FLAC 1.3.4
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FLAC 1.3.4
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Re: FLAC 1.3.4
#2How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC?
By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM. With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in. But, is that really worth the bother?
I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out completely. FLAC on the other hand has had decades of work put into it. It is an engineering marvel. I just wish people would think simpler than “engineering marvel” when it comes to archival formats when the simplest conceivable format works just about as well… :$
Edit: Many people are bringing up MP3/Ogg/Opus, compressing podcasts, how silly it would be to toss out all forms of audio compression.
To be clear, MP3/Ogg/Opus make perfect sense to me. They are complicated. But, in return you get 8-12x the content at great (not perfect) quality. FLAC on the other hand Is at least as complicated, has a lot less widespread support and has an ROI of 1.5-2x…
As a consumer, I can see that 2x in return for a modest amount of hassle can be an OK deal in constrained situations -like price-gouged mobile storage. As an engineer who has maintained software systems over many years, the complexity of FLAC compared to trivial PCM as an archive format makes me a sad, cranky, old greybeard.
Re: FLAC 1.3.4
#3How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC? By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM. With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in. But, is that really worth the bother? I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out…
For me, it's mostly about being able to stream it over a poor quality 4G connection in a speeding car/train. I could care less about the storage; I've got over half of a 120TB array unused, but halving the bandwidth requirement for crappy client connections without having to deal with transcoding is nice.
The storage savings are relevant when I consider cached audio on my phone, but... I'm not really sure how relevant.
Re: FLAC 1.3.4
#4How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC? By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM. With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in. But, is that really worth the bother? I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out…
> How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC?
It's not about the storage, it's about the transfer.
Streaming services are only just beginning to support lossless at all. Improved lossy codecs like Opus provide indistinguishable-from-lossless audio at 128Kb/s, so the formula is store the audio losslessly, then transcode it to lossy (on the fly, even) for streaming.
Re: FLAC 1.3.4
#5How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC? By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM. With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in. But, is that really worth the bother? I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out…
Portable devices have to come with more internal storage before file size doesn't matter.
I'm still converting to MP3 before adding to my phone for that reason (used to be ogg which I remain convinced sounded better, but player compatibility wasn't there) because 128GB of expanded internal storage isn't much.
Re: FLAC 1.3.4
#6How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC? By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM. With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in. But, is that really worth the bother? I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out…
I'm surprised to hear this perspective. I feel like FLAC is to PCM as PNG is to BMP. Why not just work with FLAC directly? Half the file size in exchange for negligible processing time.
As a practical use case, FLAC is the only way I can fit my song library on my phone. Flagship phones today come with 128GB of storage, about 90GB is actually usable. Every additional 128GB is $100 more.
Re: FLAC 1.3.4
#7How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC? By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM. With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in. But, is that really worth the bother? I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out…
Isn't the 4TB hard drive an engineering marvel itself? Worse, it's an engineering marvel that costs each time its produced, while FLAC is mostly done.
Re: FLAC 1.3.4
#8How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC? By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM. With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in. But, is that really worth the bother? I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out…
There is also other storage like memory cards for cars or portable players.
Re: FLAC 1.3.4
#9How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC? By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM. With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in. But, is that really worth the bother? I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out…
Besides the other good points people have made, I would just like to add that this is the kind of mentality that I really dislike to see. Just because resources are cheap, do we really need to waste it all? Computers and smartphones are faster than ever, yet there are always websites that I find completely unusable on my phone. And some of these websites I actually need to use because they are required by the government... Looking at you, MitID!
I'm inclined to call this The Javascript Mentality, though I don't mean to insult JS users. JS definitely has its place, it's just very much abused, unfortunately.
Re: FLAC 1.3.4
#10How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC? By my calculations, $65 will buy you a 4TB hard drive which can hold over 6,000 hours of uncompressed CD quality PCM. With FLAC you might squeeze 9,000-12,000 hours in. But, is that really worth the bother? I know it’s not obviously relevant to consumers, but an uncompressed PCM .wav file is a format that any high school coder can figure out…
I need an SD card on my phone just to happily fit my highly compressed podcasts, so I don't think we're anywhere near the point of skipping compression.
Even somewhere you don't want to use FLAC because you're worried about the complexity, you should at least throw gzip at your files. PCM is a waste in any kind of computer scenario.