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Chrome is Getting the Ability To Play FLAC (theverge.com)
Audiophiles are getting a new way to listen to one of the top formats for lossless music. From a report: Google has begun adding FLAC support to Chrome, and it should be rolling out to the masses very soon. FLAC support is already live in Chrome's beta build and it's live in the current version of Chrome OS, too. If you have local FLAC files or come across one on the web, the added support allows Chrome to open it up in a completely bare-bones music player that takes over the entire tab. It's not exactly elegant, but it works. And it means that Mac users with Chrome installed will have an easy way to play back FLAC files should they come across one. While there are plenty of apps that can handle FLAC -- VLC being a popular one -- no native macOS app is capable of it. Windows 10, on the other hand, includes native support.
Isn't VLC a native macOS app? I use it on Linux, but I've seen friends use it on macOS, and it looks like other macOS software.
I installed Sox and set it to "play" all audio file types including mp3 & flac. No fuss, no gui needed.
I want to make sure I can do *everything* in my web browser so that I can be tracked in everything I do. More of this please...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Winamp/XMMS was able to handle this, how long ago, but Google was not??
Google assumes you don't have a flac player installed, so chrome will become the default. They can then fingerprint the file and send that along with the filename back to google whenever you open one.
FLAC is just an audio compression codec, like MP3, but lossless full CD quality. Not sure why it's so hard to implement like any other codec. It's not a new codec, either, but adoption has been very slow. I was playing FLAC files back in the days of Rockbox on my magnetic-HDD based MP3 player iRiver H100, but that required custom firmware. I don't think I've ever seen an MP3 player that out of the box supports FLAC.
With bandwidth and storage increasing every day I'm surprised that FLAC hasn't caught on better than it has. It hasn't kept pace with video quality increases which went from 480i to 4K/UHD during it's lifetime. Any day now?
You mean, except for the one that was listed off immediately prior to that assertion? Though VLC is cross-platform, the Mac version is native to macOS.
I think what they meant to say was that no first-party apps support FLAC, but even that's not strictly true, since you can use Fluke or other utilities to enable support for FLAC in iTunes, QuickTime, and other first-party apps. Or maybe they meant that no Mac-exclusive apps support FLAC, but that's not true either, since there are plenty of Mac-only apps that can operate on FLAC files (e.g. Rogue Amoeba's Fission).
FLAC support isn't baked in, to be sure, but there have been simple ways to use FLAC files on Macs for the vast majority of the format's lifespan. I'm even planning to go through and re-rip my entire collection to FLAC in the next few months.
Firefox will do it too!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Enjoy your stay.
The iRiver not playing FLAC out of the box was why I got a Rio Karma instead. It still works.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Pretty much every phone supports FLAC. Been that way for a while.
Who in the fuck brought you here? What's next, asking what Ogg Vorbis is?
Here's a way to block ads that always works: DON'T VISIT THE SITES. STARVE THEM. And then when they move to the next sleazy thing, withdraw support from that too. Adblock technology won't solve the human confrontation that is required. You're complaining about blind leeches that couldn't even resist if you flicked them off -- but you sit there, motionless, asking them to leave. You're like the vacuum who called them in the first place.
Chrome can't even get repeating MIDI/MP3/OGG to work properly. Now we're just getting more bloat added without Google fixing prior problems.
Good thing I uninstalled Chrome long ago and haven't looked back.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What sort of speaker and amplifier hardware is required to reproduce FLAC such that you can actually notice a difference?
You can easily notice a visual difference of 480i -> 4K on a 4K monitory. Short of certain audiophile setups how many end users are going to actually notice FLAC vs other lossy options on their laptop speakers, headphones, etc?
FLAC has supported 255 channels, 32 bit sample depth and any sample rate you want for a looong time.
There isn't any need to go for more than 24 bit depth even in professional formats although higher is better as an internal intermediate processing depth. Two channels is enough for my pre-recorded music but it's fine if other people want surround music.
I'm not quite sure why the iRiver IHP-120/140s didn't do FLAC out of the box. They supported some other specialty goodies(line level and optical in and out) that required more hardware and are probably even more esoteric; and they had ogg vorbis support, so it's not like they were MP3 only or wedded to whatever Microsoft was pushing at the time(the 300 series, though, leaned dangerously in that direction).
