6 ms·

Thanks to this article, when I torrent music that is shared in 24/192 format, I always resample to 24/96: ffmpeg -i foo.flac -ar 96000 -acodec flac bar.flac

vortico 8y ago
To thank the article even more, you could resample to 16/48kHz.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  Even if the lower sample rate of 48kHz would be entirely reasonable and 96kHz is overkill, 24 bits still makes an audible difference for the material I listen to (modernist classical music and ECM jazz), which is why you can find 24/48 from some labels. For pop music, which of course is distinguished by little dynamic range, then 16 bits would be fine just like on the CD format.
  - vortico 8y ago
    The only issue with low bitrates is noise floor, so if you're hearing other distortions, it's not caused by the bitrate but maybe your room treatment or headphone drivers. A recording would have to have a hilariously large amount of headroom for 16-bit noise floor to be noticible when the music is played at a desired level, and while symphonic and jazz recordings have ridiculously high dynamic range, it's not 100dB of headroom, maybe 60, so 16-bit should be fine. If you still think it's a problem, adding good dithering with ffmpeg's quantizer/resampler flags will make the noise floor 6-10dB smaller.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - andybak 8y ago
    > 24 bits still makes an audible difference The article (and numerous other sources I've seen over the years) disagrees with you so I'm curious why you're so certain?
    - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
      As the article notes: "It's true that 16 bit linear PCM audio does not quite cover the entire theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions." Now, 24-bit may be overkill, but 24-bit is the next step up from 16-bit among standard encoding formats, and as the article notes, there are no drawbacks with 24-bit encoding except greater use of disk space.
      - andybak 8y ago
        The article says: "[...] does not quite cover the entire theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions." Note the words "theoretical" and "ideal". In your post it sounds like you're claiming that you can regularly hear a difference under normal listening conditions - which contradicts my reading of that sentence. My gut feeling is that the difference you're hearing is placebo. To put it another way - either the article is making an inaccurate statement, you're mistaken - or you've got golden ears and only ever listen to music in specially prepared environments.
        Applejinx 8y ago
        The article is making numerous inaccurate statements, because it's got an agenda and the author is invested in lossy media encoding quite heavily. There's a degree to where it's relative: in the car with the windows open you'll not be hearing 16 bits of audio resolution. Monty's gotta monty, and this argument has been going on from the very earliest days of digital: back when people behaved exactly the same way over digital recordings that are now commonly accepted to be excruciatingly bad for a variety of reasons (generally having to do with bad process and wrong technical choices). You can get a HELL of a lot out of 16/44.1 these days if you really work at it. I do that for a living and continue to push the boundaries of what's common practice (most recently, me and Alexey Lukin of iZotope hammered out a method of dithering the mantissa of 32 bit floating point (which equates to around 24 bit fixed for only the outside 1/2 of the sample range, and gets progressively higher precision as loudness diminishes). Monty is not useful in these discussions, nor is anyone who just dismisses the whole concept of digital audio quality.