91–100 of 165 posts
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FLAC bitrots less than WAV, because WAV doesn't have checksums.
It bitrots at the same rate, but you detect that it happened with FLAC
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> Who says your filesystem isn't compressing data under you? Me, because we don't use transparent compression anywhere. > Actually, who says the disk itself isn't? I'm not very sure about that, to be honest. SSDs do that to prolong their life, but the saved space doesn't return as more space on FS level. It just returns as endurance, which is more important in my case. So, disk's transparent compression doesn't mean…
> Me, because we don't use transparent compression anywhere. Since Fedora 34, a clean install will result in btrfs with zstd compression turned on. (An update of an older install will of course not change the filesystem from underneath the files.)
Other systems we install are configured on many levels, so even if the defaults are BTRFS w/zstd, it might be either known or changed to suit our needs better.
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This’ll be because since 2016 it’s now expected you’ll stream more media than you’ll did back then, so not much much storage needed.
That doesn't make sense of why the prices increased so much despite storage offering stagnation while NAND flash getting cheaper. Any way you slice it it's still price gouging.
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…
Meanwhile everything bar Apple now supports FLAC natively.
No way in hell we ever switch to WAV.
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.
Another fun fact about wav files: they don't necessarily contain LPCM data. The format allows for a variety of encodings, including lossy ones.
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…
WAV can’t deal with metadata / ID3s, cover art etc. Meanwhile everything bar Apple now supports FLAC natively. No way in hell we ever switch to WAV.
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…
* Most FLAC tools support metadata. For the more "bare" formats that's not the case. When converting to a lossy format, I want my metadata intact.
* FLAC can be played directly on most media players (with metadata).
* The format may be complicated, but the source is open and actively maintained, and there's support everywhere. Using FLAC in your software project is a breeze.
* 2x compression is nothing to sneeze at. My archival collection takes up 1TB on my mirrored, backed up NAS. I like that better than it taking up 2TB (which would be 1/6 of my space). Someday when I look at 1TB the way I look at 100GB today, this won't be a concern anymore.
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There's no way their proprietary codec is less black magic than Opus is. I've rarely if ever seen a closed source codec designed by people who really know what they're doing; they're usually just whatever the cowboy they hired thought would be cool. It's not like management is going to be able to tell if it's state of the art or not.
Well, I say "black magic" because at least to me it's a quite mysterious creation. But I'm no audio engineer. It's a lossy codec that's for some reason fixed rate, and shrinks audio by exactly 1/4th. The resulting quality is very good (works perfectly fine for music), and it's much faster than Opus. It retains stereo and high frequencies and sounds just fine. I'm sure there's a tradeoff somewhere, but it's certainly…
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That doesn't make sense of why the prices increased so much despite storage offering stagnation while NAND flash getting cheaper. Any way you slice it it's still price gouging.
Price gouging has a legal meaning and means raising prices in an emergency. Charging more than you’d happen to like isn’t ‘price gouging’.
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> 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 ) T…
Gotta give the audiophools lossless so they can listen over compressed Bluetooth audio.
I don't stream it; and I don't use it on a phone. If I ever need to do those things, I can convert from FLAC to lossy, knowing that I'm starting with something that is as accurate I can get.
That is, I'm implicitly using FLAC as an archive format. Gzipped PCM would work, except that I can't play that directly in a music player. I don't care about a bit-flip rendering a FLAC unplayable; my collection is backed-up.
Basically, I'm not going to pay for a CD full of bits, and then immediately throw away a lot of those bits.