FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don’t prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don’t avoid non-lossless albums either.
Um, .wav is a lossless format. It’s just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it’s stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.
With storage as cheap as it is nowadays, a 15 MB FLAC audio file vs. a 3 MB MP3 really doesn’t matter anymore. Those 12 MB cost nothing to store.
And to be honest, in cases where storage does matter, a 320 kbps MP3 is just a waste of space. A VBR MP3 with average bitrate around 200 kbps makes way more sense and nobody can tell the difference between that and 320 kbps in a double blind test.
So just maintain FLAC or other lossless for sharing music and transcode down when needed.
But like, why? I’m going to be listening to the lossy version on my phone 90% of the time anyways, and my headphones are not good enough to truly appreciate lossless either. It doesn’t matter that I have over 4tb of storage on my PC, I still don’t wanna waste an extra 50GB for no tangible benefit, when I could use the same extra 50GB to more than double my lossy music collection if I wanted.
If you store lossy on your PC you will lose quality if you transcode to a lower bitrate. If you don’t transcode, then you will be using more space on your phone.
That’s why.
If you don’t want to transcode and just want to download and play, then full lossy is easier. But you are going to be using more space on your phone.
This is my take as well. Storage is cheap. I have thousands of albums and about 40,000 tracks currently and it consumes about 400GB. It’s really not that much storage, considering.
So you don’t listen to music unless you’re at home? Or do you choose a subset of your library to put on your phone? That would be terribly annoying for me.
In my case, a self hosted streaming server works wonders. Plex with Pleaxamp, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Airsonic, any of them will stream to your phone while out and about.
I live in the rural midwest with spotty cell service. All of those services support manual offline syncing to store music on your phone. I set Plexamp to stream lossy over cellular, and it doesn’t take long to cache an entire playlist when I do have a signal.
It’s easy bro just maintain a server with redundant disks and a reverse proxy so you can stream music over your unlimited cellular data connection that I’m totally sure you have access to in your region.
In my case I use FLAC because when Plex transcodes, FLAC > Opus sounds better than MP3 > Opus. Almost all my media was ripped by me direct from CD, with some coming from Bandcamp.
FLAC Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Yeah, this isn’t how that works.
“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.
You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.
Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.
Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist
You’re bang on with everything but this, if you’re getting FLACs from the source, you may be getting higher quality than CD which is 16-bit 44.1khz. I’ve got many 24-bit 96khz FLACs in my collection
Your last point about Bluetooth is such a great one though. Recompression of already compressed audio is a much worse end result than compressing uncompressed audio one time (and before anyone says it, basically no one is listening to lossless Bluetooth audio)
Fair point with the higher bit depths and sampling rates, I just figured there was no point in overcomplicating it when it seemed there was already some form of misunderstanding.
Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd
WAV and FLAC are both lossless, the reason people use FLAC is because WAV doesn’t (or didn’t) have good support for tags and FLAC has lossless file compression while WAV usually is uncompressed. There isn’t any sort of “upscaling” that is done.
Personally, I think a quality v0 or 320kb/s MP3 is perfectly fine for listening but I’m always going to prefer storing lossless audio so I can convert the files to whatever format I want/need. I’ve moved around between MP3, AAC, and Opus for different devices and if I didn’t have the FLAC files I would either have to redownload files or do lossy to lossy transcodes
The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent.
I would disagree with this. It isn’t really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.
What I’ve noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.
I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.
Sometimes it’s more about knowing you have the highest quality format than being able to hear the difference. An mp3 of a great sounding album with good dynamic range will always sound better than a FLAC of a shitty recording.
I think most people can train themselves to hear mp3 compression even on low quality gear by listening to comparisons of cymbal sounds. An experiment to prove this is to import a lossless track in to a DAW, export it to mp3, import the mp3 and invert the waveform, so playing back you will only hear the differences between the two tracks, ie only the sounds that the compression failed to accurately replicate, the compression artifacts. What you will be hearing with an mp3-320 is a sort of muddy static sound whenever the cymbals hit, blended with whatever other vocals or instruments overlapped with that frequency. This doesn’t mean that when you only hear the mp3 it will automatically sound bad or noticeably worse, but it proves there is an audible difference in the character of certain sounds that can be heard even on bad gear.
Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
I really hope this is satire. If not, you’re way off the mark. Lossy files do not intrinsically suffer any kind of bit rot. Bits are bits, and your storage interface doesn’t have any clue what those bits mean. I have MP3s from the late 90s that have been stored on the cheapest CD-Rs you can imagine, that still play perfect.
