Why We Should Buy Music In FLAC 550
soodoo writes "We have plenty of HDD space and broadband internet. Why don't we demand full CD quality audio in an accessible format from online music stores? The advantage of lossless compression is not only the small audio quality improvement, but better future-proofing and converting capabilities. FLAC is a good, free and open format, well suited for this job."
If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:5, Insightful)
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We Australians pay way too much for cds. $30~ for a new cd? Fuck that for a joke!
Plus for those of us who prefer the ease of having our audio in a digital format (the only thing I own that plays audio cds now is my car) buying a cd for cd quality audio really isn't conveint.
Maybe buying CD singles and albums appeals to you, but for me I much prefer my stuff in digital. Plus if it's DRM free FLAC it'll last a lot longer than a cd.
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Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:5, Insightful)
You think a CD is more "indestructable" than having a backup or two of your music collection, which you will be migrating from storage device to storage device over the years? Also, storing masses of CDs/DVDs is just a royal PITA. Especially when it comes to finding stuff later. Or having to rip everything again later rather than just having a lossless digital copy.
I have no qualms about downloading FLACs of any MP3s that I've already purchased, when I decide I have enough space to waste on such things. I think I'd have to have a portable media player with terabyte storage to be able to hold all my music in FLAC format..
Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:4, Insightful)
Adjusting for CPI, $14 in 1983 is about $31 in 2011. $20 today is about $9 in 1983 dollars.
1983 is a bit early to declare full market availability for CDs don't you think?
I'd suggest a more reasonable date of 'availability' for determining the start of sales (and a price point) as the time when Middle school students are able to afford it on their allowances. That's where the target demographic starts for Pop music anyway (and those are the albums that follow the most common price curve).
In short, 1983 might have seen CDs come into existence, but I would say that they really didn't take off as consumer items until ~1992.
I don't know what the prices of CDs were in 1983, but If we go by your date, I do know that CD Players cost ~$2000 in 1983. Adjusted for inflation, that same player today would cost nearly $4,300. Obviously this wasn't the price which marks the true 'beginning'.
$14 in 1992 would go to $22 (approx). Still higher, but the cost of production of CDs is VERY low today compared to then.
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Do you buy your shirts separate from your pants? How about your ties? What if every time there was an article of clothing you liked, you were forced to purchase an entire outfit?
Like those shoes? Just buy the suit that goes with them.
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Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:5, Insightful)
But then you have to physically move the CD from some place to your place, which requires a distribution network and takes time. It's also costly to produce CDs.
By simply requiring CDs, you restrict yourself to artists that have strong deals with distributors and enough money to produce them.
Also, what the hell are you going to do with a CD once you have it but rip it? I don't even have a CD reader anymore. I don't have the room to store thousands of CDs either, and it wouldn't be a practical way to manage my music library.
Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:4, Insightful)
I have pressed CDs from bands my high school friends were in, while they were in high school. It's not an expensive process... and doesn't at all require a strong deal with distributors...
As to what I would do with a CD once I rip it... rip it again, should my online backup of my music hard drive fail when my music hard drive invariably does. My once-ripped CD will still be in perfect condition.
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You also probably have to move it from your old place to your new place, which, especially if you move often, is not exactly effortless.
CC.
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Bullshit. I have a CD of an amateur pub singer that I bought from her in the pub.
As a bonus it came with an instant rebate in the form of beer, no mailing of vouchers necessary.
Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:4, Interesting)
"Also, what the hell are you going to do with a CD once you have it but rip it?"
Sell it used.
Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:5, Informative)
Also, what the hell are you going to do with a CD once you have it but rip it?"
Sell it used.
At which point you are required to destroy the original, as I understand it.
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More so, but yet another format switch is utterly pointless, especially when high-bit-rate AAC is generally inaudibly different from CD quality, and in fact, the 96kHz ones apple has started selling for some artists surpass CD quality, despite the compression.
Basically, there's no reason to use FLAC – "lossily" compressed audio is plenty good enough.
Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:4, Insightful)
Formats that rely on removing inaudible frequencies or such psychoacoustics work perfectly in anechoic rooms or in headphone listening. When listened through speakers the frequencies take multiple routes to the ears at slightly different times, which makes the inaudible frequencies actually audible. So something is definitely missing from the fabric.
I have refrained from bying music online because of the inferior quality. I'd like to hear music that sounds better along with the technological advances.
Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:4, Informative)
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http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless
TFA should still mention this, instead of pretending that FLAC is the one and only, and that iTunes supports no lossless format. I do agree in the sense that Apple should either open ALAC and start selling it, or adopt FLAC, or something.
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Re:If you want CD-quality audio, buy CDs (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, it really depends on the equipment.
I was listening to some Pink Floyd several years ago (probably 10 years ago), and I had just set up a very nice sound system in my house. I heard things in the music that I'd never heard before. You simply miss out on systems that don't reproduce the full spectrum of sound. It could be a low rumble that's just felt, or a high pitched ting like a little bell.
Most people's setups have significant gaps throughout the spectrum. There are professional disks to demonstrate it, but most people here can write their own software to generate tones sliding up the scale, from say 20Hz 20KHz. I recently did that for fun on my regular desktop, and noticed about 5 or 6 significant bands where the sound was barely reproduced by the speakers. I moved the machine to my theater room, and hooked it directly to the sound system. It had a few dips, but nothing so significant that I'd go pick up any new hardware.
Consider where most people are listening to music. It's not in an expensive theater setup. It's on their iPod (or other portable device) with earphones, on their PC, or in their car.
I enjoy my theater setup for watching movies, and being surrounded by all the sounds that were produced with it.
I also listen to music on my "good enough" desktop speakers and in the car. Sure, I know parts are missing, and if I compare the output with the theater, I will notice the differences. So, I simply don't. Speakers large enough to fit in my ears aren't going to give an accurate recreation of the music. I listen to FM radio in the car. I enjoy the words, the beat, and know that the speakers in the car are in a harsh environment. Not only the extreme temperatures that the car interior encounters (about 15F to 150F), but there is significant interference with outside noises. My car is transportation, I'm not going to try to make it into a platform to recreate audio performances. Some people do. Some people spend an awful lot of money doing it. In the end, they can listen to music just as I can, except for the hours I'm in my car, and the difference in cost, I have a lot of money left over to spend on other things.
Consider *who* is listening to the music (Score:2)
Not only where people are listening to the music, but also who is listening to the music.
Lots of us have been exposed to loud noises over the last 20, 30, 40 or more years. Some through our own choices (loud live gigs, nightclubs etc), and through noise that isn't our choice (living in cities, working in industrial workspaces).
Lots of us don't have perfect hearing so to be honest less than perfect sound reproduction is good enough, our hearing is too shot. No point spending thousands on a sound reproduction
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VHS quality is enough for all videos. Why do people want this crappy HD stuff ?
Because that is like comparing extremely low bit rate mp3 to flac, not comparing high bit rate aac to flac. By comparison – a lot of people I know are entirely happy with DVD and don't give a shit about HD because with the size of their TV and the distance they sit from it they can't see any noticeable difference. You'd in fact be pretty surprised by what you can't see in HD – you need a 40" TV to be closer than 12 feet from you to be able to see any improvement above a DVD.
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"I didn't hear any difference between the wav and mp3. But I was surprised to hear a difference with the original CD (even did a blind test)."
Were all 3 formats played with the same equipment? Or did you play WAV and MP3 with your computer, but the CD was played with an external CD player?
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You can find your CD's?
I can't find a single one of my CDs these days. The only stuff I can find is on my hard drive. Nicely categorized. Backed up. Taking a small amount of room.
Do your CDs out last your hard drives? What brands are you buying, because that shit sounds fucking terrible. Else, why are you spending so much time and effort keeping track of your CDs?
I'm not abdicating getting rid of CDs, but FLAC is a perfectly good format, which could be easily supported.
So thank you for diverting the convers
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"So thank you for diverting the conversation."
You must be new here.
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Yeah, it seems you used the CDs as backups, which is okay, but that hasn't worked out well for me. They get lost, they get damaged, etc.
Also, buying then ripping, or even just buying and copying them across, is just adding another step.
I'll continue to buy music online, as its a lot more convenient. Artists that don't distribute online, and sometimes artists that don't do FLAC, just won't get my business, instead I'll pirate their shit.
Done and done.
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CDs are more costly, and they won't last longer than say, flash memory, except for special circumstances. For example, some CDs will degrade in as little as 18 months in humid conditions, or there's a fungus [nih.gov] that will colonize and eat your discs. Flash memory is practically unaffected by storage conditions, as long as you don't throw it into the oven and switch it on: it can take basically any value for humidity, even a straight-up dump into water, survive freezing and tropical heat, fungi, etc.
