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FLAC 1.3.4

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Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#111

Post by dangravell »

topranks wrote: post #94
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…

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.

It can - it has supported RIFF INFO from the start, and ID3 support exists.

If software writers choose to not extract metadata from WAVs that's up to them... but I guess it amounts to the same thing if you only want to use software that doesn't read tags in WAVs.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#112

Post by dangravell »

denton-scratch wrote: post #100
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta give the audiophools lossless so they can listen over compressed Bluetooth audio.

The reason this "audiophool" uses FLAC is because I want my music collection to be stored at the same quality it was when I paid for it; and FLAC is more conservative with storage than PCM. 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 a…

This. It's just silly to throw data away. Who knows when you might need to transcode?

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#113

Post by Aachen »

sprash wrote: post #35
brnt wrote: post #16

Shoutout to LossyWAV (formerly LossyFLAC) [1]. It's a preprocessor to lossless codecs shaping noise such that higher compression ratios can me reached. It works out much better than that sounds like. 1. https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=LossyWAV

This reduces the bitrate by about 3 times. Even at the lowest bitrate at about 300 kbps I can't even hear the slightest difference to the original. Impressive, but I wonder what it would sound like when you reduce the bitrate even further. Would it be competitive with mp3?

I mean, you don't need flac to have audio quality where people can't distinguish in double blind test. Something like 160kbps (iirc, ±30) Opus does the job as well.

(Mp3 is way less efficient and depending on the encoder it can have characteristic artifacts. Vorbis was already better, but opus blows that away. Software support for opus is nearly as good as mp3 since recently. We should either stop considering mp3 the default lossy format or hack it into a container format so audio files can have opus inside while carrying the familiar mp3 extension for the 90s folk to be happy about.)

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#114

Post by Aachen »

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…

Right about the time where computers are finally fast enough where we can just have all software run with Electron without caring about the performance hit.

Just because we can doesn't mean we should waste ssd/cpu when there are absolutely no benefits, aside perhaps from saving a few kilobytes of extra decoder code to save multiple megabytes per song.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#115

Post by SSLy »

Aachen wrote: post #113
sprash wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reduces the bitrate by about 3 times. Even at the lowest bitrate at about 300 kbps I can't even hear the slightest difference to the original. Impressive, but I wonder what it would sound like when you reduce the bitrate even further. Would it be competitive with mp3?

I mean, you don't need flac to have audio quality where people can't distinguish in double blind test. Something like 160kbps (iirc, ±30) Opus does the job as well. (Mp3 is way less efficient and depending on the encoder it can have characteristic artifacts. Vorbis was already better, but opus blows that away. Software support for opus is nearly as good as mp3 since recently. We should either stop considering mp3 the…

Ogg was merely a (very bad) container, you're probably thinking about Vorbis.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#116

Post by Aachen »

SSLy wrote: post #115
Aachen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you don't need flac to have audio quality where people can't distinguish in double blind test. Something like 160kbps (iirc, ±30) Opus does the job as well. (Mp3 is way less efficient and depending on the encoder it can have characteristic artifacts. Vorbis was already better, but opus blows that away. Software support for opus is nearly as good as mp3 since recently. We should either stop considering mp3 the…

Ogg was merely a (very bad) container, you're probably thinking about Vorbis.

Ah yes, I keep mixing those up. Edited, thanks.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#117

Post by Aachen »

astrange wrote: post #60
corysama wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not clear how you are jumping from “30% of a few hundred gigs is a bad complexity trade off” to “100000% of terabytes is worthless” :p Thanks for at least arguing against the use case I argued for. Even if you were a bit hyperbolic. I get that I’m being a cranky old engineer. As someone who has spent a couple decades optimizing and maintaining bespoke high performance file formats, the particular use case of FLAC…

FLAC isn't an unmaintainable "engineering marvel", the algorithm is pretty simple and all the data is checksummed. That's enough to make it a better archival format than WAV.

This.

My dad is very skeptical of compression, not understanding the concept of lossless and thinking it reduces quality to compress it. Even if you explain it in terms of "so instead of writing 1111111 it writes 7x1, look how much less space that takes! But it's the same information in the end." Even NTFS compression is a checkbox he insisted I disable. So it's wav all the way.

Recently had hard drive issues and I copied all data to a new drive at painstaking speeds (the hdd was barely limping). I now have no idea which files might have glitches from broken bits or sectors in them.

I guess a checksummed filesystem or keeping hash sums somewhere (the standard utilities make it pretty easy to verify many files with one simple command) is the solution for him. For me... just use a normal format and save half the space and money. Heck, go one step further and use opus: a healthy young individual can't hear the difference at a good bitrate let alone my "audiophile" "listens to too loud music" old man.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#118

Post by ZekeSulastin »

topranks wrote: post #94
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…

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.

In a pinch you can play FLACs using the built-in Files app, actually. Still better off using a different playback app for any long listening, though.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#119

Post by astrange »

grumpyprole wrote: post #107
astrange wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS supports FLAC, you can play it in Safari and the Files app. It's true you can't add it to the Music app, but you can use another app. Also, the $9 Apple headphone dongle is objectively superior to most audiophile DACs, which isn't surprising since it has a larger R&D budget than that entire industry. (Same goes for Google's IIRC.)

I would guess these days, many people buy audiophile DACs for the amplifier stage, for use with demanding high impedance headphones. However, there have been some really bad phone DACs in the past, the Qualcomm audio from the Note4 that I used to own sounded significantly worse than the iPhone using IEMs. What are people measuring with regard to the Apple dongle? Is it "objectively superior" with regard to multiple m…

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...

It's still useful to have an amp for very high impedance headphones for electrical reasons, otherwise it can be quiet and lack bass (plus drain the battery faster.)

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#120

Post by astrange »

Aachen wrote: post #117
astrange wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FLAC isn't an unmaintainable "engineering marvel", the algorithm is pretty simple and all the data is checksummed. That's enough to make it a better archival format than WAV.

This. My dad is very skeptical of compression, not understanding the concept of lossless and thinking it reduces quality to compress it. Even if you explain it in terms of "so instead of writing 1111111 it writes 7x1, look how much less space that takes! But it's the same information in the end." Even NTFS compression is a checkbox he insisted I disable. So it's wav all the way. Recently had hard drive issues and I c…

Some of the older generation have been convinced there's a difference with lossless compression, usually by British salesmen using words like "jitter" and "PRAT". It's sad that by the time you're old enough to afford being an audiophile, you probably don't have high-end hearing anymore.
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