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FLAC Gets First Update In 6 Years
An anonymous reader writes "The Free Lossless Audio Codec, FLAC, loved by audiophiles for its lossless fidelity has been
updated to version 1.3.0. FLAC is an audio format similar to MP3, but 'lossless', meaning that audio compressed in FLAC doesn't suffer any loss in quality. FLAC v1.3.0 is the first update in almost 6 years and it is also the first release from the new Xiph.Org maintainer team."
Big new feature: ReplayGain works for sampling rates up to 192kHz so you can finally control the volume of your obsessively ripped LPs.
I wonder if that because no one cared or because it was a solid piece of software...
May Peace Prevail On Earth
>implying I will stop using mp3s and ever be able to fully recollect all my music in FLAC
uppermost lel
http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
I been using flac for all my music collection about 5 years now. Also have had an mp3 player that has supported it for 3-4 years now.
Ten years ago, when hard drives were small and NAS systems for home use didn't really exist, I could see the point of all this ripping and converting. But now, with multi-terabyte HDs and the proliferation of NAS appliances, there is a limited need for this or any other 'compressed' music file format.
Release once every 30 years! We're doing awesome stuff, trust us!
LOL, backwater idiots.
30 years Apple released the Lisa personal computer and you were probably not even a sperm. Backwater twit.
All the music I ever bough was FLAC, mostly thanks to services like Bandcamp. They require the artists to upload their song in lossless and from there they provide all the formats you'd ever want. That's how all music should be sold.. with no shitty codecs and DRM.
You fucking troll.
Have you not heard of Opus? It's a fucking sweetass new codec that beats speex quality-wise for voice compression at equal bitrates, but works equally well for web-radio beating AAC-HE v1 and v2, is better than MP3/AAC/OGG at regular video soundtrack rates (eg 96kbps) and does High-Def lossy audio better than AC3 (192kbps to 448kbps).
It's a fucking amazing codec, and it's already out in beta. VLC and Foobar2000 already plays it. It already has support in FFMPEG and MPlayer.
Have you been that awsome in the the last ten years? NO YOU HAVE NOT.
Go home you stupid child.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
While this is mostly accurate, articles like this fail to mention where 192KHz is useful. That is, for certain types of digital post-processing and effects. Doing a digital time or frequency shift (not a re-sample, that's simple and effectively lossless) yields atrociously poor results if using 44.1 or even 48 KHz. With 192KHz, you can't hear the difference, and that is why it is used in the studio. Auto-tune is a decent example of that kind of processing. It works much better at higher bit rates.
None of this matters to the average listener though, or to the DJ who only cares about a simple speed up or slow down (or re-sample).
MP3 compresses audio files so that they have the same playback within the range of human auditory sensation. FLAC is superior because it retains full audio fidelity across the entire frequency spectrum. This will be of the utmost importance if you are a dog.
Opus is ONLY useful for voice and low-bitrate audio. For high-fi stuff, it's no better than anything else.
I sure as hell would never use it for music.
I was wondering what happend to FLAC. It has been a while since I've encoded .wav files into FLAC.
Funny thing is I remember when reel to reel was touted as much better than vinyl. Then CD's were touted as a hundred times cleaner than vinyl or reel to reel. Then dvd's were superior to cd's. (Then everyone used mp3's anyway)
Now... we're back to vinyl.
Gotta love marketing.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
While this is mostly accurate, articles like this fail to mention where 192KHz is useful. That is, for certain types of digital post-processing and effects. Doing a digital time or frequency shift (not a re-sample, that's simple and effectively lossless) yields atrociously poor results if using 44.1 or even 48 KHz. With 192KHz, you can't hear the difference, and that is why it is used in the studio. Auto-tune is a decent example of that kind of processing. It works much better at higher bit rates.
None of this matters to the average listener though, or to the DJ who only cares about a simple speed up or slow down (or re-sample).
Wrong. Article mentions it as being useful for processing. Article uses oversampling for antialiasing / cutoff as an example.
At no point would the signal have to be stored in a high sampling rate to get this benefit. Article mentions most ADCs/DACs handle this shit transparently.
"Sampling rates over 48kHz are irrelevant to high fidelity audio data, but they are internally essential to several modern digital audio techniques. Oversampling is the most relevant example [7]."
ReplayGain works for sampling rates up to 192kHz so you can finally control the volume of your obsessively ripped LPs.
What does sampling rate have to do with volume? Is there some sort of DSP going on to resample it down to 48kHz and increase bit depth (which increases dynamic range but not volume)?
Oversampling at the ADC level is NOT post-processing. Post means "after", in case you didn't know. If the desire is to use audio for a multitude of uses, say to play back in a sampler frequency shifted or to "correct" some awful notes (as is commonly done), it is still worthwhile to record raw audio at 192kHz. It is never worthwhile to distribute the finished product at high sample rates, unless the finished product IS in fact sample material intended to be used by studio people.
