What is the best format settings to store a physical music?

I did look at Flac but the data is almost the same size as the uncompressed Wav and none of my devices or self hosted services seem designed to play flac files. Everything gets converted.

What are people using?

  • solrize@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Flac for me has been about half the size of wav, at least for normal 16 bit 44 khz audio. Maybe it’s worse at higher bit depth? Anyway bulk storage is pretty cheap. You could have Flac in your archive while keeping ogg or whatever on your everyday playback device.

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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      6 months ago

      OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.

  • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    Flac for storage, turn up the compression level. Transcode to an appropriate format when copying or streaming to a device

  • quixotic120@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Flac 44.1 16bit level 3. Host with something that meets your needs. I have my files in jellyfin and navidrome and can then access the library remotely either through jellyfin web client, navidrome web client, substreamer, Finamp, kodi, etc. but this way if another amazing format comes up down the line I will always have my library in a good state to transcode from. Tag and sort everything with beets.io (or musicbrainz picard is great, I just like that beets is cli). This results in a library I can access on my phone, laptop, tv, carplay, etc

    Technically you could go for 24bit but imo the extra file size isn’t justified. though one could make that argument for flac vs 320cbr mp3, transcoding 320 mp3 is more likely to create artifacts, thus the reason for keeping around flac

    Alac may be easier for you if you use mac

  • aleph@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    I use FLAC for long-term storage, 256kbps Ogg when transcoding for mobile devices.

    Opus is the best lossy codec in terms of efficiency, but many devices/apps don’t properly support it.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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    6 months ago

    If you’re storing them for yourself I would recommend doing an online AB test to figure out at what bitrate you are capable of hearing a difference (assuming decent headphones or speakers). For some people anything above 256kbps is wasted (or even 128). If you find yourself in that category you can just use lossy formats and stop worrying about FLAC.

    • Mountain_Mike_420@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      This is good advice right here. Unless you’re a dj (even then it’s overkill) and or have incredibly high end equipment (again, it’s probably overkill), just go with some high bitrate mp3. MP3 is incredibly compact, everything plays it, and has all the metadata needed. Seriously you can’t tell the difference.

  • DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    That depends. Are you looking at preserving the music without loss of information? Then you need to use a lossless format like flac. Formats like aac, mp3, opus can throw away information you’re less likely to hear to achieve better compression ratios. Flac can’t, so it needs more storage space to preserve the exact waveform.

    You can use a lossy format if you want. On most consumer level equipment, you probably won’t notice a difference. However, if you start to notice artifacting in songs, you’ll need to go back to the originals to re-rip and encode.

  • Maxy@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 months ago

    Which compression level are you using? My old server is able to compress flac’s at the highest (and therefore “slowest”) compression level at >50x speed, so bumping the level up shouldn’t be too hard on your CPU.

  • shrugal@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    I’m transcoding everything to 320kbps MP3s. It’s much much smaller than flac, and I can’t hear the difference even if I try.

  • swooosh@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I save everything in mp3 128kbps. I compared the quality with higher quality and with my setup (Bose speakers & in ear headphones) and with my ears, I can’t hear a difference. Opus is more efficient but my source is already in mp3 and I don’t gain anything by converting it. If I had to convert from flac, I’d choose opus. 1 4k movie is so big, the size of music doesn’t really matter at all.

    • walden@sub.wetshaving.social
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      6 months ago

      The only downside to keeping everything in a lossless format is that over the years new formats emerge. mp3 used to be the only game in town, but now we have multitudes of lossy formats to pick from. By having your collection in mp3 format, you aren’t able to say “hey, this new format looks cool, let me switch to that”. By storing everything in a lossless format (FLAC), you can convert for mobile as you see fit.

      • swooosh@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        What could I gain from switching? Playing mp3 will always be there and even if support is dropped in 30 years which is highly unlikely, the server can transcode on the fly. I’m unfortunately/ luckily no person with ears that can hear a slight difference between losless and 128kbps

        • walden@sub.wetshaving.social
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          6 months ago

          Just flexibility and future proofing. Having/building a music library is very time consuming, so I’ve chosen to do it properly so there’s no work in the future.

          Since my stuff is all FLAC it doesn’t matter what new lossy formats become popular 25 years from now. My music server will convert it on the fly to stream it to my phone.

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          For you personally? Not much at all. For a real archive future proofing is great.

        • unreliable@discuss.tchncs.de
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          6 months ago

          A lot. Mp3 is a proprietary format on copyright. Some idiot ceo can came and change the rules, let’s add an ads mandatory for each decoder. Today with a bunch of open source good quality formats, is kind of pointless depending on a private company for your music.

          • ericjmorey
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            6 months ago

            Mp3 is a proprietary format on copyright. Some idiot ceo can came and change the rules, let’s add an ads mandatory for each decoder.

            This is not true. Copyright is not relevant to an encoding standard. The standard has been unchanged for 26 years and all legal claims of patent rights related to implimentations of the standard have expired before May 2017.

            @[email protected] you should probably know about this as well.

          • ares35@kbin.social
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            6 months ago

            patents is what you’re thinking of. and all (afaik) of them relating to mp3 format have expired.

          • swooosh@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            That is valid and good criticism of mp3!

            I wonder if navidrome can handle switching from mp3 to opus.