So really, i
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I've never, ever heard of commercial CDs going bad (except from scratches). All my CDs from 5th grade forward (nearly 20 years old at this point) work just fine. I found them while moving, all played fine. I borrowed a friend's CD-R and some cheap media to back up my computer in 1998, THOSE still work as well. This is after being stored in the attic of our house which regularly sees 150 degrees during the day (Dallas), and a huge range of humidity levels. I'm sure if you left them shiny side up on the windo
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Oh yeah, I forgot about scratches: drop the flash chip and co. in a cheap aluminium/steel cassette (think CF cards), and it'll be nearly indestructible by domestic means, while still usable easily. You can't do that with a CD.
I have, however, had trouble with disc degradation, even though I kept them in a mostly-constant temperature room (~21C ±4C), and had a few go bad and unreadable after about ten years, without scratches. They did make nice light shows in the microwave afterwards, though...
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Simple. Physical media cannot give me the "instant gratification" of buying downloaded songs. Especially, it puts the burden of actually ripping it onto me, as well as incurr extra costs in manufacturing, shipping etc. Besides, the longevity of CD-formats vary greatly depending on the quality of plastic that is put it. (For example, my father recently discovered some of his 15-years-old CD:s doesn't play back today.) Ripping it losslessly, and backing it up to some cloud-storage is probably both more reliab
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But why should I be limited to 'CD Quality'? Linn Records have it right, I think. You can get the same recording at various quality levels, and for certain kinds of recordings I am more than happy to part with 20 quid for an album which is what they charge for 24bit 192kHz FLAC. ... plus I don't want to consume space in my home to store my music collection.
I think the key point here is that choice is good. The music industry needs to start responding to market demand.
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It might be tedious to rip an entire colelction, but how often do you buy music? It's hardly tedious to rip a single album... you stick in the CD, and on most computers you launch your audio program and press "rip" or "import" - it grabs all of the necessary metadata from the net, and if you've chosen your software well, it'll even either automatically grab your album art for you, or be just one more click to grab the art for the full album.
What CD gets scratched if you're ripping it once to FLAC? It stays
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It might be tedious to rip an entire colelction, but how often do you buy music? It's hardly tedious to rip a single album... you stick in the CD, and on most computers you launch your audio program and press "rip" or "import" ...
There is no reason anyone should ever have to do this job - it is as silly as printing and scanning a document, in order to email it. We have better technology than this, why not use it?
Just because the wasted time is a small amount (at a time) is no argument for continuing to waste that time...
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You should have a backup solution in place anyways, so adding your digital music to your backup of your photos, email, spreadsheets, and other documents isn't any more complex. Alternatively, if you don't currently back up your CD collection (by copying the CD), then not backing up your digital music collection is no different.
Moreover you're likely relying on CDDB or similar to get the track names and times. What happens when the CD isn't on there? You have to type it yourself, which again is something
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You have other data you need to back up anyway. The added tedium of needing to backup ~50GB rather than say ~30GB (200 albums), is essentially ignorable. Zero extra effort, and the extra cost is in the "small and dropping" category.
At the moment online backup is around $0.10 pro GB and month, so keeping the 200 albums securely backed up is $25/year - and that's for the first year. (if you think a GB of online storage will cost MORE in a year or three, I've got some prime swampland for you...)
Infact, keeping
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And I prefer from far to do this ripping and tagging myself. That way I have consistency in the way tags are filled, having all the artists names on compilation cd and not just 'multiple artists'. How many time I have see the track title in the album title tag! How many time i have seen in 1 album the name of the artist spelled differently! And I am fed up of all uppercase titles when the title on the jacket is in title case.
Yes: "Ripping and tagging CDs is tedious". But it should be done if you want it to
FLAC is definitely a sound option (Score:2)
Portable players (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a proud owner of a Rockboxed Sansa e250. However, if I kept the music I listen to regularly in FLAC, both the internal storage (2GB) and external microSD fall short. No, hotswapping isn't a good idea, especially if you're treating yourself to music going long distance. That's why I decided to settle for Ogg Vorbis - quality good enough that I don't hear a difference between the source and the compressed file (as proven by several long blind hearing tests), and file sizes that make my collection that much more managable.
Re:Portable players (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why they'd probably never go for it. A business model that is incompatible with DRM? Are you mad!?!?!?
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While this would be the ideal setup most of us simply don't care enough about a (to most people) imperceptible difference in quality to go through all this hassle. Also if your typical MP3 collection was in FLAC it would be impractical to backup online. Online/cloud backup and syncing is what the consumer world is moving very rapidly towards.
