4 ms·

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

by 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.
  - teach 10y ago
    If you can tell a difference between 320 kbps mp3 and FLAC, then your mp3 encoder has a bug. I promise you that you can't ABX the two.
    - pimeys 10y ago
      Mp3 is really useful if I transcode and stream some music while having data caps. But do I really have any valid reasons to archive the music I own with a lossy codec? And as I said in another branch in this discussion, mp3 + bluetooth compression is pretty awful already.
      - teach 10y ago
        If you care so much about music fidelity and are using bluetooth, then I'm inclined to say you deserve what you get. I keep all the music I own in FLAC as well, but have written scripts to transcode to Ogg Vorbis for portability.
- pimeys 10y ago
  Oh, I forgot one big deal: Bluetooth audio. I use bluetooth headphones when commuting and I have a Bluetooth receiver at home for convenience. Here it's a big deal if you compress with a lossy compression two times: once to MP3 and again when using Bluetooth. The loss in quality is significant.
  - pja 10y ago
    Decent bluetooth receivers can decode mp3 / mp4 & a correctly setup sound path should pass the mp3 packets straight from source to speaker without a decode/encode stage. Weirdly, this seems to be one of those tech things where it’s impossible to actually find out whether a bluetooth devices supports more than just the mandatory codecs & it’s equally impossible to find out whether your sound path is passing the source through or not. It’s all completely opaque.
    - pimeys 10y ago
      I really need a technology like Bluetooth, but there seems to be no other that works with all devices. Bluetooth audio is a black box and you never can't be sure what happens between the device and receiver.
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      Are you talking about apt-x?
      - pja 10y ago
        APT-X is a proprietary codec that performs far better than the original bluetooth audio codec & can be used for things that said codec really was’t up to. (It also includes a lossless mode for the audio purists amongst us.) Modern bluetooth devices can also negotiate various other codecs as part of the A2DP spec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles#Advanced_Audio_Distribution_Profile_.28A2DP.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles#Adv... including mpeg3/mpeg4 encodings but only SBC is mandatory and it seems to be impossible to tell what codec any particular Bluetooth audio device is using on any platform: I’ve not seen anything that will tell you what it’s really sending over the air.
- pimeys 10y ago
  So to summarize my thoughts (had a nice cup of coffee and thinking, Sunday anyways), the people I allow to do compression for the music I buy is the artist/producer herself or me. I really don't like having a third party in the middle turning the knobs for the music I buy.
  - krautsourced 10y ago
    You are of course aware that what you are listening has already been tweaked, knob-turned and filtered by the recording studio, sound engineers, artists and whoever else was involved. In the end music is subjective. It sounds different and pretty much every playback system. And to the listener, it either sounds good or not. It's never "correct".
    - pimeys 10y ago
      Of course. The typical music I listen to (techno mainly) goes through the producer's studio and usually has another person doing the mastering. Until now all compression is done by professionals who have ear how the end product should sound (with their Genelec studio monitors, of course). I'm fine with this. What I don't want to have is an automatic lossy compression done by systems which the artist has no influence. Depending on the sound of the original music, this might have no effect or then the compression completely ruins the dynamics and sound of the original production. On this time and age, bandwidth is cheap and the connections are fast. Disk space is cheap and cloud storage is cheap. I don't see so many reasons to use lossy files anymore and with flac I can be sure that I have the closest possible copy of the production that left the artist's studio.
      - sjwright 10y ago
        Yes, you are definitely conflating dynamic range compression (dynamics) and data compression (codecs). These are very different, completely unrelated issues that unfortunately bear the same linguistic shorthand of "compression". In the way they are commonly used, lossy compression codecs have zero impact on dynamics. Correctly used, lossy compression can have zero audible consequence no matter how good the equipment or how "golden" the ears. That said, a recording studio shouldn't ever be dealing with lossy codecs, because there's simply no need to, and because there's a sliver of possibility that the inaudible lossy artefacts could compound into an audible artefact over multiple generations. The only time a lossy codec should ever be used is by distribution networks and/or end users.
- rikkus 10y ago
  Why re-encode when there's no need?
- ozmbie 10y ago
  The point isn't about audio quality. It's about having a free and open way to do it at all! Who cares what uses it has? It's a whole new area of capability. Somebody could find a new use for it. If we limit our choices based what's currently possible, we get nowhere.
- dTal 10y ago
  Those listening tests are done on stereo headphones. I often listen to music through a 5.1 system, which processes the stereo signal through a Dolby Pro Logic II decoder in order to feed the 5 speakers. This stresses lossy codecs much more than listening through headphones; phase information is used for sound placement, and sounds that would normally be masked often end up sufficiently localised to discern (this is part of the fun of a surround system). I can definitely hear outright artefacts at rates and codecs purported to be transparent. You never know how a piece of audio might be used, and once you've thrown away information you can't get it back.
  - bfuller 10y ago
    Thank you. In a past life I was an audio engineer, and I spent hours tirelessly testing mixes on every kind of system. You are the listener I was working for.
    - dTal 10y ago
      Sounds like I should be thanking you. I'm amazed at how good things often sound when treated that way - I'm glad that artistic input goes into it.
  - sjwright 10y ago
    I agree in principle, however I disagree with the logic insofar as anyone who is listening to music through Pro Logic (or a similar matrix decoder) is by definition not a target audience for pedantic degrees of audio signal preservation.
    - dTal 10y ago
      Not really sure what you're trying to say. Why am I not allowed to be in the "target audience" for not wanting artefacts in my music? Your reasoning seems to be "only deluded, pedantic audiophiles want lossless, and audiophiles don't listen though matrix decoders". But that begs the question - the whole point of relating my personal experience was to show how a perfectly reasonable and commonplace listening style could benefit from lossless encoding.

