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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
http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
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.
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.
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.
I'll give you one: metadata. WAV doesn't really support it in a standard way across applications. AIFF is a little better but it doesn't have a lot of traction on Windows. FLAC has a robust tagging scheme. Since converting to lossless is incredibly fast, and you typically save about 30% of the disk space, why not do it?
no longer working for cnet
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
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.
Yep, because audio files are never:
I can't imagine anyone having a need for those things. *eyeroll*
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
What other format should someone use? It is mathematically provably lossless. There is literally no reason not to use it.
I'm a sound designer, I mostly work on feature films; I use FLAC for my remote archives -- uploading to S3 goes a lot faster this way, particularly when the audio media is sparse. A 20 minute FX premix might be 10% the size of an equivalent WAV because of all the silence. The flac(1) tool also has a handy --keep-foreign-metadata option that generally gives byte-for-byte round trip accuracy, even for embedded metadata. I also use Apple Lossless for my local library, mainly because it supports ID3 and Apple clients (like Pro Tools) support it more commonly than FLAC.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I can see that for those who are audiophiles and purists, this is good news. Or those with Super-Hearing :)
FLAC also includes error detection - each frame has as 16-bit crc and the file header includes an md5 hash of raw audio data. Doesn't help with repairing corruption but at least you can detect it and avoid playing the corrupt frames as ear-splitting noise unlike wav.
Because people swear they can hear the missing bits of data with their SPDIF Monster cable.
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>
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?
There is literally no reason not to use it.
Computational complexity....
But lets not consider the actual realities here... lets assume computation has zero cost.
"His name was James Damore."
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?
real time decoding of FLAC uses less that 10% cpu on a $25 raspberrypi (ARMv6). I can't imagine needing to decode high quality audio on a lower end CPU.
Jeez guys, I thought /. was for nerds ;-)
Here is your answer: They are not mixed at all, they are recorded straight to the master record:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_to_disc_recording
And for the other ACs that do not believe my GP post, I will specify that one of these cost more than 100$ 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.
Audiophilic SPDIF connectors are supposed to use cocobolo wood plugs lined with titanium for a nice "warm" bitstream.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
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.
Tell you something FLAC doesn't have, though - a consistent mapping for 5.1 or more channels.
It's avoided in scene releases for this reason even when a lossless source is otherwise available, with encoders prefering to mux in the original DTS-HD despite poorer software compatibility than flac.
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
real time decoding of FLAC uses less that 10% cpu on a $25 raspberrypi (ARMv6).
So it costs 10% of the peak power usage of the device. is your pi solar powered, or do you pay for electricity?
"His name was James Damore."
But still true enough for car stereo. I needed a new one about half a year ago, and while many can play MP3, I did not find one that will play FLAC.
May I introduce you to some car radio head unit models that can play FLAC ?
http://www.kenwood.de/products/car/receivers/mediareceiver/KMM-357SD/
http://www.soundstream.com/html/source-units-inteq.html
http://www.poweracoustik.com/pa2012/source-units-ingenix.html
http://www.crutchfield.com/S-f7u1W1rzkpx/p_113KMM100U/Kenwood-KMM-100U.html
This is absolutely false. People only think that LPs sound better because it's what they are accustomed to.
This is absolutely false. I and many with me argue that LP's (mostly) sound better as they generally are mastered with a greater dynamic range than their digital counterparts which tend to be remastered with as much loudness as possible. Not everybody that listen to vinyl are clueless hipsters.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
This, I believe, is the first time an acronym has been expanded in a Slashdot summary.
Don't worry - it explained a concept nerds already know and didn't bother to mention what was different in the new version. Since I've already surfed over there:
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you have the pi without ethernet (model A) the total power consumption is below a watt (and i don't believe power consumption was major design goal). So yes, maybe 0.1W is a big cost for some applications, but for me that is dwarfed by the rest of my hifi.
This has been addressed in FLAC 1.3.0, which came out recently. This is the first update to FLAC in six years, you'd think someone would have posted something about it to Slashdot.
FLAC is an audio format similar to MP3, but 'lossless'
In other words, it's like mp3, but the exact opposite.
Where did I say you shouldn't use FLAC at all? The OP was saying there was no reason to ever use a lossy format. There are.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Ok, not "no reason"... "limited use". The uses aren't limited -- there are more uses for lossy compression than for lossless. FLAC has one solid use case: archival. Lossy formats have hundreds of use cases.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
real time decoding of FLAC uses less that 10% cpu on a $25 raspberrypi (ARMv6).
So once you're playing the music and four sound effects at once, you have only half the CPU left for the rest of the game.
On the compression/uncompressed scale?
It's more similar to MP3 in that it is compressed.
In the subdomain of compressed formats, it has the attribute of being
lossless, whereas mp3 is lossy.
So, similar on the scale of talking about computer music formats -- most people don't store music in WAV format when you have something like FLAC that buys you space and METAinfo w/no downside.
So sure, if all you ever do is _play_ source material by all means use mp3. But when DJs or audio engineers want to do a remix or mashup they need source material in a _lossless_ format.
Then the owner of copyright in the sound recording can distribute lossy files to the public and distribute lossless files only to people who have bought a license to make remixes.
Direct to disc recording is not a serious option, if I was planning an all analogue live workflow I would mix live to my Studer A807 then cut a record from that master. Why would anyone ever go direct to disc live?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
the headache is probably from straining to hear what's wrong with the 192kbit mp3.
At last, somebody who knows what he is talking about !
I admit I pushed it a little far with direct to disk . The important thing is to keep it analog all the way. Your proposal is more serious indeed.
On a side note, even back in the 70's, it was amazing how we would get cheaply pressed LPs in America. We had to import them from Germany or what not and pay 50$ 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.