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Isn't the bigger problem with that that it makes life much more difficult for the user (longer download time, time spent transcoding everything they want to put on their MP3 player instead of just copying) for a marginal benefit that only occurs in an already rare scenario? It's a lot of hassle to go to in order to enjoy very slightly increased quality if you ever either buy an incredibly high-quality sound system or migrate to an MP3 player that can't play your MP3s, neither of which are ever likely to hap
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There's this tinsy little online place does it somewhere. Err...ah yes, iTunes Music Store. That's the one. DRM free and iTunes has an option to transcode to a lower bit rate when transferring to an iPod.
Cheers,
Ian
Seems fairly obvious why not (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Seems fairly obvious why not (Score:5, Informative)
For example, Harper-Collens has put a limit on how many times a library can use a copy of an ebook http://ebooks.dreamwidth.org/32051.html [dreamwidth.org] The book can only be circulated 26 times before the DRM license runs out.
This is outrageous and stupid. If possible, boycott all their products.
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I was about to post the same thing. How can they sell you the same shit over and over again if they give it to you in the best format to start with?
Best thing to do is buy the MP3s and then download the FLAC files off BitTorrent. Probably violates the license agreement or something but morally you are in the clear.
I don't know anyone who still downloads music... (Score:2)
Everyone I know (in the EU) has switched to Spotify [spotify.com].
(This isn't a sales pitch, just a statement of fact :-P)
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Thought it was bigger than that! Insensitive clod is insensitive :)
Ah well... My point is still that, based on the speed at which Spotify is growing (where available), the future is streaming.
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Well ... (Score:2)
Most of the time I listen to music using a mobile device (phone, PMP) and earbuds. So for my purposes large lossless files wouldn't make much of a difference anyway.
But in the end it all depends on whether there's a large enough demand on the market.
FLAC is bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
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I tried converting my entire mp3 library to FLAC and couldn't hear any difference. It's just audiophiles circlejerking. I bet you all use golden audio cables and $500 cable stands, too.
Is that +1 funny or -1 troll? I can't tell...
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Bahahahaha... Now I kind of wish I hadn't posted just so I could mod this funny :) You made my day good sir.
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Obviously you're joking, but just in case you're not:
Converting a lossy format (MP3) into a lossless format (FLAC) will not magically restore the bits lost in the original conversion to MP3.
What you're doing is the equivalent of taking an 800x600 image, scaling it down to 1x1, saving it, re-opening it, scaling it back up to 800x600 and complaining that all you have is a single colour image rather than the original.
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Re:FLAC is bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, that would work in Hollywood OS.
"Enhance!"
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Woosh!
Re:FLAC is bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, did you connect your computer to the network using a regular cable when you did the conversion? There's your problem. You need to use a good network cable [amazon.com] or the bits aren't polished properly when you convert from MP3 to FLAC. You might think "but I didn't even use the network when I was converting". Doesn't matter--the audio bits leak out of there if you're not using the right cable.
Why not just sell fully uncompressed audio? (Score:2)
You know... FLAC doesn't actually compress down from WAV all that much. Given current storage sizes, why not simply just sell fully uncompressed audio files? You can use FLAC or whatever as the transmission medium and/or storage server-side to be less of a bandwidth burden, but the user should just see an incoming WAV file, etc. that he can do whatever he wants with...
Personally, I rip all my CDs to --preset-extreme MP3 to listen, since I can just pull out my CD if I really needed a bit-perfect copy (e.g.
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I don't know about you, but ~60% of original size when using FLAC sounds to me like compression is useful. While nowhere near the 10x or more compression of popular lossy codecs, it's still useful to save space. It also helps when you need to make backups.
Demand for FLAC (Score:2)
I could demand FLAC, but not many people use the format or know what it is. A quick experience I had. After a system crash I decided to upgrade from WinXP to Win7 (I very rarely use Windows, and it's only there for testing). There is no default support for FLAC in Windows, in fact, the only lossless format I did find support for is WAV (PCM).
If Windows does not provide support out of the box for FLAC, and to add it to Windows Media Player needs hacking of the registry, you can see why not many people would
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Maybe they won't sell a lossless format because... (Score:2)
.. that would impair their ability to charge the same person several times for the same content in different formats.
Why do we put up with DRM? (Score:2)
Same reason. There are not enough consumers who care in order to put any kind of pressure on the music cartels.
I don't want FLAC (Score:2)
We may have a lot more hard drive space these days, but really? There are many formats that produce great quality and don't need to be ~25 megs per song. To anyone but real audiophiles, I think this would be a waste of space.
