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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...
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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
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]."
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
Vinyl may have a nostalgical value. The quality is indeed WAY worse than that of a CD, for example.
Yep, because audio files are never:
I can't imagine anyone having a need for those things. *eyeroll*
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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.
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
good example of the stupidity of the music industry.
they put the best mix on the worst (physical, playback) medium, vinyl.
the cd (or file) which can have superior specs, they give the compressed loudness-war mix.
makes NO SENSE!
the music industry is fucked up. they just are.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
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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?
They would have done the same with vinyl, and did, to a certain extend, but there is a limit to how loud a vinyl can be. It really isn't a matter of choosing where to put the best mix, but a matter of one of the limitations of vinyl ending up making the product better.
On a side note, "the best mix" isn't constant, but depends on the medium used. I have been told that one of the original problems with CDs was that they used the vinyl mix on early CDs, which isn't ideal (I am sure there is some explanation with the frequency response of the different media).
With lossless compression, mathematics is unforgiving.
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.
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