by pimeys 10y ago

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.
- teach 10y ago
  If you can tell a difference between 320 kbps mp3 and FLAC, then your mp3 encoder has a bug. I promise you that you can't ABX the two.
  - pimeys 10y ago
    Mp3 is really useful if I transcode and stream some music while having data caps. But do I really have any valid reasons to archive the music I own with a lossy codec? And as I said in another branch in this discussion, mp3 + bluetooth compression is pretty awful already.
    - teach 10y ago
      If you care so much about music fidelity and are using bluetooth, then I'm inclined to say you deserve what you get. I keep all the music I own in FLAC as well, but have written scripts to transcode to Ogg Vorbis for portability.
pimeys 10y ago
Oh, I forgot one big deal: Bluetooth audio. I use bluetooth headphones when commuting and I have a Bluetooth receiver at home for convenience. Here it's a big deal if you compress with a lossy compression two times: once to MP3 and again when using Bluetooth. The loss in quality is significant.
- pja 10y ago
  Decent bluetooth receivers can decode mp3 / mp4 & a correctly setup sound path should pass the mp3 packets straight from source to speaker without a decode/encode stage. Weirdly, this seems to be one of those tech things where it’s impossible to actually find out whether a bluetooth devices supports more than just the mandatory codecs & it’s equally impossible to find out whether your sound path is passing the source through or not. It’s all completely opaque.
  - pimeys 10y ago
    I really need a technology like Bluetooth, but there seems to be no other that works with all devices. Bluetooth audio is a black box and you never can't be sure what happens between the device and receiver.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Are you talking about apt-x?
    - pja 10y ago
      APT-X is a proprietary codec that performs far better than the original bluetooth audio codec & can be used for things that said codec really was’t up to. (It also includes a lossless mode for the audio purists amongst us.) Modern bluetooth devices can also negotiate various other codecs as part of the A2DP spec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles#Advanced_Audio_Distribution_Profile_.28A2DP.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles#Adv... including mpeg3/mpeg4 encodings but only SBC is mandatory and it seems to be impossible to tell what codec any particular Bluetooth audio device is using on any platform: I’ve not seen anything that will tell you what it’s really sending over the air.
pimeys 10y ago
So to summarize my thoughts (had a nice cup of coffee and thinking, Sunday anyways), the people I allow to do compression for the music I buy is the artist/producer herself or me. I really don't like having a third party in the middle turning the knobs for the music I buy.
- krautsourced 10y ago
  You are of course aware that what you are listening has already been tweaked, knob-turned and filtered by the recording studio, sound engineers, artists and whoever else was involved. In the end music is subjective. It sounds different and pretty much every playback system. And to the listener, it either sounds good or not. It's never "correct".
  - pimeys 10y ago
    Of course. The typical music I listen to (techno mainly) goes through the producer's studio and usually has another person doing the mastering. Until now all compression is done by professionals who have ear how the end product should sound (with their Genelec studio monitors, of course). I'm fine with this. What I don't want to have is an automatic lossy compression done by systems which the artist has no influence. Depending on the sound of the original music, this might have no effect or then the compression completely ruins the dynamics and sound of the original production. On this time and age, bandwidth is cheap and the connections are fast. Disk space is cheap and cloud storage is cheap. I don't see so many reasons to use lossy files anymore and with flac I can be sure that I have the closest possible copy of the production that left the artist's studio.
    - sjwright 10y ago
      Yes, you are definitely conflating dynamic range compression (dynamics) and data compression (codecs). These are very different, completely unrelated issues that unfortunately bear the same linguistic shorthand of "compression". In the way they are commonly used, lossy compression codecs have zero impact on dynamics. Correctly used, lossy compression can have zero audible consequence no matter how good the equipment or how "golden" the ears. That said, a recording studio shouldn't ever be dealing with lossy codecs, because there's simply no need to, and because there's a sliver of possibility that the inaudible lossy artefacts could compound into an audible artefact over multiple generations. The only time a lossy codec should ever be used is by distribution networks and/or end users.
rikkus 10y ago
Why re-encode when there's no need?
ozmbie 10y ago
The point isn't about audio quality. It's about having a free and open way to do it at all! Who cares what uses it has? It's a whole new area of capability. Somebody could find a new use for it. If we limit our choices based what's currently possible, we get nowhere.
dTal 10y ago
Those listening tests are done on stereo headphones. I often listen to music through a 5.1 system, which processes the stereo signal through a Dolby Pro Logic II decoder in order to feed the 5 speakers. This stresses lossy codecs much more than listening through headphones; phase information is used for sound placement, and sounds that would normally be masked often end up sufficiently localised to discern (this is part of the fun of a surround system). I can definitely hear outright artefacts at rates and codecs purported to be transparent. You never know how a piece of audio might be used, and once you've thrown away information you can't get it back.
- bfuller 10y ago
  Thank you. In a past life I was an audio engineer, and I spent hours tirelessly testing mixes on every kind of system. You are the listener I was working for.
  - dTal 10y ago
    Sounds like I should be thanking you. I'm amazed at how good things often sound when treated that way - I'm glad that artistic input goes into it.
- sjwright 10y ago
  I agree in principle, however I disagree with the logic insofar as anyone who is listening to music through Pro Logic (or a similar matrix decoder) is by definition not a target audience for pedantic degrees of audio signal preservation.
  - dTal 10y ago
    Not really sure what you're trying to say. Why am I not allowed to be in the "target audience" for not wanting artefacts in my music? Your reasoning seems to be "only deluded, pedantic audiophiles want lossless, and audiophiles don't listen though matrix decoders". But that begs the question - the whole point of relating my personal experience was to show how a perfectly reasonable and commonplace listening style could benefit from lossless encoding.