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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.
The latter.
Clearly the project should be migrated over to the pdf team at Adobe, they know how to put a little excitement back into software that had been just quietly doing its job.
http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
This is why you are not a product manager at Adobe.
no longer working for cnet
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.
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
No. Both are methods of compressing audio data for later playback, just with different trade-offs.
With MP3 of course you are losing fidelity, and with FLAC you are using more disk space and limiting the devices on which your audio data can be played back.
So while they are both different horses for different courses, but they both have the same goal - storage of audio, with data compression.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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
With MP3 of course you are losing fidelity, and with FLAC you are using more disk space and limiting the devices on which your audio data can be played back.
My cell phone (which doubles as the portable music player) can play FLAC, as can my computer and my network-connected home theater receiver. I think my smart TV can play it too, but I've never had a reason to check...
While you're definitely sacrificing disk space, the argument about fewer devices being able to play it is certainly not as true as it used to be. I still carry most of my music around in FLAC format, and just buy a bigger SD card for the phone, and choose some albums I don't want to carry around.
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.
Thatwasthejoke.jpg
I tried opening that but I get the following error:
The file is damaged and could not be repaired.
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.
Allow me to explain with a graph: http://i.imgur.com/nSD3ofw.gif
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
It's worth noting that mobile devices often decode popular compressed audio and video formats in dedicated hardware. Modern, powerful devices can play audio and sometimes video reliably in software, but they use a lot more battery power to do so in comparison, so sticking with formats natively supported by your hardware is still usually the best idea.
I think a few chips got Vorbis support and it wouldn't surprise me to find that FLAC made it in to real hardware somewhere, but there's a reason MP3 was basically the only real portable format choice for years.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
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.
Zoid.com
It consists of an inherently lossy encoding in the frequency domain (like MP3) plus an encoding of the difference between the lossily encoded audio and the original.
While a few other lossless formats do this (mostly for backward-compatibility), FLAC does not convert the audio into the frequency domain. It either uses a polynomial or linear function: http://xiph.org/flac/documentation_format_overview.html
True. However, FLAC is extremely CPU efficient for playback (decoding).
You can find some comparisons where it performs even better than MP3 in terms of CPU usage
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=92235
It's also more efficient than any other compressed lossless codec (note: WAV/PCM is not compressed):
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=98665
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 is asymmetric; lots of computrons to encode, but not very much to decode. I had an old iPod Video, and the battery lasted longer playing FLAC in Rockbox than it did playing MP3s in the native Apple software (or in Rockbox, for that matter). Despite being done in software, FLAC is just so stupidly easy to decode that it's nearly a moot point.