Luckily rockbox support is quite good on those models, which takes most of the pain away. LCD isn't good enough to do Doom justice, however.
With bandwidth and storage increasing every day I'm surprised that FLAC hasn't caught on better than it has.
I'm not. FLAC offers little if anything in terms of increased audio quality above high bitrate lossy audio. With double blind tests it's not even clear there really IS a difference. Remember that "audiophiles" were the same people who 30 years ago claimed that putting a green magic marker around a CD increased its quality, and still today insist on having massive "oxygen free" speaker cables to increase quality.
FLAC is only about 2x compression, vs maybe 6x compression for a high bitrate lossy codec. How many people want to have 1/3 the storage available? Turn your 16 gigabyte ipod into a 5 gigabyte ipod for no real discernible gain?
All 12 of them!
... get a lot of that, already?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Not like anyone is using MNG.
Yeah, but I was more referring to dedicated audio players. Android phones do a lot more than an MP3 player ever could do beyond just FLAC.
As I recall, someone in iRiver basically admitted on the forums years ago that they had to cap support for MP3 recording on many models (and with the OGG firmware) to keep the record companies from coming down on them. So I think FLAC would have launched the nukes, so to speak. This was before the record industries finally gave up and acknowledged reality (wait, they haven't done that yet either).
The same could be said about 1080p-4K, but that hasn't stopped people from wanting to upgrade to 4k because it's "better". And even worse, the push for higher than 1080 resolution on a tiny ass smartphone screen when 1080p is already higher than what a person can perceive on a screen that small. People will always want something better wether the improvement makes a difference or not.
Nothing fancy. I can hear a definite difference between FLAC and MP3 files on my old Marantz receiver with some JBL speakers.
I am fairly certain that the Sansa models of mp3 players supported FLAC out of the box.
FLAC offers little if anything in terms of increased audio quality above high bitrate lossy audio. With double blind tests it's not even clear there really IS a difference.
The real advantage of FLAC is for audio editing . A FLAC file can be edited and saved without affecting the quality of the audio. That isn't true for lossy audio codecs, such as MP3. Every time that you edit and save an MP3 file, the new file has poorer audio quality. If you only make one edit, you might not notice the drop in quality. But if you repeatedly edit-and-save the file, then the loss of quality will eventually become noticable.
Me too. Onkyo receiver and Dali Zensors, nothing at all fancy FLAC played over DLNA. Definite improvement (yes this is subjective) over purchased mp3s but with your own encoded mp3 at 320kbps vbr, any perceived difference is psychological.
The real beauty of FLAC for me though is simply ripping your CDs to FLAC, dumping them ona network share and using the FLAC as input for transcoding to whatever lossless format you want.
For the unititiated, FLAC is essentially ZIP for audio
This is true for any lossy->lossy conversion. For instance, a bunch of old .ra real-audio files I had from back in the day I converted to FLAC for archival purposes rather than MP3 or Vorbis. Even though it won't increase the quality at all it at least will prevent further loss in quality by converting to yet another lossy formats.
... I don't think I've ever seen an MP3 player that out of the box supports FLAC.
Sansa Clip+ does, and without custom firmware. It's been around a while - mine's a good 6 years old and still going strong. I think it's been superceded by some newer models now though...
It's more to do with the audio material and listening skills, than equipment.
Also, comparisons with video resolutions aren't that good. You can simply step closer to a monitor and see individual pixels. With audio it's different. And let's just say that consumer digital video formats still have a very long way to go.
Boy, they're gonna catch some FLAC over this.
Mine doesn't, at least out of the box. I mistakenly added a bunch of FLAC files from a JRAD show to it, and nothing installed on the phone, even Google Music, could play them. And that's running Android Marshmallow.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The "Apple lossless" compression supported in iTunes and with iPods is basically just a re-branded FLAC codec, and compile by Apple to make it non-compatible with standard FLAC formats. ALAC can be easily transcoded FLAC and vice-versa, especially since ALAC has been open sourced. But it takes a lot longer than it should, considering they are both essentially using the same compression technique.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Hard to answer. Nobody who spent many thousand bucks on a audio setup will admit it's impossible to tell the difference!