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    To put things in perspective, 16-bit PCM audio has a noise floor around -96dBFS, ie. the difference between the loudest possible sound the format can contain and the noise floor is 96dB. That's what the bit depth determines; the level of the noise floor in relation to the loudest reproducible sound. It does not add any more detail, it's not like the resolution of an image file, the added bit depth does not allow for finer-grained details, audio doesn't work like that. 96dB is a lot more than you probably think, it's like the difference between an anechoic chamber (nominally ~0dB) and someone jackhammering concrete right next to you (~90-100dB). Add to this that even a quiet room has a noise floor around 20-30dB, and to even hear the noise floor in CD quality audio, a full-scale peak would hit 130dB! Try generating a sound at 0dBFS, the attenuate it in steps of 10dB and make note of when you can't really hear it anymore. At -50dB the sound is already extremely low and barely audible, and there would still be 46dB of attenuation available. In addition to this, noise-shaped dither can push the noise floor towards frequencies where the human ear is less sensitive, giving a perceived noise floor of around -120dBFS. In other words, 24-bit audio for distribution and listening is absolutely pointless and has absolutely no audible difference when compared to 16-bit audio.
badfrog 8y ago
I'm curious why you torrent music still when streaming is so widely available and free/cheap? I did a lot of torrenting back in the 2000s, but thinking back on it I spent a ton of time finding things, organizing my file system, transcoding, editing metadata, etc. I do not miss that hassle at all now.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  I spend about half of every year traveling, often in particularly undeveloped countries and/or far from a mobile signal. Having my entire music collection on a portable hard drive is more convenient for me personally than being bound to streaming.
  - badfrog 8y ago
    Makes sense, thanks for answering!
- quattrofan 8y ago
  I refuse to pay streaming subs, I buy second hand CDs for pennies and rip to flac. I'll always own my content and play it whenever/wherever I want at the best quality.
- discreditable 8y ago
  Some bands still refuse to be available on streaming (ex: Tool). Some will never be on streaming.
- babypuncher 8y ago
  Streaming music services lack all the options in foobar2000 that I've grown accustomed to over the last 10+ years. Personally, I buy music rather than torrent, but the pace at which I buy new music (either on bandcamp or physical CDs) costs me about the same as a Spotify premium subscription anyways, only I get to keep the music forever.
- Nadya 8y ago
  >I'm curious why you torrent music still when streaming is so widely available and free/cheap? To provide you with another answer, most of the artists I listen to aren't on any of the music streaming services. Because local underground bands whom only have CD's handed out at their shows rarely exist outside of the pirating scene - which has a knack for distributing local underground bands with limited release/number of CDs. A small percentage of the bands/artists are on Spotify or Bandcamp but most aren't. I buy what I can because I enjoy having the album arts but most of my music cannot be purchased or streamed. There's also no guarantee that the streaming services will still exist in 10, 20, 30+ years - but there is an almost 100% chance that the hardware and software necessary to listen to or convert .flac will exist for me to continue to listen to my music.