Related: ripping CDs to FLAC/CUE properly on Linux (Score:2)
On Windows, Exact Audio Copy seems to be the gold standard with more bells and whistles than I could wish for.
I don't use Windows though.
What is the "best" way to rip audio CDs to FLAC with CUE sheets on Linux? Ideally, I'd like:
* automagic grabbing of meta-data off the Internet
* automagic comparison of my ripped results to an online database. I.e. I want to know if my rip is bit-perfect.
* a guesstimate of how good/bad a rip's quality is, depending on the read data of the disk drive
* optionally a log file o
Devices, convenience and lack of knowledge (Score:2)
Proper Perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFS:
...better future-proofing and converting capabilities. FLAC is a good, free and open format...
We see here yet another case of mistakenly assuming a commonality of perception where history strongly suggests the opposite. The things listed above as features are actually perceived as bugs by the media distribution cartels.
Strat
Where's the story? (Score:2)
I do it today. I buy CD's and rip them to FLAC (simultaneously applying ReplayGain) and then they go to my media jukebox. The CD then goes on the shelf and is my master backup should all else fail. I can easily transcode the FLAC to anything else I need without generational loss in quality. My media jukebox is a commercial NAS with RAID 5 and hot spare, so backups are less of a concern. No matter what happens in the future with audio formats, FLAC is about as future-proof as you can get while preserving ori
Rotational Velocidensity (Score:5, Funny)
I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.
--
BMO
RE: Just buy a CD (Score:3)
That's exactly what I do.
I buy a CD. A USED CD.
Often for less than a few tracks off iTunes.
Rip 'em to iTunes. Gracenote adds the fiddling small details.
Google Images or Amazon provides album art for CoverFlow.
I rip to MP3. My 'stereo' is my old dual processor G5 Mac, with a pair of Cambridge Soundworks speakers.
Good enough for these old ears of mine.
As always, YMMV.
The reason is obvious (Score:3)
FLAC --for format choice (Score:3)
One reason I'd like to see lossless files available is so that I could put everything in my preferred lossy format on my devices. Can't fit your whole library in 320kbps? Just re-encode for a lower bitrate. Too snobby for 128kbps? Re-encode for a higher bitrate. That's something you can't do with MP3 source files without enduring multi-generational loss issues.
In my case, I'd prefer to have this capability for a rather unusual reason. Amazon's MP3s are done in a VBR MP3 encoding; for some inexplicable reason, most VBR encoded MP3s give me a slight headache?! This is true even when I'm not aware of the encoding beforehand. I'd much rather have CBR encoded files just to avoid this strange effect, even if I had to use a lower bitrate.
Some labels are doing it right (Score:3)
I recently bought a vinyl album released by Asthmatic Kitty Records [asthmatickitty.com], it included a download of the entire album in FLAC and MP3 already tagged for your convenience. I don't even own a turntable, I bought it for the included artwork and to support the artist.
Some labels are doing it right.
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Re:"CD quality audio"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Master is downsampled to 44.1kHz with the best possible filter to avoid aliasing. Then the samples are scaled and rounded to 16 bits, with a scaling factor carefully computed to give the best possible SNR. And you get this result on an audio CD or using a lossless compression like FLAC.
Alternatively you can choose to get the 96kHz 24 bits stereo sound compressed with a lossy compression (ogg, mp3, or anything you choose) at a bitrate of 1Mbit/s.
Which of the two would you choose? There is no doubt the first of the two options will give the best audio quality if your hardware is somehow limited to 44.1kHz 16 bits. But if your audio hardware can do better than that, I guess the second option will give better audio quality at one third the bitrate.
If you are optimizing for best possible sound quality, you have to know your constraints. Depending on the constraints you will get different result. If your only constraint is the actual hardware from the D/A converter to the speakers you will get a completely different result from when you are constrained to a certain bitrate but can choose audio hardware as you like. You'll get yet another result if you are constrained by cost of the hardware to do the playback.
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I personally would prefer to BUY in FLAC, even if I later have to transcode. If I buy lossily compressed, I can never get back original quality, but the other way is (relatively) easy. In particular, many of the music-stores are not web-outlets but requires a client-side software. (Itunes for one) If customers demanded it, it would be trivial to implement auto-conversion to the target-device, many already do, while keeping originals in fully-quality format.