ABX at 192kbps and I can't hear the difference, which is good enough for me. Granted I don't have the best ears.
I don't mean to be overly enthusiastic, it's just nice having a codec that serves basically all purposes.
I don't use it for music really. That's all in FLAC (storage) and Vorbis (players) already, but I do use it for video nowadays. I usually encode at 48kbps at 44.1kHz and it sounds better to me that AAC-HE-PS while using the same space. And it's a free and open codec too, so I have all the unjustified moral superiority to wave around too.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
This, I believe, is the first time an acronym has been expanded in a Slashdot summary.
It all depends on the content.
There are certain albums that sound great at 128Kb/s where others sound like crap at 320Kb/s.
At this point in time disk space is cheap enough that I'm considering going uncompressed instead of FLAC.
I can see that for those who are audiophiles and purists, this is good news. Or those with Super-Hearing :)
"Oversampling" and recording with a high Fs are two different concepts. Oversampling is specifically when the AD runs at a higher sample rate than the effective Nyquist rate.
Oversampling technologies are things like 1-bit delta-sigma ADC and MASH. They trade sample rate for bit width, and are used because high-frequency oscillators are cheaper to engineer than 24 bit symbol encoders.
Actually digital or "numeric" is exactly what you call "virtually infinite", watch it in action using analog gear here.
Why not? It should be transparent at high bitrates, just like Vorbis, AAC and MP3.
It has done well in listening tests, even though the encoder is still maturing. Fair chance it will end up beating AAC at near-transparency levels, IMO.
sigh
all your damned "brand new high quality" LPs are full of music that has been digitally recorded, digitally mixed, and digitally mastered prior to being printed to vinyl, so those infinite ways of grooving the LP contain the same damned digital information.
the fact that you find LPs to sound better despite this should be evidence enough that the digitial/analogue distinction is not actually the problem your LPs are solving for you
jesus, i thought this was a site for nerds. where's your goddamn intellectual curiosity?
This is absolutely false. People only think that LPs sound better because it's what they are accustomed to. The "warmth" from an LP is, in fact, distortion. CD's are a far more accurate representation of the sound as it was at the time of the studio recording.
Your point about the infinite bandwidth of the grooves on vinyl is moot, since humans can't hear with infinite resolution. All that counts is how accurately the sound is reproduced within the human-audible frequency range, and digital CD quality recordings have vinyl beat, hands down, without exception.
To people digitizing rare LPs and the people posting Youtube videos that show a phonograph record going round.
Please oh please fill a spray bottle with a solution of water with a tiny bit of liquid soap, and spray the surface of the record before and occasionally during recording. After, rinse and dry with fluffy-towel and lean on edge to dry completely before re-sleeving.
You will be flabbergasted with the result. Even if you do not flabbergast easily.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
And yet when someone with hearing problems presents themselves to an expert on human hearing they'll tell you the human ear is an incredibly delicate part of the body that they don't fully understand,
I think of digital music and lossy codecs in the same way I think of GM foods. Yea sure, they're probably OK, but maybe they're not. When someone speaks with absolute certainty about a subject no one understands absolutely I have to raise an eyebrow.
But this sampling rate goes to 11
It's because FLAC rocks... There has been no need to update it. It's one of the huge open source/open spec success stories.
Zoid.com
Wish we could see 6 years of advancement in file compression technology with FLAC. I know space is on the cheap these days, but that doesn't mean we should just keep inflating files more and more. As much as I do appreciate FLAC, when it's virtually impossible to tell the difference between a 6MB file and a 24MB file, it starts to feel a bit wasteful, especially when the source was something like a compact disc to begin with.
So yes, it's rather limited still. However, it's not the codec that's the limiting factor, it's the choice of the hardware vendors, since the codec itself is free to implement.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Adobe needs to install an updater for the installer. Continue?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
What sort of definition is that? It's the first time I've seen it mentioned. Maybe you mean that mp3 uses a psycho-acoustic model that takes out "definition", spatial information and volume dynamics? Depending on the amount of "loss" in the compression, mp3 is somewhere in between "some musicians and audio purists are statistically able to distinguish between the compressed and non compressed format" to "a casual listener on a mediocre audio device may not hear the difference in a noisy environment." Both FLAC and MP3 encoded files with a lossless source file usually don't contain any frequencies above 20 KHz, so your dog will probably not hear things a human with non-damaged ears wouldn't. FLAC may be capable of storing such formats, but even straight-from-the-stylus-to-the-DAC style LP rips just don't contain these frequencies because the original artist never recorded them.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
They trade sample rate for bit width, and are used because high-frequency oscillators are cheaper to engineer than 24 bit symbol encoders.
In part, there are other reasons as well. For example you can never get a a regular symbol encoders to be completely linear. (Technically there will always be some jitter on the oscillator too, but it will have a better distribution and will be insignificant compared to the equivalent symbol encoder.)
Sometimes the cheaper option yields better results. Just don't tell an audiophile about it.
