51–60 of 119 posts
After reading "How Music Works" by David Byrne, it seem like FLAC is solving the wrong problem. No one needs over 4 billion discrete levels.
I 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.
As far as human hearing goes, 24-bit is already overkill. Even 16-bit should be an imperceptible downgrade for anything with a naturally low dynamic range (i.e. most music).
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What data are you compressing?
I've used it to record oscilloscope captures. Especially useful since audio cards are cheap high res adc's.
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Note that 144dB range is what you get from 24 bits per sample. 32 bits gets you another 48dB more. Some of your ADC/DAC chain can reasonably claim 125dB range. Some amplifiers can claim 17 or even 18 bits above their noise floor - 108dB. No full-spectrum microphones, headphones or speakers can reasonably claim 125dB without distortion, but if they did you would still want to limit your exposure to "never". Long-term…
This unfortunately discontinued mic could comfortably exceed your claimed limits: https://en-de.neumann.com/d-01 156 dB max spl 86 dB snr 130 dB dynamic range Neumann patented a dual ADC preamp to make this possible.
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I've used it to record oscilloscope captures. Especially useful since audio cards are cheap high res adc's.
I'm amazed that consumer-grade audio cards are still available and cheap, to be honest. I can't recall having seen one in years, then again, I haven't had a reason to look for them in years either.
Can't say I haven't been tempted.
I personally can't care less about 32-bit, but unfortunately a few digital music stores I buy from use this format (delivered in WAV). And I don't want to downscale them simply for archival reasons. Now I can at least re-compress them losslessly in FLAC. (previously I have to use Wavpack, which isn't bad but I'd prefer to have a single format in my media library.)
I personally can't care less about 32-bit, but unfortunately a few digital music stores I buy from use this format (delivered in WAV). And I don't want to downscale them simply for archival reasons. Now I can at least re-compress them losslessly in FLAC. (previously I have to use Wavpack, which isn't bad but I'd prefer to have a single format in my media library.)
there’s no part of the analogue capture process that can utilise such a low noise floor (as far as i’m aware): is there anything of value worth preserving there?
Nice! 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?
* The sensor system wants to do unit conversion for me. This data doesn't really have 32-bits of dynamic range, but for archival purposes I'd like to store the exact bits without adding another quantization step - that can happen later.
* The sensor system combines multiple ADC channels HDR style. I'd rather get the raw readings and do the combining myself, but don't always have access to it.
* Some more advanced preprocessed results, akin to a GPS solution. Linear predictor based algorithms are perfect here since the full possible set of values does have high dynamic range, but the upper bits change very slowly.
I personally can't care less about 32-bit, but unfortunately a few digital music stores I buy from use this format (delivered in WAV). And I don't want to downscale them simply for archival reasons. Now I can at least re-compress them losslessly in FLAC. (previously I have to use Wavpack, which isn't bad but I'd prefer to have a single format in my media library.)
the noise floor at 16 bit is already low. 24 bit, much more common (and imo needless for consumers), is 256x lower than that. there’s no part of the analogue capture process that can utilise such a low noise floor (as far as i’m aware): is there anything of value worth preserving there?
Not really in term of audio itself, just easier to do bitwise comparison with the original file, in term of file integrity.