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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.
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
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.
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 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