Not even that, just a decent pair of headphone will do the trick, and even that does not need to be expensive. A pair of AKG Y50, which you get for $80 on Amazon would do the trick. What Hi-Fi recommended best headphones under £100 for several years now.
In fact I would go as far as saying a decent pair of in ear buds would do the trick, say Sony MDR-EX650 which is what I use, snap at £25 in black on Amazon in the UK at the moment.
For my main system I use a Marantz MCR511 with some Q-Acoustic speakers, again nothing fancy and you can tell the difference there as well, which is why I only feed it FLAC files from my server.
Um... Chrome has already had FLAC support for a long time now. All you had to do was strip the FLAC header and it magically worked like any other media...
There was one user on hydrogenaud.io that had "golden ears" and would provide the results to double-blind (ABX) tests to prove that he/she could hear the difference between 320kbps mp3 and flac, on certain tracks. I can't recall the user's name, and I haven't been to the site much in years, not since it stopped being hydrogenaudio.org.
I do remember castanets.wav as being a favorite sample that was easy for non-golden-ears to hear the flaws in lossy encoders. Check it out, I'll post back if I can find that person.
Not saying much. MP3 gives me a headache. Something it does with the compression hurts my ears. Even at low volume. 128kbit or less is the worst, but even 256kbit gives me issues.
Cowon's players support FLAC. I still use a D2 at work with a 32GB sd card full of FLAC; wolfson DAC onboard.
Karnal
Active studio monitors, with one local amp pre driver, are a reasonably cheap way to get fantastic sound. However most people will really notice on headphones which are getting amazingly good value for money these days. I see quite a few people listening to high-end headphones on the train. Unless they are tone deaf, they will definitely hear a difference.
I once read that MP2 has a much better temporal resolution than MP3, something to do with shorter time windows (or whatever the exact name is). That is the problem with castanets and such, it will happen with MP3 no matter the bit rate.
MP2 is older, simpler, just worse than MP3 but is said to sound good at high bitrates (like, 192K minimum). It would be a nice experiment to compare it with mp3 and flac at the max bit rates of 320 kbps and 384 kbps where it ought to sound really fine anyway. But MP2 encoding was in the realm of proprietary, professional encoders mostly.
AAC has good press but is like an improved version of MP3, very similar to MP3. So, 128 kbps is often garbage.
Opus should beat all other lossy, ought to be good at castanets (I didn't know of a castanets.wav file)
Do you use Monster cables?
I first noticed the difference before I knew there was a difference, on some average computer speakers. Beethoven's 7th sounded flat. After some troubleshooting of the sound card and speakers, and thinking maybe my ears were going, I played the CD on the computer and it sounded great. I re-ripped using flac, and then I was happy with the quality.
(By flat, I mean not as rich, not that the pitch was too low.)
Nothing fancy. I can hear a definite difference between FLAC and MP3 files on my old Marantz receiver with some JBL speakers.
in double blind tests I find those who say they can hear difference can't actually tell the difference with average music files with mp3 encoded PROPERLY. I do use flac but it depends on the content. I have perfect pitch and range too and the difference is there played with likes of JHA JH11's through a good DAC etc only on some files, for others it is transparent and I cannot tell in double blind tests on all files.
Most people compare apples to oranges such as What you might be hearing a difference between is the decoder since depending on the firmware/hardware (most don't do it in hardware these days especially), the rest of the chain such as dac used etc etc different formats can be played back worse/better than others. Even when apples to apples it is complicated by psychological imagined differenc. It isn't wishful thinking or an insult but subconscious actualyl percieved difference so I'm not saying people are lying just that trained listeners can be tricked even due to actually hearing a none existent difference, the brain is tricky like that; it actually works that way with other senses not just audio and is common in smell and taste.
Me too. Onkyo receiver and Dali Zensors, nothing at all fancy FLAC played over DLNA. Definite improvement (yes this is subjective) over purchased mp3s but with your own encoded mp3 at 320kbps vbr, any perceived difference is psychological.
The real beauty of FLAC for me though is simply ripping your CDs to FLAC, dumping them ona network share and using the FLAC as input for transcoding to whatever lossless format you want.