vortico 8y ago

To thank the article even more, you could resample to 16/48kHz.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
Even if the lower sample rate of 48kHz would be entirely reasonable and 96kHz is overkill, 24 bits still makes an audible difference for the material I listen to (modernist classical music and ECM jazz), which is why you can find 24/48 from some labels. For pop music, which of course is distinguished by little dynamic range, then 16 bits would be fine just like on the CD format.
- vortico 8y ago
  The only issue with low bitrates is noise floor, so if you're hearing other distortions, it's not caused by the bitrate but maybe your room treatment or headphone drivers. A recording would have to have a hilariously large amount of headroom for 16-bit noise floor to be noticible when the music is played at a desired level, and while symphonic and jazz recordings have ridiculously high dynamic range, it's not 100dB of headroom, maybe 60, so 16-bit should be fine. If you still think it's a problem, adding good dithering with ffmpeg's quantizer/resampler flags will make the noise floor 6-10dB smaller.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- andybak 8y ago
  > 24 bits still makes an audible difference The article (and numerous other sources I've seen over the years) disagrees with you so I'm curious why you're so certain?
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    As the article notes: "It's true that 16 bit linear PCM audio does not quite cover the entire theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions." Now, 24-bit may be overkill, but 24-bit is the next step up from 16-bit among standard encoding formats, and as the article notes, there are no drawbacks with 24-bit encoding except greater use of disk space.
    - andybak 8y ago
      The article says: "[...] does not quite cover the entire theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions." Note the words "theoretical" and "ideal". In your post it sounds like you're claiming that you can regularly hear a difference under normal listening conditions - which contradicts my reading of that sentence. My gut feeling is that the difference you're hearing is placebo. To put it another way - either the article is making an inaccurate statement, you're mistaken - or you've got golden ears and only ever listen to music in specially prepared environments.
      - Applejinx 8y ago
        The article is making numerous inaccurate statements, because it's got an agenda and the author is invested in lossy media encoding quite heavily. There's a degree to where it's relative: in the car with the windows open you'll not be hearing 16 bits of audio resolution. Monty's gotta monty, and this argument has been going on from the very earliest days of digital: back when people behaved exactly the same way over digital recordings that are now commonly accepted to be excruciatingly bad for a variety of reasons (generally having to do with bad process and wrong technical choices). You can get a HELL of a lot out of 16/44.1 these days if you really work at it. I do that for a living and continue to push the boundaries of what's common practice (most recently, me and Alexey Lukin of iZotope hammered out a method of dithering the mantissa of 32 bit floating point (which equates to around 24 bit fixed for only the outside 1/2 of the sample range, and gets progressively higher precision as loudness diminishes). Monty is not useful in these discussions, nor is anyone who just dismisses the whole concept of digital audio quality.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  To put things in perspective, 16-bit PCM audio has a noise floor around -96dBFS, ie. the difference between the loudest possible sound the format can contain and the noise floor is 96dB. That's what the bit depth determines; the level of the noise floor in relation to the loudest reproducible sound. It does not add any more detail, it's not like the resolution of an image file, the added bit depth does not allow for finer-grained details, audio doesn't work like that. 96dB is a lot more than you probably think, it's like the difference between an anechoic chamber (nominally ~0dB) and someone jackhammering concrete right next to you (~90-100dB). Add to this that even a quiet room has a noise floor around 20-30dB, and to even hear the noise floor in CD quality audio, a full-scale peak would hit 130dB! Try generating a sound at 0dBFS, the attenuate it in steps of 10dB and make note of when you can't really hear it anymore. At -50dB the sound is already extremely low and barely audible, and there would still be 46dB of attenuation available. In addition to this, noise-shaped dither can push the noise floor towards frequencies where the human ear is less sensitive, giving a perceived noise floor of around -120dBFS. In other words, 24-bit audio for distribution and listening is absolutely pointless and has absolutely no audible difference when compared to 16-bit audio.

badfrog 8y ago

I'm curious why you torrent music still when streaming is so widely available and free/cheap? I did a lot of torrenting back in the 2000s, but thinking back on it I spent a ton of time finding things, organizing my file system, transcoding, editing metadata, etc. I do not miss that hassle at all now.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
I spend about half of every year traveling, often in particularly undeveloped countries and/or far from a mobile signal. Having my entire music collection on a portable hard drive is more convenient for me personally than being bound to streaming.
- badfrog 8y ago
  Makes sense, thanks for answering!
quattrofan 8y ago
I refuse to pay streaming subs, I buy second hand CDs for pennies and rip to flac. I'll always own my content and play it whenever/wherever I want at the best quality.
discreditable 8y ago
Some bands still refuse to be available on streaming (ex: Tool). Some will never be on streaming.
babypuncher 8y ago
Streaming music services lack all the options in foobar2000 that I've grown accustomed to over the last 10+ years. Personally, I buy music rather than torrent, but the pace at which I buy new music (either on bandcamp or physical CDs) costs me about the same as a Spotify premium subscription anyways, only I get to keep the music forever.
Nadya 8y ago
>I'm curious why you torrent music still when streaming is so widely available and free/cheap? To provide you with another answer, most of the artists I listen to aren't on any of the music streaming services. Because local underground bands whom only have CD's handed out at their shows rarely exist outside of the pirating scene - which has a knack for distributing local underground bands with limited release/number of CDs. A small percentage of the bands/artists are on Spotify or Bandcamp but most aren't. I buy what I can because I enjoy having the album arts but most of my music cannot be purchased or streamed. There's also no guarantee that the streaming services will still exist in 10, 20, 30+ years - but there is an almost 100% chance that the hardware and software necessary to listen to or convert .flac will exist for me to continue to listen to my music.