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FLAC 1.3.4

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Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#21

Post by masklinn »

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.

FLAC also has no metadata interop issues since the flac container always specified vorbis comments.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#22

Post by worik »

dwoxctbvgq wrote: post #9
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…

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 governm…

I think of it as the Python Mentality

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#23

Post by noiwillnot »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #15
lazyjeff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Same thing with MacBooks. Air +200$ for 256 GB of disk drive (from 256 to 512).

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#24

Post by chungy »

corysama wrote: post #17
at_a_remove wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's that last statement that makes it completely impractical.

There isn't even a de facto standard for metadata with wav files. Most players/software don't even bother at all.

FLAC pretty firmly settled on the ogginfo format and literally everything that supports FLACs use that same metadata format.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#25

Post by magicalhippo »

dale_glass wrote: post #19
LeoPanthera wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What are the use-cases for pre-baked positional audio? Ie where the client can't do the positional audio processing itself.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#26

Post by raverbashing »

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…

"complexity of FLAC"? As complex as gzipping a file

Sounds like the people who are surprised at their end of month AWS bill because they couldn't bother to optimize anything.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#27

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #15
lazyjeff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

The market decides; people pay those rates even though there's alternatives available.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#28

Post by grumpyprole »

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.

The FLAC decoder has been almost completely integer for a long time (and may now be completely so). Apple Music and iOS still do not play FLAC, which is one significant reason why I won't buy an iPhone. Transcoding my entire music library certainly isn't "just works".

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#29

Post by masklinn »

corysama wrote: post #17
at_a_remove wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> And, trivial to ignore or blindly carry it along if your software doesn’t specifically support it.

Which is about as good as not having metadata in the first place.

And since people rarely actually code to spec and it’s usual for wav files to not have metadata (and as demonstrated by GP common belief that WAV files can’t have metadata), pessimistically I would absolutely expect choking on wav metadata to be common.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#30

Post by ksec »

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…

> It is an engineering marvel

There are lots lossless audio compression. Each with different set of priorities and trade offs. From Compression Ratio, Decoding and Encoding Speed etc. I agree FLAC is a very good codec, especially for consumers. But I am not entirely sure it is a "marvel". Arguably WavePack does somethings better, especially when doing it patent free. ( Sort of irrelevant now at this point in time )

The world has moved to streaming, and it is only a matter of time when lossless becomes a standard. Like both Apple and Spotify are planning. 5G will improves capacity, so by the end of 5G migration sometimes in 2030? This is sort of off topic but HN on one hand dont understand 5G and suggest not upgrading to 5G but on the other hand wants to have more Data for the same price and start doing lossless streaming. Well you cant have both.

While I wish we could research and push the lossless ratio down to 33%, or push 128kbps lossy audio codec to be truly transparent. But much like modern audio codec all research are now going to low latency and real time. Which seems to be a much much harder topic.

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