For the unititiated, FLAC is essentially ZIP for audio
you're right but there is more to it, sometimes it is unfair comparissons of apples to oranges since different decoders etc can play back those files differently. What people are hearing a difference between is the particular audio chains efficiency at playing back different formats accurately. On correctly rigged gear with proper hardware and software where there is no difference I have found hardly any listeners can tell the difference. I have perfect pitch and range but only hear it on some very complex music through gear costing more than most peoples cars, and the difference is VERY slight. For archiving flac is superior, for devices that have better flac playback or where listeners can hear the minor difference in very complex tracks flac is superior but most the people making the night/day difference noise are wrong; whether they know it is another thing as it is often subconscious psychological thing or due to not understanding the audio chain on a complex level. I suspect I have higher density of brain wiring where it counts for noticing this kind of thing and it is only slight to me, I'm high functioning autistic with savant traits and in the miniscule percentile with IQ over 150 and can percieve a lot of these things due to higher density of wiring in those areas like I say so average people are less likely to notice the difference. The big picture is often neglected and not taking into account the whole audio chain. Like people commenting on telling opamps etc apart, you can of course but even the same ones sound different put into a different chain and people often compared this as it it is just that link and add psycholoical bias on top.
ALAC is *not* rebranded FLAC. It's a different lossless format with a different metadata format and fewer features (e.g. no built-in hash for file integrity.)
The iRiver e100 supports FLAC natively. It's the only reason I bought it.
You're barking up the wrong tree. The main reason a person chooses flac is for archival. Once encoded to flac, you have a perfect, bit-for-bit master copy of your audio files. From there you can encode to any lossy format at any time, leaving your lossless archive untouched.
Think of it this way. With flac, you have the equivalant of the original cd. With mp3, you have the equivalant of a copy on a cassette tape. Which would you rather make a third copy from: the flac or the mp3?
What sort of speaker and amplifier hardware is required to reproduce FLAC such that you can actually notice a difference?
You can easily notice a visual difference of 480i -> 4K on a 4K monitory. Short of certain audiophile setups how many end users are going to actually notice FLAC vs other lossy options on their laptop speakers, headphones, etc?
any speaker/amp above a $5 crapper will render FLAC better than MP3.
listen to cymbals. layering of voices. reverbs.
MP3 is like a paper bag thrown over your speakers. learn to listen and its pretty easy to spot.
every once in a while a 320k MP3 or 256k AAC fools me into thinking its lossless, but if you listen close you can usually hear all the artifacts, and how it absolutely destroys the soundstage. the drums and other instruments are supposed to pan around the virtual room you are hearing. lossy destroys all that.
Some smart folks here, but audio can be so counterintuitive in that software logic doesn't get you there. Pay attention computer nerds:
Nearly everyone can hear lossy degradation, and all can FEEL it. It's literally less than half of the data hitting your body as vibration. Sorry for the young generation that doesn't believe there's a difference. Their loss. Literally.
Now, you can claim no one cares, or no one can hear (or no one has musical taste!), but the recording studio exists for a reason. Pro gear exists for a reason. All those knobs and buttons? That's tone, children. It's Placement. Decay. Delay. Layers. EQ across the entire spectrum. Side chaining. Things you shouldn't understand. Things you couldn't understand. https://youtu.be/nJKOIxP0thE
If an album was recorded before 2000 then it's masters are on tape. They were digitized once or twice already, and most can be digitized again. If it's more recent vintage, it'll be in Pro Tools as 16bit or 24bit. Whatever is it's highest native resolution is the master copy. Anything less would be uncivilized! You can find that one yourself!
The point is that from 1978 until 2015 or so, there wasn't enough bandwidth to conveniently sell the best quality version to the consumer.
In 1978 they had to get a 1-hour symphony into the 650mb optical disc. Hence 16/44 PCM. Compromise.
In 1994 they had to get a 1-hour CD into 100mb or less. Hence mp3. Compromise.
In 2017 they are just lying to everyone. Spreading FUD. They can't sell music unless it's full quality (like Pro Studio Masters and Pono) so they stream lossy for $10/month even though we have the bandwidth for lossless.
Dirty little secret:
24/88 & 24/92 stereo audio FLAC is smaller than NetflixHD stream.
We just love the video and crap on the audio. Sad but true. (Well, blu-ray doesn't.)