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> I wonder why this took so long. Because supporting lossless audio streaming is as useful as supporting TIFF images or UTF-32 text encoding. Nice to add to th

> I wonder why this took so long. Because supporting lossless audio streaming is as useful as supporting TIFF images or UTF-32 text encoding. Nice to add to the spec sheet; mostly useless in a practical setting. The only purpose that comes to mind for delivering lossless audio within a web page is to build, somewhat ironically, a lossy codec comparison tool which would in turn demonstrate why lossless audio isn't necessary.

wiz21 10y ago
so according to you leaving a castle fall into ruins is "good enough" because nobody wants to see it...
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  That would appear to be overwhelmingly the consensus of people with castles, too. Do they have some moral imperative to pay maintenance forever on something that has no use value and no hope of paying for itself?
pimeys 10y ago
I have pretty decent headphone system at work. I'm constantly using services like Tidal HiFi and listening to my own flac collection from Style Jukebox. I just want to have my music in the original quality and if needed, transcoding down to mp3. So there is at least one of us who has a serious need for flac in a browser. And the bandwidth it uses is still less than with a typical full-hd video stream.
- sjwright 10y ago
  Why not stream in ~256kbps AAC or Opus? The audible quality drop is objectively proven to be zero. Make peace with the placebo effect and enjoy your life.
  - delta1 10y ago
    > objectively proven Links? "subjectively indistinguishable" would be a bit less argumentative
    - JonnieCache 10y ago
      http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm More here: https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison and all over https://hydrogenaud.io https://hydrogenaud.io Blind testing is also easy to do yourself.
  - pimeys 10y ago
    AAC is mostly Apple-stuff and I'm out of those pictures. Where do you have a music streaming platform that serves Opus? Flac is the best trade-off. I get the original quality, I can store my files to a cloud service and stream the music without using too much bandwidth (it's 2016 anyways). I have seriously good headphone system at work (for the price of a new iPhone) and at least with Style Jukebox I can switch between 320 kbps mp3 and the original flac where I definitely see a difference. There is no price difference when buying mp3 or flac and storage + bandwidth is cheap nowadays. If I need a lossy compression, I want to have a control on the compression parameters.
    - sjwright 10y ago
      AAC is part of the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standard. You probably listen to AAC-encoded audio far more often than you realise.
      - pimeys 10y ago
        But not really with any of the music I buy...
        sjwright 10y ago
        All web browsers support the downloading of FLAC files.
onli 10y ago
Not necessarily. I use a site local to my network to play music in my browser using the audio tag [0]. Some of the music in my library is flac. I never came around encoding them, and the transcoding support of my player never worked perfectly, so much that I finally got annoyed and cut it. Having flac support in the browser will make those audio files work without further work on my side, which is great. [0]: https://github.com/onli/music-streamer https://github.com/onli/music-streamer, but there are probably better alternatives
- sjwright 10y ago
  That's a reasonable counter-example. Thank you.
  - sitkack 10y ago
    Lots of browsing activity occurs on the intranet where bandwidth is effectively infinite. But I am not sure why more native code is being added to firefox that handles file parsing. An emscripten based extension to firefox could have been just as effective. And to support all browsers, one will need to drop in a JS flac library anyway, making this addition moot. The discussion in the bug itself covers JS flac implementations https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195723#c2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195723#c2 There doesn't seem to be any testing around security, attack surface, etc. Disappointing, and not recommending that anyone use Firefox for the foreseeable future.
    - dTal 10y ago
      >And to support all browsers, one will need to drop in a JS flac library anyway, making this addition moot. That's silly. By that argument no browser should ever bother adding any new features.
      - sitkack 10y ago
        Not ones that are trivially added "in user land". Browsers should add features where only they have access.
rikkus 10y ago
If your source media is FLAC (which is a good way to store 'source' material, that you might lossy-encode later) then being able to just stream that without any encoding step is handy. Maybe you wouldn't do this if you were concerned about bandwidth, but I'd certainly welcome this in a player to use on my LAN.
cookiengineer 10y ago
> Nice to add to the spec sheet; mostly useless in a practical setting. I'm still waiting for the day when the OPUS codec is supported everywhere. OPUS is some serious next-gen shit: https://www.opus-codec.org/ https://www.opus-codec.org/
HugoDaniel 10y ago
Why the comparison to TIFF ? If you want to insist in that analogy, are you aware of PNG and UTF-8 ?
- sjwright 10y ago
  That's the point. The point of the analogy is precisely that there are existing formats that are capable of the same practical quality with much smaller file sizes. PNG is smaller than uncompressed TIFF. UTF-8 is much smaller than UTF-32.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    HugoDaniel was referring to the fact that PNG is lossless as well. The rest of your point still stands, of course.
  - greggman 10y ago
    I got your point but just FYI, TIFF supports 16bit per channel images. PNG and JPG do not. I think TIFF might also support floating point images. Those might be useful for raw manipulation and HDR. Safari supports TIFF BTW (or did last time I checked). No idea if there is a way to get access to the high res data in Safari though.
    - vanderZwan 10y ago
      Actually, PNG supports 16 bit channels (as well as 1, 2 and 4 bits for paletted or greyscale images). TIFF meanwhile is kind of a kitchen-sink container format, so you can do quite a bit of strange things with it (store JPGs inside it, support tiling), but I don't think many viewers support everything in the TIFF standard. > The standard allows indexed color PNGs to have 1, 2, 4 or 8 bits per pixel; grayscale images with no alpha channel may have 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 bits per pixel. Everything else uses a bit depth per channel of either 8 or 16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Pixel_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Pixe... > TIFF is a flexible, adaptable file format for handling images and data within a single file, by including the header tags (size, definition, image-data arrangement, applied image compression) defining the image's geometry. A TIFF file, for example, can be a container holding JPEG (lossy) and PackBits (lossless) compressed images. A TIFF file also can include a vector-based clipping path (outlines, croppings, image frames). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF#Features_and_options https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF#Features_and_options
AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
> lossless audio isn't necessary As an audio engineer, I must point out what is wrong with this statement. Sure, the average listener cannot discern between FLAC and a well-encoded lossy audio file. However, with the Web Audio API making big advancements, the need for in-browser FLAC support is becoming quite apparent. People are building all sorts of web apps for creating, manipulating, and processing audio. For this use case, working with lossy audio is out of the question. Supporting FLAC means the ability to follow signal flow best practices [0] without requiring the user to work with much larger PCM files. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_signal_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_signal_flow
- mmastrac 10y ago
  I think this is the most reasonable argument for supporting FLAC natively. We have support for lossless images in the browser already - TIFF isn't the image analogue, but rather PNG.
  - ansgri 10y ago
    Except that PNG is by far not sufficient in professional image manipulation: it's compression scheme is good and 8uc{3,4} is lossless, but beyond 8bpc you're out of luck. I'd love to have a wide-supported float32 format with reasonable lossless (and maybe lossy) compression options. Conversely, FLAC supports different resolutions and sampling rates, so it does do the job for the sound processing.
tuxracer 10y ago
This isn't just academic. As OP pointed out TIDAL is not only using lossless but touting that as a key selling point.