That’s 100% placebo. I’m a professional recording and mixing engineer and have done ABX tests in rooms with speakers that cost as much as a new car and struggled. Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars in acoustic treatment in those rooms. 320kbps is guaranteed to be indistinguishable from lossless on $100 speakers in what’s likely a horrible sounding room.
Thx, this was an easy way to test this out! Pretty much confirmed what I already thought I knew. The nice booming base in Dark Horse threw me off :-) but I managed to get 5/6 correct. Listened with UMC404HD powering my ATH-M50x, which makes its literally HUNDREDS of dollars of equipment. When I power those headphones off my phone via apple DAC, I don’t think it would be audible. How did you do on this test?
All’s I know is I’ve been slowly replacing my 320 mp3 catalog with flac and certain albums are night and day difference. Usually ones with a lot going on. Try comparing wintersun - time in mp3 vs flac. The instrument separation is way better
There could be a metric fuckton of reasons why the file on your computer and the file you downloaded from a store sound different, but the codec most definitely is not one of them, assuming they are good first gen lossy encodes.
This dude is scared that he’ll find that he can’t tell the different between high and low bitrate and completely invalidate his reason for storing FLACs.
FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don’t prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don’t avoid non-lossless albums either.
Um, .wav is a lossless format. It’s just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it’s stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.
Yeah, but that argument was compelling in 2005.
With storage as cheap as it is nowadays, a 15 MB FLAC audio file vs. a 3 MB MP3 really doesn’t matter anymore. Those 12 MB cost nothing to store.
And to be honest, in cases where storage does matter, a 320 kbps MP3 is just a waste of space. A VBR MP3 with average bitrate around 200 kbps makes way more sense and nobody can tell the difference between that and 320 kbps in a double blind test.
So just maintain FLAC or other lossless for sharing music and transcode down when needed.
file size absolutely matters when you have thousands of songs lol, my music is a significant chunk of my phone’s SD card capacity
That’s why you should transcode to 200 or even 160 kbps for your phone.
But the master archive should be in flac if possible.
A 2 TB disk is less than $100 nowadays.
Now that’s dedication.
But like, why? I’m going to be listening to the lossy version on my phone 90% of the time anyways, and my headphones are not good enough to truly appreciate lossless either. It doesn’t matter that I have over 4tb of storage on my PC, I still don’t wanna waste an extra 50GB for no tangible benefit, when I could use the same extra 50GB to more than double my lossy music collection if I wanted.
If you store lossy on your PC you will lose quality if you transcode to a lower bitrate. If you don’t transcode, then you will be using more space on your phone.
That’s why.
If you don’t want to transcode and just want to download and play, then full lossy is easier. But you are going to be using more space on your phone.
In which case we circle back around to “storage is cheap”. Music is the only substantial space hog on my phone.
So you want to waste space on your phone to save space on your PC.
An odd choice, but you do you.
You should upgrade from your Razor to a phone made in the last decade, they have a lot more space now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpQQohcHk9Q
This is my take as well. Storage is cheap. I have thousands of albums and about 40,000 tracks currently and it consumes about 400GB. It’s really not that much storage, considering.
40… 40,000…? My god I thought I had a lot of music downloaded, but I haven’t even broken into the thousands yet
So you don’t listen to music unless you’re at home? Or do you choose a subset of your library to put on your phone? That would be terribly annoying for me.
In my case, a self hosted streaming server works wonders. Plex with Pleaxamp, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Airsonic, any of them will stream to your phone while out and about.
That will work great if you live your entire life in cities.
I spend a lot of time in places with no cell service.
I live in the rural midwest with spotty cell service. All of those services support manual offline syncing to store music on your phone. I set Plexamp to stream lossy over cellular, and it doesn’t take long to cache an entire playlist when I do have a signal.
So then you’re back to the problem where you require more storage than what your phone has.
What problem? 200 tracks times 4mb/track equals 1Gb. If you can’t spare a couple gigs of storage, you need to delete some apps off your phone.
Plex or other local system streaming service, you know, using the tech that’s existed for over a decade now?
No need to store jack shit on my device unless I know I’m going to a low reception area m
Yes, I listen to music and podcasts everywhere. I use airsonic-advanced, currently.
It’s easy bro just maintain a server with redundant disks and a reverse proxy so you can stream music over your unlimited cellular data connection that I’m totally sure you have access to in your region.
Bro I’m poor. I make the compromises I have to make.
It starts adding up when your collection is in many thousands of albums.
I get what you are saying though
In my case I use FLAC because when Plex transcodes, FLAC > Opus sounds better than MP3 > Opus. Almost all my media was ripped by me direct from CD, with some coming from Bandcamp.
See the problem there is that Plex is transcoding instead of just supporting popular audio formats directly.
