATH-M50's I will sometimes use a headphone amp because my sound card can't drive them loud enough to hear every detail.
When I say certain songs, I like to pick songs that the V0 encoder had trouble with, or in other words V0 encoded songs with the highest average bitrate. When there are many instruments and voices at the same time, there is more information that has to be represented, or more than may be lost in compression.
The difference is most noticeable in the high end, particularly in the percussion. I can hear up to 19.5KHz. If you can't hear as high, you will have more trouble distinguishing FLAC vs MP3, bu it isn't impossible. Percussion, especially cymbals, sound clearer and sharper in FLAC, but clearness or sharpness alone aren't enough for me to distinguish the difference in back to back listening. I always listen for flaws in the sound of cymbals-- instead of sounding like a real instrument, they will sound digital, shimmery, or wrong. It's hard to describe without making up what sounds like audiophile BS, but the difference is there.
I agree for casual listening FLAC is unnecessary. If there is even the slightest noise coming from the environment (in the car, air conditioning running at home, etc) it becomes hard to distinguish the difference, and if I am not devoting my full attention to the music, I don't hear anything wrong MP3 encoded music.
That's exactly what I do.
I buy a CD. A USED CD.
Often for less than a few tracks off iTunes.
Rip 'em to iTunes. Gracenote adds the fiddling small details.
Google Images or Amazon provides album art for CoverFlow.
I rip to MP3. My 'stereo' is my old dual processor G5 Mac, with a pair of Cambridge Soundworks speakers.
Good enough for these old ears of mine.
As always, YMMV.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
The recording industry still doesn't want you downloading anything, even if you pay for it; they want you to buy a CD. Therefore while they grudgingly allow paid downloads, they don't want you to have full fidelity from those downloads. Note that I think it's utterly rediculous, too, and the recording industry is run by dinosaurs, but I do understand it, I think.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
One reason I'd like to see lossless files available is so that I could put everything in my preferred lossy format on my devices. Can't fit your whole library in 320kbps? Just re-encode for a lower bitrate. Too snobby for 128kbps? Re-encode for a higher bitrate. That's something you can't do with MP3 source files without enduring multi-generational loss issues.
In my case, I'd prefer to have this capability for a rather unusual reason. Amazon's MP3s are done in a VBR MP3 encoding; for some inexplicable reason, most VBR encoded MP3s give me a slight headache?! This is true even when I'm not aware of the encoding beforehand. I'd much rather have CBR encoded files just to avoid this strange effect, even if I had to use a lower bitrate.
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/FLAC
I recently bought a vinyl album released by Asthmatic Kitty Records, it included a download of the entire album in FLAC and MP3 already tagged for your convenience. I don't even own a turntable, I bought it for the included artwork and to support the artist.
Some labels are doing it right.