Sadly still no support for variable blocksize.
FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
11–20 of 119 posts
Re: FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
#12After reading "How Music Works" by David Byrne, it seem like FLAC is solving the wrong problem. No one needs over 4 billion discrete levels.
Nyquist Shannon theorem, sure. There are situations where you'd use 32bit audio but not for mastered music you'd listen to at home really. Although people still won't believe you, hence the market for thousand dollar cables and other snake oil.
From my understanding, doesn't Nyquist-Shannon assume you take infinite steps to refine the discrete steps into the final waveform?
Since real-world DACs don't have infinite taps, either increasing the number of samples per second in the original audio or the number of steps done by the filter will improve how close it gets to the original waveform.
Would that apply to the number of bits used to represent the level as well? I thought that was mainly useful to give some additional headroom when editing?
(Obviously there's diminishing returns either way)
Re: FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
#13Nice! I (ab)use FLAC to store waveform data that isn't audio, but compresses better using audio codecs than with general purpose compression algorithms. This will let me remove some hacks to compress 32-bit data as multiple channels.
What data are you compressing?
I've used it to record oscilloscope captures. Especially useful since audio cards are cheap high res adc's.
Re: FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
#14After reading "How Music Works" by David Byrne, it seem like FLAC is solving the wrong problem. No one needs over 4 billion discrete levels.
There are definitely scientific uses that might want to (ab)use FLAC to store sound-like data that would benefit from 32 bit.
Re: FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
#15After reading "How Music Works" by David Byrne, it seem like FLAC is solving the wrong problem. No one needs over 4 billion discrete levels.
There's a real use case for storing original tracks and masters in 32-bit and down-sampling for consumer use.
Re: FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nyquist Shannon theorem, sure. There are situations where you'd use 32bit audio but not for mastered music you'd listen to at home really. Although people still won't believe you, hence the market for thousand dollar cables and other snake oil.
From my understanding, doesn't Nyquist-Shannon assume you take infinite steps to refine the discrete steps into the final waveform? Since real-world DACs don't have infinite taps, either increasing the number of samples per second in the original audio or the number of steps done by the filter will improve how close it gets to the original waveform. Would that apply to the number of bits used to represent the level a…
Nyquist-Shannon simply says that you need 2x the sample rate of the highest frequency to perfectly recreate something. So, to recreate a 20 kHz wave that was sampled at 16 bits, you'd need 40 kHz sample rate. Bump that up to 22.05 kHz (for anti-aliasing) and you get CD audio.
The bit depth, OTOH, is your signal-noise ratio (noise floor) when sampling/quantizing said audio. It's unrelated to Nyquist-Shannon. More bits gives you less noise when reproducing it. For CD audio, 16 bits was chosen to give an acceptable SNR of 96 dB.
Monty Montgomery (of xipf.org) has a nice YouTube video related to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
Re: FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
#17After reading "How Music Works" by David Byrne, it seem like FLAC is solving the wrong problem. No one needs over 4 billion discrete levels.
You're correct; lossless formats aren't needed by the average consumer. But the problem they solve is a very real thing. Think of the difference between a repeatedly edited JPG vs. a repeatedly edited PNG. Every save of the JPG destroys information irretrievably, whereas every save of the PNG keeps it all. It's the same with MP3 vs. FLAC: MP3 throws away information each export, but FLAC doesn't. For an example, musi…
"People" don't need just lossless, they need The Beatles to release all of their pre-master tracks to be released in lossless format, so they of them can create their own remastered versions of a the tracks.
Re: FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
#18After reading "How Music Works" by David Byrne, it seem like FLAC is solving the wrong problem. No one needs over 4 billion discrete levels.
While I doubt that human ears need 4 billion discrete levels, I think it's important for archival purposes.
Re: FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my understanding, doesn't Nyquist-Shannon assume you take infinite steps to refine the discrete steps into the final waveform? Since real-world DACs don't have infinite taps, either increasing the number of samples per second in the original audio or the number of steps done by the filter will improve how close it gets to the original waveform. Would that apply to the number of bits used to represent the level a…
Nyquist-Shannon simply says that you need 2x the sample rate of the highest frequency to perfectly recreate something. So, to recreate a 20 kHz wave that was sampled at 16 bits, you'd need 40 kHz sample rate. Bump that up to 22.05 kHz (for anti-aliasing) and you get CD audio. The bit depth, OTOH, is your signal-noise ratio (noise floor) when sampling/quantizing said audio. It's unrelated to Nyquist-Shannon. More bits…
Yes, you only need that many samples given you know a maximum frequency. But to actually perform the conversion from discrete samples to continuous wave takes infinitely many steps. The number a given DAC actually does varies. Some do hundreds, some thousands, a couple rare (very expensive) ones do 100k or more.
That's what I'm saying. Increase the number of samples in the audio itself, and the DAC can get closer to the original.
Re: FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
#20I had no idea FLAC didn't store 32-bit. I'll need to look over my library and make sure nothing strange is going on. I'm curious if sites like Qobuz will suddenly replace some of their existing files with higher-bit copies if they already had them and just had no way to encode them as FLAC.
It is extremely hard to justify 32-bit audio from a technical standpoint, since it requires that every component in your audio chain has better than 144 dB dynamic range. In practice, just about none of the analog components in your audio chain will have that kind of dynamic range, and any analog components in the recording chain are unlikely to have that range either.
The kind of equipment I'd expect to see in order to record that kind of range is where you'd have something like multiple microphones, and switch back and forth between them based on the level of the material you're recording (which would have to be something like actual gunfire or explosions).
I don't know what kind of equipment you'd need to reproduce this dynamic range, but I don't think it's audio equipment.
My guess is that the main real application of this is going to be compression of non-audio data that happens to compress well with FLAC.