Plex does support FLAC. It’s transcoding to reduce data usage. You always have the option of playing the original, I’m doing it right now.
Yeah, this isn’t how that works.
“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.
You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.
Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.
You’re bang on with everything but this, if you’re getting FLACs from the source, you may be getting higher quality than CD which is 16-bit 44.1khz. I’ve got many 24-bit 96khz FLACs in my collection
Your last point about Bluetooth is such a great one though. Recompression of already compressed audio is a much worse end result than compressing uncompressed audio one time (and before anyone says it, basically no one is listening to lossless Bluetooth audio)
Fair point with the higher bit depths and sampling rates, I just figured there was no point in overcomplicating it when it seemed there was already some form of misunderstanding.
WAV and FLAC are both lossless, the reason people use FLAC is because WAV doesn’t (or didn’t) have good support for tags and FLAC has lossless file compression while WAV usually is uncompressed. There isn’t any sort of “upscaling” that is done.
Personally, I think a quality v0 or 320kb/s MP3 is perfectly fine for listening but I’m always going to prefer storing lossless audio so I can convert the files to whatever format I want/need. I’ve moved around between MP3, AAC, and Opus for different devices and if I didn’t have the FLAC files I would either have to redownload files or do lossy to lossy transcodes
I would disagree with this. It isn’t really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.
What I’ve noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.
I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.
Jokes on you, I have thousands of dollars in listening equipment
As in, a phone?
THOUSANDS!
I totally agree, I was just perpetuating the meme
The .wav part of your comment makes no sense, that is a lossless format, and it is used everywhere because it is dead simple to impliment
Sometimes it’s more about knowing you have the highest quality format than being able to hear the difference. An mp3 of a great sounding album with good dynamic range will always sound better than a FLAC of a shitty recording.
I think most people can train themselves to hear mp3 compression even on low quality gear by listening to comparisons of cymbal sounds. An experiment to prove this is to import a lossless track in to a DAW, export it to mp3, import the mp3 and invert the waveform, so playing back you will only hear the differences between the two tracks, ie only the sounds that the compression failed to accurately replicate, the compression artifacts. What you will be hearing with an mp3-320 is a sort of muddy static sound whenever the cymbals hit, blended with whatever other vocals or instruments overlapped with that frequency. This doesn’t mean that when you only hear the mp3 it will automatically sound bad or noticeably worse, but it proves there is an audible difference in the character of certain sounds that can be heard even on bad gear.
Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
Just to be certain: are you really suggesting that mp3 files, if left unmodified, will degrade in sound quality over time?
I think it’s pasta
Oh thank god haha. I’ve never been so relieved to have been baited.
It’s veru tastu pasta.
I really hope this is satire. If not, you’re way off the mark. Lossy files do not intrinsically suffer any kind of bit rot. Bits are bits, and your storage interface doesn’t have any clue what those bits mean. I have MP3s from the late 90s that have been stored on the cheapest CD-Rs you can imagine, that still play perfect.
I’m a programmer, I know this. It’s a cooypasta you dork.
Just about all music is rendered to uncompressed .wav
Anything else is just some inferior transcoding /s
But also not /s because it’s accurate, just dumb.
Nah this is bullshit. Even on my $100 edifer speakers you can easily tell the difference.
Type of music matters though. For metal flac is totally worth it. With ambient music you aren’t going to hear a difference obviously.
That’s 100% placebo. I’m a professional recording and mixing engineer and have done ABX tests in rooms with speakers that cost as much as a new car and struggled. Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars in acoustic treatment in those rooms. 320kbps is guaranteed to be indistinguishable from lossless on $100 speakers in what’s likely a horrible sounding room.
Really so you can ace this test no problemo?
Thx, this was an easy way to test this out! Pretty much confirmed what I already thought I knew. The nice booming base in Dark Horse threw me off :-) but I managed to get 5/6 correct. Listened with UMC404HD powering my ATH-M50x, which makes its literally HUNDREDS of dollars of equipment. When I power those headphones off my phone via apple DAC, I don’t think it would be audible. How did you do on this test?
Maybe. I’ll give it a shot later…
All’s I know is I’ve been slowly replacing my 320 mp3 catalog with flac and certain albums are night and day difference. Usually ones with a lot going on. Try comparing wintersun - time in mp3 vs flac. The instrument separation is way better
There could be a metric fuckton of reasons why the file on your computer and the file you downloaded from a store sound different, but the codec most definitely is not one of them, assuming they are good first gen lossy encodes.
This dude is scared that he’ll find that he can’t tell the different between high and low bitrate and completely invalidate his reason for storing FLACs.