FLAC is an audio format similar to MP3, but 'lossless'
Sooo... not similar at all, really?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full
The Oosashi study has been debunked so much that it's not even funny anymore.. I did not even bother opening the link, but I'm pretty sure it's the same old Oosashi crap.
Personally, I find that a brand new high quality LP played on a high end sound system sounds better than numeric, even with no compression at all (raw) formats
That's nice. And how exactly these brand new LPs to be recorded, mixed and mastered? All in analog? I don't think so.
Jeez guys, I thought /. was for nerds ;-)
Here is your answer: They are not mixed at all, they are recorded straight to the master record:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_to_disc_recording
And for the other ACs that do not believe my GP post, I will specify that one of these cost more than 100$ and that you need a 5000$ turnable and a 30,000$ sound system, usually driven by lamps to really appreciate the difference.
But hey, history always repeats itself an even the supposedly nerds at /. are now saying that digital sound recording is better for some reason and they are more than happy with their mp3s and flacs. Here is why you never heard about what I am telling you about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_to_disc_recording#Albums_and_public_reception
People like things that are not expensive and have a tendency to convince themselves that for some reason, what they use is the best. Do I use mp3 and a digital sound appliances?: Yes. Am I trying to convince myself it is the best sound I ever heard?: No. Trying to do so would be like trying to convince myself that my VOIP phone sounds better than an old 150$, in 1980 dollars, analog phone from Northern Telecom.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I don't know where you got that idea, or why you got modded 'informative', when the whole point of Opus is to have one codec that covers the whole range from low-band speech to full-band music, as can be seen from their handy chart.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
"smaller THAT" - YOU MORON.
Do you not understand what the words "that" and "than" mean?
My barber was saying this exact thing to me the other day. So I says to him, "Frank, come on, can't you just correct for nonlinearities?" and he laughed at me and gave me a look like he couldn't believe me. I've decided to change barbers.
FLAC may be lossless but it's still no guarantee of super HiFi. You've still got the DAC, amp and speakers to worry about. People often assume because it's FLAC, it is the acme of quality even played back on an iPod with Apple headphones. Ain't so.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The OP (like so many others) doesn't understand the difference between lossy and lossless compression, and why each is useful and necessary -- yet completely different tools for completely different jobs. People don't use flac because it "sounds better". They use it because it is suitable for permanent archiving, where lossy compression is not. Why? Because a decompressed flac is bit-for-bit identical to the original wav. A decompressed mp3 is anything but. Therefore, if you rip your cd collection to flac, you have a true archive of the original. If you rip your cd collection to mp3, you don't have a true archive; you have an approximation. Simple as that.
But still true enough for car stereo. I needed a new one about half a year ago, and while many can play MP3, I did not find one that will play FLAC.
May I introduce you to some car radio head unit models that can play FLAC ?
http://www.kenwood.de/products/car/receivers/mediareceiver/KMM-357SD/
http://www.soundstream.com/html/source-units-inteq.html
http://www.poweracoustik.com/pa2012/source-units-ingenix.html
http://www.crutchfield.com/S-f7u1W1rzkpx/p_113KMM100U/Kenwood-KMM-100U.html
This is absolutely false. People only think that LPs sound better because it's what they are accustomed to.
This is absolutely false. I and many with me argue that LP's (mostly) sound better as they generally are mastered with a greater dynamic range than their digital counterparts which tend to be remastered with as much loudness as possible. Not everybody that listen to vinyl are clueless hipsters.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
But this sampling rate goes to 11
kHz?
The 90s called, they want their 8-bit Sound Blaster back
FLAC is an audio format similar to MP3, but 'lossless'
In other words, it's like mp3, but the exact opposite.
NO IT IS NOT!!!11
real time decoding of FLAC uses less that 10% cpu on a $25 raspberrypi (ARMv6).
So once you're playing the music and four sound effects at once, you have only half the CPU left for the rest of the game.
flac people assure me that flac is perfect already
So sure, if all you ever do is _play_ source material by all means use mp3. But when DJs or audio engineers want to do a remix or mashup they need source material in a _lossless_ format.
Then the owner of copyright in the sound recording can distribute lossy files to the public and distribute lossless files only to people who have bought a license to make remixes.
Direct to disc recording is not a serious option, if I was planning an all analogue live workflow I would mix live to my Studer A807 then cut a record from that master. Why would anyone ever go direct to disc live?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
At last, somebody who knows what he is talking about !
I admit I pushed it a little far with direct to disk . The important thing is to keep it analog all the way. Your proposal is more serious indeed.
On a side note, even back in the 70's, it was amazing how we would get cheaply pressed LPs in America. We had to import them from Germany or what not and pay 50$ instead of 12$ and you could really tell the difference. That is 1975 dollars. That would be 200$ at least in 2013 dollars. Cheap CDs sell much better in 2013 ;-)
Analog is much more costly than digital. There you go!
You are the man!
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.