Re:Compatibility (Score:4, Informative)
Portable support is not the point. Being able to batch encode is. I've been ripping my CDs for years. When I gave up on the whole OGG Vorbis thing and went back to MP3, no problem. When I switched to iTunes + iPhone, no problem encoding to AAC. No decrease in quality transcoding from one lossy format to another. No doubt I'll want to re-enocde again in the future if there is an improvement in the encoders.
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That seems to me a little like arguing that the real loss from not buying CDs is that you don't get a handy portable mirror. Yes that is a benefit that you miss out on - but only one person in a million cares about it. As a reason to advocate FLAC it's a little low on mass-market appeal.
And frankly, what would be the big difference if you had ripped to 320kB Vorbis files (or the equivalent) at the start? You're never going more than one transcode away from the source file so the quality loss would be minima
Re:Compatibility (Score:5, Informative)
As to portable media players supporting FLAC:
Sandisk (Sansa Fuze, Fuze+, Clip, Clip+)
iRiver (B30, E100, E150, E200, Lplayer, P7, Spinn, S100)
Archos (Vision 3, 24, 28, 32)
Samsung (Yepp M1, YP-Q1, YP-Q2, YP-Q3, YP-R0, YP-R1)
Philips (GoGear Muse)
Sweex (MP470, MP480)
Transcend (MP860, Tsonic 870)
and last but not least,
Cowon/iAudio (all of them)
Prices:
The most affordable player capable of FLAC (and Ogg Vorbis), the Sweex MP480 Vidi 8GB, from GBP 22 (ca USD 35) in the U.K.
Re:Compatibility (Score:4, Informative)
The big issue with FLAC isn't just player compatibility, but storage. I have a few 24-bit/96kHz FLAC-encoded albums, averaging over a gigabyte each in size. Unless you're using one of the hard-drive equipped Archos devices or something similar (if anyone else uses HDD anymore), you're not going to keep many albums on your player this way.
You're also probably listening via earbuds, maybe some better cans if you really care, but still... there's not that much need for the higher quality on a portable device. Unless you're using a Cowon device, you may not have the audio chops in the device hardware needed to get much better sound out of these files, either. But it's nice to know you can play that latest HDtracks download without the need to transcode.
And for those living in the 21rst century (dedicated audio players being so 1990s), FLAC is also supported in many Android media players.
Re:do you stick CDs in your phone? :) (Score:2)
Because FLAC is very poorly supported among both portable media devices and media center devices?
So are CDs, yet people buy those. I have bought FLACs from livedownloads.com, and it's a lot like buying a CD, except it was a little cheaper (about halfway between the MP3 price and the CD price), and I didn't have to wait for delivery. Once I got 'em, I transcoded 'em (once) for my portable, and burned 'em for my CD player(s), so the total amount of work was almost exactly the same as for a CD (which I would rip instead of burn). I didn't see any particular downside, and I'd like it to be an option mor
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I can here the difference on good headphones and certain songs. I've done listening tests on 3 headphones. Using Sennheiser CX300's ($30), I could barely tell the difference between FLAC and V0 MP3. In a blind test, I might not be able to tell them apart at all. Using Sennheiser IE6's (~$120) it is easier to tell the difference, and I can tell the difference on certain songs. Using my friend's Audio Technica ATH-M50's (~$120), the difference is obvious on many songs. All of this is listening coming st
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legit music that I can do anything I want with.
Contradiction. The very idea of 'legit' music recordings contains within itself restrictions on what you can do with said recordings.
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Man, post as your real self, whoever you are. I want to say "Amen, brother".. but not to a fucking A/C.
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You drag your songs from your music library to your portable device, and your music player automatically converts them if it needs to. I'm not sure what hassle is involved here.
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I follow the same philosophy.
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CD sound is compressed and leaves out "unneeded" bits of audio because it had to be processed by very early and cheap computers. You might as well say MP3 quality. Lossless copies of a lossy media are NOT the holy grail of HiFi.
No. That is incorrect. CD sound is uncompressed PCM; no bits are "discarded" except signal bits that were never sampled in the first place, due to the finite sampling rate, OR bits that were aliased due to distortion; all conversions to digital from analog require sampling.
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But CD, DAT, and the stereo PCM option for DVD-Video all use uncompressed audio.
Yeah, but most music is mixed in at least 24bit/96kHz these days. CDs have to dither to 16/44.1 which either requires truncation or psychoacoustic noise shaped dithering.
Read this if you're actually interested in a full explanation:
http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozone/OzoneDitheringGuide.pdf [izotope.com]
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