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FLAC 1.3.4

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Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#131

Post by chrisseaton »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #130
chrisseaton wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is price gouging to you? Just being asked to pay more than you’d like to? Then it’s a meaningless term - I’d always like to pay less.

>Just being asked to pay more than you’d like to? No, I already explained above why I consider it price gouging.

Because they make a profit margin that you'd prefer was smaller? That’s just commerce, and we'd always prefer people charged smaller profit margins.

Are you 'gouging' your employer by asking for the highest salary you can get away with? Of course not. It's a market price.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#132

Post by MikusR »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #53
ksec wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Going from lossless to lossy is better than lossy to lossy.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#133

Post by denton-scratch »

bayindirh wrote: post #121
astrange wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, from my experience, hi-fi audio is more about the complete sound rather than details itself. I've played in orchestras and have a respectable system at home, and the biggest differentiator is not the details, but how these details interact and create a bigger, more immersive soundstage. Yes, you can hear subtle sounds of a bow or a cymbal, but the exciting part is how sounds mesh and play with each other. S…

> more about the complete sound rather than details itself

Agreed. My sound system isn't by any stretch audiophile; and I have the hearing of a 65-year-old. I can't point to things I can hear on a FLAC that I can't hear on an MP3; I hear the same notes, and the same instruments, with much the same tonality. But the former has a presence and vibrancy that is lacking in the latter; when I listen to MP3s, my involvement in the music rapidly tails off.

I suspect that you don't have to be able to hear higher harmonics in isolation, for those higher harmonics to affect what you do hear. That is, even if my hearing range cuts off at 12KHz, I can still tell the difference between an unfiltered sound, and a sound that is low-pass-filtered at 15KHz. The difference seems to be clearest with voices.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#134

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #131
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just being asked to pay more than you’d like to? No, I already explained above why I consider it price gouging.

Because they make a profit margin that you'd prefer was smaller? That’s just commerce, and we'd always prefer people charged smaller profit margins. Are you 'gouging' your employer by asking for the highest salary you can get away with? Of course not. It's a market price.

You missed the point completely.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#135

Post by [deleted] »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #134
chrisseaton wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they make a profit margin that you'd prefer was smaller? That’s just commerce, and we'd always prefer people charged smaller profit margins. Are you 'gouging' your employer by asking for the highest salary you can get away with? Of course not. It's a market price.

You missed the point completely.

[deleted]

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#136

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

fho wrote: post #73
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Funny how a 200€ Xiaomi phone has 256 GB of storage these days. No idea though if that is fake HDD somehow.

Why would it be fake? NAND flash is cheap, that's why Xiaomi can offer 256GB on cheap phones since few people rush to buy Xiaomi. Apple and Samsung are name brands and can afford to overcharge their customers.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#137

Post by bayindirh »

corysama wrote: post #48
bayindirh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC? Having cheap storage is not a valid reason to not to use that space efficiently. With today's, even last decade's processors, encoding FLAC at ripping speed is not even a CPU saturating task, and decoding is merely a blip on processor's queue. If I can store the same bitstream on a smaller space, why shouldn't I? If we're not compressing a…

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…

> Even if you were a bit hyperbolic.

It was an intentional dramatization to showcase some slippery slope, tbh. Genuinely sorry if that sounded too harsh, or rude. That wasn't the intention.

> I’d rather have something that’s trivial for any software to work with everywhere forever. I know FLAC feels like forever. But, so did a lot of dead formats I used to work with.

I understand the fear and pain of obsolescence in the world of file formats. VQF is the first notable example in my mind, but we need to keep in mind that FLAC is proper FOSS, and it'll live on in one way or another. People still keep Commodore64 kernals, emulators alive. Similarly MiniDisc has a cult following. On the worst case, I can install an old distro to a VM, and convert my music via that VM to something more modern.

I personally don't think FLAC as an "Archival Format". It's more of a bona fide storage format for me. I'm a serious music listener, and I tag my archives ambitiously, and besides being lossless and provides space advantages, it supports proper tagging via ID3 tools and allows me to store a truckload of metadata with my music.

To prevent corruption in my archives, I'd rather store recovery data and take regular backups. There's no other way in my book to keep data safe.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#138

Post by ogurechny »

chungy wrote: post #24
corysama wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.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.

There is no de facto supported standard because WAV files are de facto not used as anything but intermediate format these days. You could have fifty standards, that wouldn't change much.

WAV files can have any kind of compressed stream inside. A program that used some ancient API like WinMM ACM could theoretically play anything inside WAV as long as audio driver for that compressed format (now commonly called “codec”) was present. In addition, there are all kinds of standard metadata (like author and comment fields), and players in the '90s had no problem with displaying it in their interface if it was present. Old Windows Media Player had some of these status lines shown by default.

By the way, “driver” was an actual driver, with an .inf file, update of win.ini/system.ini or registry, and probably a reboot required to start using the decoder.

Old SDK tells us to look further into MMREG.H, so let's do just that.

https://github.com/tpn/winddk-8.1/blob/f6e6e4da7d1894536cf1f...

https://github.com/tpn/winddk-8.1/blob/f6e6e4da7d1894536cf1f...

(Last line is quite ironic.)

It's interesting to look how all those early '90s ideas that Universal Tagged Formats would be used to hold anything and everything, and dragged-and-dropped into any and all application completely flopped. Mac had those, Windows had those, Amiga had those. You can say that MP4, an international standard, is actually MOV in disguise, but it doesn't support all those early crazy options that could turn the file into poor man's PowerPoint presentation, poor man's Hypercard, or poor man's FMV game. On the other hand, Windows Media Player did support ASF interactivity like “open the link in a browser at this timestamp”, “show user some text at that timestamp”, and the consequences were so bad that it all had to be killed in mid-00s.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#139

Post by chungy »

meepmorp wrote: post #95
at_a_remove wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can definitely embed metadata in wav files. Another fun fact about wav files: they don't necessarily contain LPCM data. The format allows for a variety of encodings, including lossy ones.

Windows Vista included WAV files with the OS that contained MP3 audio :)

I don't know if newer versions still do that. I'd be a little surprised if they don't, given the previous version.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#140

Post by corysama »

kstenerud wrote: post #97
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…

There are a number of reasons: * 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 compre…

> Someday when I look at 1TB the way I look at 100GB today, this won't be a concern anymore.

And, there it is. Thank you.

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