wiz21 10y ago

so according to you leaving a castle fall into ruins is "good enough" because nobody wants to see it...

thaumasiotes 10y ago
That would appear to be overwhelmingly the consensus of people with castles, too. Do they have some moral imperative to pay maintenance forever on something that has no use value and no hope of paying for itself?

pimeys 10y ago

I have pretty decent headphone system at work. I'm constantly using services like Tidal HiFi and listening to my own flac collection from Style Jukebox. I just want to have my music in the original quality and if needed, transcoding down to mp3. So there is at least one of us who has a serious need for flac in a browser. And the bandwidth it uses is still less than with a typical full-hd video stream.

sjwright 10y ago
Why not stream in ~256kbps AAC or Opus? The audible quality drop is objectively proven to be zero. Make peace with the placebo effect and enjoy your life.
- delta1 10y ago
  > objectively proven Links? "subjectively indistinguishable" would be a bit less argumentative
  - JonnieCache 10y ago
    http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm More here: https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison and all over https://hydrogenaud.io https://hydrogenaud.io Blind testing is also easy to do yourself.
- pimeys 10y ago
  AAC is mostly Apple-stuff and I'm out of those pictures. Where do you have a music streaming platform that serves Opus? Flac is the best trade-off. I get the original quality, I can store my files to a cloud service and stream the music without using too much bandwidth (it's 2016 anyways). I have seriously good headphone system at work (for the price of a new iPhone) and at least with Style Jukebox I can switch between 320 kbps mp3 and the original flac where I definitely see a difference. There is no price difference when buying mp3 or flac and storage + bandwidth is cheap nowadays. If I need a lossy compression, I want to have a control on the compression parameters.
  - sjwright 10y ago
    AAC is part of the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standard. You probably listen to AAC-encoded audio far more often than you realise.
    - pimeys 10y ago
      But not really with any of the music I buy...
      - sjwright 10y ago
        All web browsers support the downloading of FLAC files.

