this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Go FLAC or go home.
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.
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.
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.
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
I totally agree, I was just perpetuating the meme
I fucking love my 100gb flac collection
Do you know a reliable tracker? I have lidarr set up to find lossless versions, but it's pretty terrible at it.
Im using Soulseek
Orpheus for torrents, Usenet gets like 90% of the stuff out there though. And don't forget to sort your favorites bands but buying their albums when they provide them as FLAC.
Look for the Redtopia torrent. About 6tb of flac albums and another half terabyte of .mp3s
Where does one begin to find flac? I am taking the first steps beyond "finding a movie to play for free"
I use FLAC for albums I love and mp3s for everything else (including copies of the flacs in mp3). It's a nice balance.
Fucking love my collection of music. I use Spotify as well, but nothing can compete with literally owning a music collection of my own I can listen to without the Internet
This is the way. Also, FLAC for high bit rate audiophile vinyl rips.
I literally got goosebumps reading that. Take my Iron Maiden collection for example:
I have mp3 versions of all albums. Different release versions of FLACs and then a vinyl FLAC collection as well.
It's nice exploring the difference in sound, but somehow, vinyl always makes me feel the best.
Man I miss what.cd.
I miss Oink's :(
BUY ME BIGGER STORAGE BROTHER
looks at his 42TB NAS
That's a lot of hip-hop 😂
Listen up, all you young whippersnappers and your FLAC collections, we downloaded our lossy but 'high enough quality' 128kbps mp3s from those IRC DCC Fserves back in the 90s using our dialup internet and we didnt complain!
Unless of course someone picked up the house phone and caused our internet to disconnect.
I'm still shuffling some of those.
It's all about the 64kbps .wma's. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day