Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

people.xiph.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 328 posts

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#311

Post by thirdsun »

mruts wrote: post #4

Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120). The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy ear…

> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.

In my opinion that‘s a myth and certainly not a given. There are plenty of subpar vinyl masters and terrible pressings out there. And it‘s not that difficult to find good digital masters these days. More important than the medium is the genre, label and target audience - I have a pretty obscure and diverse taste, including rarities from past decades which are finally being re-issued for the first time and while mixdowns certainly vary in quality it‘s mostly fine and the result of a careful process these days.

However things might be worse when it comes to mainstream music.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#312

Post by aw3c2 »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #297
aw3c2 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit. What risk? You can privately store your music anywhere, it's completely legal to do so.

I'm considering which online backup service to use for my music collection, is there a particular one you'd recommend, other than the obvious players like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive? Preferably not hosted in the US, for privacy/bandwidth reasons.

I use my own 10€/month 2TB server with OVH but also have it synced to Google Drive.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#313

Post by thirdsun »

matwood wrote: post #108
jlarcombe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But aren't you worried you'll lose access to your music? I have to own it! I can't have it at the whim of multiple third parties to take down as they see fit. It's too important.

So where do you store these files that you'll never lose access? CDs? People with a room full of 8 tracks or cassettes would like to have a word. HDDs? Those fail all the time, plus any sort of natural disaster could wipe out your collection. Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit. At least for now, the record companies and the service providers are both incen…

Not OP, but my collection is

- stored on the desktop for fast and performant access

- synced to an NAS daily for central access around the house/network

- uploaded offsite to cloud storage daily as backup

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#314

Post by thirdsun »

mark-r wrote: post #13
martin_a wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who is using MP3 players these days any more? I found myself to buy an iPod in... like... 2011 or so. Converted all the CDs I had to FLAC because losless was the way to go. Two or three years (let it be 5, doesn't matter) pass by, I got a better Smartphone, Spotify Premium and don't touch my 1xx GB of FLAC music anymore, because I don't want to carry around another device etc. I'm not sure but I think "owning" mu…

I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.

Do you manually convert to mp3? iTunes has an option to convert lossless audio to a lossy, space saving AAC at a bitrate of your choice on the fly when syncing to an Apple device. I‘m sure there are similar solutions in Android land.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#315

Post by thirdsun »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #224
ken wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iTunes doesn't support FLAC, but it does support ALAC, whose implementation is also open-source. And it has a neat feature where it can store ALAC on your computer, and automatically transcode to a (much smaller) lossy format when syncing to a mobile device.

Yeah, I'm aware, I just feel like FLAC is the more popular, more multi-platform friendly/preferred option, definitely seems to have more momentum behind it, it's easier to buy FLAC then ALAC for one.

Buying options shouldn‘t be a concern at all as long as they are lossless - you simply convert them to the lossless format of your choice. There won‘t be any quality lost. Lossless to lossless is still lossless.

Your format of choice should be dictated by your mobile platform - if you use iOS device or simply like iTunes, go for ALAC. Any decent player will handle FLAC and ALAC, but Apple requires ALAC. If Apple isn‘t a concern for you, there‘s no reason to use anything but FLAC.

Personally, I use ALAC since I use iOS. So far there haven‘t been any downsides.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#316

Post by KozmoNau7 »

grawprog wrote: post #309
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low end thing just isn't true at all, and I don't know where that myth comes from. I have a room-corrected setup with two properly adjusted subs, and MP3 does just fine on deep bass content. Regarding solo vocals, the history of the MP3 format says: "The song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega was the first song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop the MP3. Brandenburg adopted the song for testing purposes, listen…

>The low end thing just isn't true at all, and I don't know where that myth comes from. Well for me it came from running multiple copies of the same bass heavy tracks encoded in different formats through spectrum analysers. But I guess those lie? >Regarding solo vocals, the history of the MP3 format says: "The song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega was the first song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop the MP3. Bran…

>"Well for me it came from running multiple copies of the same bass heavy tracks encoded in different formats through spectrum analysers. But I guess those lie?"

Of course it's going to look different in a spectrum analyzer, the whole point of lossy compression is to discard parts of the audio to save space.

You can't evaluate the quality of a lossy codec by looking at spectrograms. They're designed to fool human ears, not measurement software.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#317

Post by teilo »

Ohren wrote: post #201

I'm not a big believer of audiophile stuff, but when I'm listening to 24k music I'm hearing new instruments, new sounds. It's not the case with everything though. Am I retarded ?

Confirmation bias. If you listened to the same track, but at 44.1/16, and were told it was hi-res, you would have the same reaction.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#318

Post by nirvdrum »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #302
nirvdrum wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. I'm actually on a Linux desktop but figured most people would reply with an iTunes-based solution. Cmus looks interesting I'd love to hear what your workflow is for converting, naming, tagging, getting artwork, etc.

Heh, nice :-) Yeah, cmus is incredibly convenient for rapid playlist management once you learn the shortcuts, (there's an excellent quick tutorial $ man cmus-tutorial). I mostly use 7digital & HDTracks to acquire FLACs these days, but when I rip from CDs, I use https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper to do the job. FLACs from 7d/HDTracks are already named & tagged properly so I only deal with it occasionally and when…

Awesome. Thank you for a thorough response. Airsonic looks like just what I want, too. I have a FreeNAS system and would love to centralize my music catalog there.

Over the years I've ripped my CDs maybe 4 or 5 times. I used to have a PowerBook G4 and an early iPod, so I ripped to M4A/AAC. Nothing else played that, so then I went MP3 with storage limitations of the day dictating bitrate. Now, I just want to rip to FLAC and never deal with that again.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#319

Post by ValentineC »

kingosticks wrote: post #296
ValentineC wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought for a moment that Spotify uses Opus, but it turns out that they use Vorbis. Wonder why a switch isn't on their roadmap.

Do they publish their roadmap? I'd imagine they consider what they have is good enough considering the backwards compatability issue it'd likely introduce.

They don't publish their roadmap, but there have been threads on their community forums suggesting this, and an official "Not Right Now" response:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Music-Use-Opus-C...

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#320

Post by behringer »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #297
aw3c2 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit. What risk? You can privately store your music anywhere, it's completely legal to do so.

I'm considering which online backup service to use for my music collection, is there a particular one you'd recommend, other than the obvious players like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive? Preferably not hosted in the US, for privacy/bandwidth reasons.

Backblaze no question about it. Use encryption and you won't have to worry about privacy. It's expensive to recover your data, so you'll need other backup methods too unless you're made of money.
Post reply on HN