onli 10y ago

Not necessarily. I use a site local to my network to play music in my browser using the audio tag [0]. Some of the music in my library is flac. I never came around encoding them, and the transcoding support of my player never worked perfectly, so much that I finally got annoyed and cut it. Having flac support in the browser will make those audio files work without further work on my side, which is great. [0]: https://github.com/onli/music-streamer https://github.com/onli/music-streamer, but there are probably better alternatives

sjwright 10y ago
That's a reasonable counter-example. Thank you.
- sitkack 10y ago
  Lots of browsing activity occurs on the intranet where bandwidth is effectively infinite. But I am not sure why more native code is being added to firefox that handles file parsing. An emscripten based extension to firefox could have been just as effective. And to support all browsers, one will need to drop in a JS flac library anyway, making this addition moot. The discussion in the bug itself covers JS flac implementations https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195723#c2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195723#c2 There doesn't seem to be any testing around security, attack surface, etc. Disappointing, and not recommending that anyone use Firefox for the foreseeable future.
  - dTal 10y ago
    >And to support all browsers, one will need to drop in a JS flac library anyway, making this addition moot. That's silly. By that argument no browser should ever bother adding any new features.
    - sitkack 10y ago
      Not ones that are trivially added "in user land". Browsers should add features where only they have access.

rikkus 10y ago

If your source media is FLAC (which is a good way to store 'source' material, that you might lossy-encode later) then being able to just stream that without any encoding step is handy. Maybe you wouldn't do this if you were concerned about bandwidth, but I'd certainly welcome this in a player to use on my LAN.

cookiengineer 10y ago

> Nice to add to the spec sheet; mostly useless in a practical setting. I'm still waiting for the day when the OPUS codec is supported everywhere. OPUS is some serious next-gen shit: https://www.opus-codec.org/ https://www.opus-codec.org/

HugoDaniel 10y ago

Why the comparison to TIFF ? If you want to insist in that analogy, are you aware of PNG and UTF-8 ?

sjwright 10y ago
That's the point. The point of the analogy is precisely that there are existing formats that are capable of the same practical quality with much smaller file sizes. PNG is smaller than uncompressed TIFF. UTF-8 is much smaller than UTF-32.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  HugoDaniel was referring to the fact that PNG is lossless as well. The rest of your point still stands, of course.
- greggman 10y ago
  I got your point but just FYI, TIFF supports 16bit per channel images. PNG and JPG do not. I think TIFF might also support floating point images. Those might be useful for raw manipulation and HDR. Safari supports TIFF BTW (or did last time I checked). No idea if there is a way to get access to the high res data in Safari though.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    Actually, PNG supports 16 bit channels (as well as 1, 2 and 4 bits for paletted or greyscale images). TIFF meanwhile is kind of a kitchen-sink container format, so you can do quite a bit of strange things with it (store JPGs inside it, support tiling), but I don't think many viewers support everything in the TIFF standard. > The standard allows indexed color PNGs to have 1, 2, 4 or 8 bits per pixel; grayscale images with no alpha channel may have 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 bits per pixel. Everything else uses a bit depth per channel of either 8 or 16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Pixel_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Pixe... > TIFF is a flexible, adaptable file format for handling images and data within a single file, by including the header tags (size, definition, image-data arrangement, applied image compression) defining the image's geometry. A TIFF file, for example, can be a container holding JPEG (lossy) and PackBits (lossless) compressed images. A TIFF file also can include a vector-based clipping path (outlines, croppings, image frames). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF#Features_and_options https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF#Features_and_options

AndrewUnmuted 10y ago

> lossless audio isn't necessary As an audio engineer, I must point out what is wrong with this statement. Sure, the average listener cannot discern between FLAC and a well-encoded lossy audio file. However, with the Web Audio API making big advancements, the need for in-browser FLAC support is becoming quite apparent. People are building all sorts of web apps for creating, manipulating, and processing audio. For this use case, working with lossy audio is out of the question. Supporting FLAC means the ability to follow signal flow best practices [0] without requiring the user to work with much larger PCM files. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_signal_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_signal_flow

mmastrac 10y ago
I think this is the most reasonable argument for supporting FLAC natively. We have support for lossless images in the browser already - TIFF isn't the image analogue, but rather PNG.
- ansgri 10y ago
  Except that PNG is by far not sufficient in professional image manipulation: it's compression scheme is good and 8uc{3,4} is lossless, but beyond 8bpc you're out of luck. I'd love to have a wide-supported float32 format with reasonable lossless (and maybe lossy) compression options. Conversely, FLAC supports different resolutions and sampling rates, so it does do the job for the sound processing.

tuxracer 10y ago

This isn't just academic. As OP pointed out TIDAL is not only using lossless but touting that as a key selling point.