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FLAC 1.3.4

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Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#141

Post by mindslight »

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.

I'm halfway there, 1TB collection on a 30TB array. When I repurpose a previously used drive, I've got a bad habit of making a multi-TB image in case I forgot to copy anything off, and then forgetting about it. (I'm in the middle of writing some tools to sort through those.)

Still, what would be the advantage to moving to WAV? There is zero experience-overhead to FLAC. This isn't like some proprietary crapware format that becomes hit or miss due to patents or poor licensing. It's a Free format so common players all seamlessly support it. We're talking like 300kB of binary code, in a world where stuffing 300MB CRUD apps at users is normal.

If I want to transcode to MP3 for some bespoke device, then the FLAC compression makes that process quicker via saved IO bandwidth. There's literally no end-user complexity that I would save by moving to WAV. And if I wanted to develop software to read an audio file, then I'd import the FLAC library just as how one would generally import a WAV library. OP might as well advocate for storing audio as textual numbers line by line, so it could be easily processed with awk.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#142

Post by sylware »

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…

"bad complexity vs benefit trade"

that makes me think of "C compiler" (actually C89 with benign bits of c99/c11) vs "c++ compiler", or "javascript web browser" vs "noscript/basic (x)html browser".

that said, aren't the 30TB hard drives around the corner?

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#143

Post by dwoxctbvgq »

theplumber wrote: post #89
dwoxctbvgq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok so what exactly is better than FLAC? I'm not aware of any "usable" lossless encoding algo. Truth is "nobody" bothers to develop open source lossless audio codecs. Of course you can always buy Dolby because there seems to be the "efficiencies" that you are looking for along with locked-in hardware and locked-in software.

By "resources" in this case I was referring to storage space. I could have written my comment more clearly, sorry. I do really like FLAC for saving space, and I hate websites that have 20+ seconds of interaction latency.

Edit: Of course websites being slow has nothing to do with storage space, but it has everything to do with wasting resources – whether that's storage space or CPU cycles.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#144

Post by dwoxctbvgq »

klez wrote: post #129
thealig wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the "mentality" you are referring to is not limited to JS at all, and has less to do with the particular language. Market dynamics, company incentives and a larger pool of developers among other reasons contribute to that more.

I don't think GP meant "JavaScript Mentality" as "a mentality that's limited to js", but more as "a mentality you see a lot in the js-adjacent world".

Precisely :)

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#145

Post by dwoxctbvgq »

worik wrote: post #22
dwoxctbvgq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, that's not too far either. I guess the difference is that the abuse of Python doesn't hurt me in my daily life in an obvious way, unlike Javascript.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#146

Post by LeoPanthera »

autoexec wrote: post #69
grumpyprole wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> Apple Music and iOS still do not play FLAC, which is one significant reason why I won't buy an iPhone. You can't just install VLC on an iphone?

You can.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#147

Post by corysama »

sylware wrote: post #142
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…

"bad complexity vs benefit trade" that makes me think of "C compiler" (actually C89 with benign bits of c99/c11) vs "c++ compiler", or "javascript web browser" vs "noscript/basic (x)html browser". that said, aren't the 30TB hard drives around the corner?

Exactly. We are currently debating $10 vs. $6 to store 1000 hours of music.

The only answer to my actual question so far indicates that when it gets down to $1 vs 60c, they’ll just say “Whatever. Leave it uncompressed.”

Thus 90% of the discussion has instead been about 4G streaming lossless real time voice and podcasts to mobile devices with price-gouged storage to be listened to through very lossy Bluetooth compression :p

And, 9% has been about how FLAC as a container format did a good job standardizing metadata. But, that has nothing to do with audio encoding within the container :P

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#148

Post by yazantapuz »

bayindirh wrote: post #124
yazantapuz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's not GZ/XZ our log files. These 20MB files will become 30-40GB, but heck, a 4TB drive is just $65. But when you tar.gz your log files you do not loss information.

When you encode your audio files with the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), you do not lose any information either.

Yes, it is my bad, I had misread the original comment.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#149

Post by yazantapuz »

bawolff wrote: post #125
yazantapuz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's not GZ/XZ our log files. These 20MB files will become 30-40GB, but heck, a 4TB drive is just $65. But when you tar.gz your log files you do not loss information.

When you FLAC audio file you do not lose information either.

Yes, it is my bad, I had misread the original comment.

Re: FLAC 1.3.4

#150

Post by astrange »

denton-scratch wrote: post #133
bayindirh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Try an ABX test: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ABX

There's a reason MP3 is obsolete, though. You probably can't pass an ABX test with high bitrate MP3, but you almost certainly can't with AAC or Opus without extremely critical listening.

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