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

FLAC 1.3.4

xiph.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 165 posts

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#11

Post by grumpyprole »

corysama wrote: post #2

How 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…

What would make life simpler is the industry standardising on at least one format. For example Apple doesn't actually support FLAC, despite it being the most popular lossless format.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#12

Post by at_a_remove »

corysama wrote: post #2

How 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…

Metadata.

FLAC allows for metadata. Those .wav files? Nope.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#13

Post by LeoPanthera »

grumpyprole wrote: post #11
corysama wrote: post #2

How 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…

What would make life simpler is the industry standardising on at least one format. For example Apple doesn't actually support FLAC, despite it being the most popular lossless format.

Core Audio added support for FLAC in High Sierra, macOS 10.13, in 2017.

Apple has supported "ALAC" for longer, which unlike FLAC uses only integer math and is therefore less power hungry on mobile devices. You can transcode losslessly between FLAC and ALAC.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#14

Post by est31 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #13
grumpyprole wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would make life simpler is the industry standardising on at least one format. For example Apple doesn't actually support FLAC, despite it being the most popular lossless format.

Core Audio added support for FLAC in High Sierra, macOS 10.13, in 2017. Apple has supported "ALAC" for longer, which unlike FLAC uses only integer math and is therefore less power hungry on mobile devices. You can transcode losslessly between FLAC and ALAC.

That FLAC support is only in CAF containers IIRC, means that most FLAC files won't play. But yes, if you transmux it into CAF, it'll work.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#15

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

lazyjeff wrote: post #6
corysama wrote: post #2

How 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.

>Flagship phones today come with 128GB of storage

IMO, one of the biggest scams in the mobile space currently.

My old OnePlus 3T flagship from 2016 came with 128GB of storage and it "only" cost €480. Also, best phone I ever owned by far BTW.

Today, nearly 6 years later, Apple and Samsung flagships (I'm staying away from OnePlus nowadays) are charging huge markups for more than the base 128GB of storage, on phones that already cost €1000+, despite flash storage getting significantly cheaper since 2016.

This is beyond insulting, especially since modern flagships also lack microSD expansion.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#17

Post by corysama »

at_a_remove wrote: post #12
corysama wrote: post #2

How 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…

Metadata. FLAC allows for metadata. Those .wav files? Nope.

.wav files are really just https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Interchange_File_Fo...

It’s trivial to put a metadata chunk into that. And, trivial to ignore or blindly carry it along if your software doesn’t specifically support it.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#18

Post by galad87 »

est31 wrote: post #14
LeoPanthera wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core Audio added support for FLAC in High Sierra, macOS 10.13, in 2017. Apple has supported "ALAC" for longer, which unlike FLAC uses only integer math and is therefore less power hungry on mobile devices. You can transcode losslessly between FLAC and ALAC.

That FLAC support is only in CAF containers IIRC, means that most FLAC files won't play. But yes, if you transmux it into CAF, it'll work.

On macOS AVFoundation (and so QuickLook and QuickTime) can open .flac files. The Music app can only playback a artificially limited number of formats and can't play FLAC.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#19

Post by dale_glass »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #4
corysama wrote: post #2

How 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.

I found an use for lossless streaming:

A weakness in the open source landscape I found is that there's a lack of fast codecs. If you want to encode in real time (eg, streaming speech or an artist playing in the moment), and encode per client for positional audio in a 3D world, then Opus becomes a bottleneck.

FLAC according to some preliminary tests helps by being faster than Opus to encode.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#20

Post by poink »

corysama wrote: post #2

How 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…

People will stop bothering with FLAC the instant they care about the specifics of the file format more than saving even the most trivial amount of space on their devices. Never, in other words.
Post reply on HN