Chrome is Getting the Ability To Play FLAC (theverge.com) 80
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.
Re:Main application? (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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The iRiver not playing FLAC out of the box was why I got a Rio Karma instead. It still works.
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Luckily rockbox support is quite good on those models, which takes most of the pain away. LCD isn't
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Re:Main application? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Main application? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing fancy. I can hear a definite difference between FLAC and MP3 files on my old Marantz receiver with some JBL speakers.
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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
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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
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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-
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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 betw
Re:Main application? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hard to answer. Nobody who spent many thousand bucks on a audio setup will admit it's impossible to tell the difference!
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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 inc
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Cowon's players support FLAC. I still use a D2 at work with a 32GB sd card full of FLAC; wolfson DAC onboard.
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Yes.
PS: Welcome to Slashdot.
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I love VLC but it sucks on the Mac. I installed it on a friend's Macbook to play MKV files and the damn program hangs just trying to launch it.
The free Elmedia player I tried next worked like a charm.
I've used VLC on Windows & Linux for over 10 years & only issues I can recall were with corrupt files
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A lot of Mac users don't like to use apps that are portable to other operating systems, they like feeling exclusive.
examples: Adium, Vienna, Delicious Library, Juice, Formulate Pro, The Unarchiver, Fugu, and Colloquy.
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I installed Sox and set it to "play" all audio file types [...] no gui needed.
Without a GUI, how do you pause or seek in an audio file?
Add more stuff to web browser, please (Score:1)
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...
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Chrome is a browser, not a media player...
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Which can play WAV and MP3 natively. Why not FLAC as well?
No native macOS app is capable? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [macupdate.com] 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 [rogueamoeba.com]).
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.
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I guess the theory is that an application exclusive to macOS is likely to follow the platform's Human Interface Guidelines more closely than one whose user interface is generalized to cover more platforms.
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but even that's not strictly true, since you can use Fluke [macupdate.com] or other utilities to enable support for FLAC in iTunes, QuickTime, and other first-party apps.
That's not true anymore as the move from the Quicktime to AVFoundation frameworks shut out 3rd party format converters like Perian [perian.org] and Fluke. Note that the link you used is from 2013 and the Fluke no longer works on newer versions of OSX.
In my case, I converted my FLAC collection to the native Apple Lossless format and I can convert back if I wish in the future.
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I use cmus for FLAC, but man would I sure love to see foobar on mac.
You know what this means! (Score:2)
Firefox will do it too!
Re:You know what this means! (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox will do it too!
Firefox added FLAC support in Firefox 51
Welcome to 1998, Google! (Score:2, Insightful)
Enjoy your stay.
Fucking useless (Score:2)
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.
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Repeating MIDI?
That's officially the dumbest reason to leave a browser, ever.
Re:Fucking useless (Score:4, Funny)
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You people think MIDI is outdated yet it's still the base controller for most music you're hearing today. How cute. Have you even heard the samples modern MIDI instruments have?
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Up until Windows Vista, MIDI was handled by the hardware or the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth or whatever flavor of softsynth you had (like Timidity,) the browser just used whatever you had selected as your MIDI device. That option has been removed, now, so in Windows, you're stuck with whatever shitty GS they have unless you use another media player that can allow soft-loading of soundfonts (yay, AIMP2!)
Example of what MIDI can really do - https://soundcloud.com/technic... [soundcloud.com]
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I have a web-plugin soundfont bank for my in-development game that makes MIDI sound utterly realistic. As long as you aren't looking for lyrics, there's no point in using OGG/FLAC/MP3, PERIOD, and it cuts way down on game size.
Masses of audiophiles rejoyce! (Score:2, Funny)
All 12 of them!
Doesn't Chrome ... (Score:3)
... get a lot of that, already?
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For not being able to support 5.1 audio, yeah it does.
Still waiting on APNG personally. (Score:1)
Not like anyone is using MNG.
O! No! They're going to change Chrome AGAIN??? (Score:2)