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> If you deeply care about music and are an audiophile you do FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content. https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital

> If you deeply care about music and are an audiophile you do FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content. https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell.

sneak 7y ago
.Zip also has no benefit over .exe, .dmg none over .app. It’s just a codec. It makes it smaller. Unless you mean “lossy” by “traditional”, in which case, yes, lossless codecs have a lot of benefit over lossy ones. A perfect example is when sampling or beatmixing; if the final product will be played on youtube or streamed on digital radio or compressed lossily in any form, you will have incurred two lossy compression steps if your source material is lossy. This is akin to subsequent generations of dubbing analog media; the quality degrades quickly with each generation.
bscphil 7y ago
>FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content. You seem to have misunderstood FLAC with the sample rate / bit depth of a file. The vast majority of FLAC files are regular old 16 bit 44.1 kHz, and nobody is claiming that 24 bit 192 kHz (or whatever) files are better. FLAC is a codec: simply a way to take all the audio on a CD and have it preserved indefinitely, without "generational" loss (where a mp3 is encoded from another mp3, and so on).
- xvector 7y ago
  You're totally right. Complete brain blank. I don't know what I was thinking - think I subconsciously mixed my frustration over Tidal's 192/24 marketing with the concept of FLAC.
- mo5 7y ago
  will be a flac version of a track sound better than a mp3 that was converted from a m4a ? or am I just missing the whole point of FLAC.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    Yes it will, assuming the FLAC one makes sense to begin with. FLAC is a specialty codec tuned for compressing audio in the same way that DEFLATE is tuned for general (mostly text) files. Both of them are lossless, which means when you decompress the file you get exactly the same bits back as you started with. So a correctly encoded FLAC file will be using CD quality audio or better. (CD audio is transparent when correctly encoded in 100% of cases.) FLAC is just a way to reduce the file size of that raw CD data by about 50%. Lossy codecs like mp3 and AAC (the codec usually found in the m4a container) are also tuned to compress music, but they do so by throwing away a some of the original information. When this is done correctly it should still be transparent to the original the vast majority of the time. No one, not even an "audiophile", can tell the difference under any listening conditions. For mp3 (depending on encoder), the bitrate that achieves transparency is about 256 kbits/sec, though there are so-called "killer samples" that can break certain encoders at that bitrate. AAC (again, depending on encoder) is transparent closer to 192 kbits/sec. The state of the art has advanced remarkably since either were released: Opus is transparent in the vast majority of cases all the way down to 128 kbits / sec, and still sounds great at bitrates below that. The problem is that just seeing the file extension gives you no guarantees about what the bitrate is. A 128 kbits/sec mp3 is going to sound like mush on a good system. If you convert that mp3 to FLAC it's still going to sound like mush, because you're using a lossy source. But a FLAC made from a CD will sound much better, as will a 320 kbits/sec mp3. So if all you care about is transparency, getting 320 kbits/sec mp3s or 128 kbits/sec Opus files is probably good enough for you. The issue with "generational loss" I was referring to is when a lossy file is used as a source for another lossy encode. This is kind of like saving a file as a jpeg twice: you always lose more than just saving it once, even if the "quality" setting in the encoder is the same. Plus if you convert an AAC file to mp3, there's an even worse problem, which is that the different codecs try to compress the file in slightly different ways, which can lead to unexpected interactions and sometimes end up sounding like crap. The point of keeping around a FLAC file is that you have a permanent archive of what was on the CD, and you have a source that you can use to make future lossy encodes from without the generational loss problem. All my albums are ripped to FLAC, but from those FLAC files I encode Opus files that are small enough to take with me on my phone.
sjy 7y ago
FLAC is an archival format. It's valuable because you can use whatever codec you like to stream the audio or store it on a device with limited space, including future codecs that haven't been developed yet. Lossy-to-lossy encoding is bad.
pimeys 7y ago
How do you convert lossy music to another lossy format? I'm having my music encoded in 96kbps opus in my phone and it is much more convenient to encode them from flac than another lossy format. I have hundreds of albums bought and ripped to flac on my NAS server. They take about 300 GB out of the 40something terabytes available. I have real rarities stored in there and I pay about 1 euro a month for the cloud backup.
- Nux 7y ago
  Which cloud backup are you using?
  - freedomben 7y ago
    Not OP but BackBlaze B2 has been amazing for me. Very affordable as long as you don't re-download your data super often.
  - executesorder66 7y ago
    not OP, but checkout rsync.net. Especially their borg repo options.
tellak 7y ago
You’re so confused. > FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content Yes it does. It’s anywhere from 70-30% the size depending on genre. That’s a benefit. > you might think that FLAC/lossless is audibly better. No I think and expect it to sound audibly identical. That’s the whole point.
mruts 7y ago
I don't think you understand what FLAC is. FLAC is a lossless compression format, that's it. FLAC also can be encoded in 16/24 or other bitrates like 24/192. Moreover, you can't (or shouldn't) do lossy to lossy encoding, so if you want to future proof your collection, you should store it FLAC or another lossless format because when/if mp3's go obsolete, you'll be stuck with it.

sneak 7y ago

.Zip also has no benefit over .exe, .dmg none over .app. It’s just a codec. It makes it smaller. Unless you mean “lossy” by “traditional”, in which case, yes, lossless codecs have a lot of benefit over lossy ones. A perfect example is when sampling or beatmixing; if the final product will be played on youtube or streamed on digital radio or compressed lossily in any form, you will have incurred two lossy compression steps if your source material is lossy. This is akin to subsequent generations of dubbing analog media; the quality degrades quickly with each generation.

bscphil 7y ago

>FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content. You seem to have misunderstood FLAC with the sample rate / bit depth of a file. The vast majority of FLAC files are regular old 16 bit 44.1 kHz, and nobody is claiming that 24 bit 192 kHz (or whatever) files are better. FLAC is a codec: simply a way to take all the audio on a CD and have it preserved indefinitely, without "generational" loss (where a mp3 is encoded from another mp3, and so on).

xvector 7y ago
You're totally right. Complete brain blank. I don't know what I was thinking - think I subconsciously mixed my frustration over Tidal's 192/24 marketing with the concept of FLAC.
mo5 7y ago
will be a flac version of a track sound better than a mp3 that was converted from a m4a ? or am I just missing the whole point of FLAC.
- bscphil 7y ago
  Yes it will, assuming the FLAC one makes sense to begin with. FLAC is a specialty codec tuned for compressing audio in the same way that DEFLATE is tuned for general (mostly text) files. Both of them are lossless, which means when you decompress the file you get exactly the same bits back as you started with. So a correctly encoded FLAC file will be using CD quality audio or better. (CD audio is transparent when correctly encoded in 100% of cases.) FLAC is just a way to reduce the file size of that raw CD data by about 50%. Lossy codecs like mp3 and AAC (the codec usually found in the m4a container) are also tuned to compress music, but they do so by throwing away a some of the original information. When this is done correctly it should still be transparent to the original the vast majority of the time. No one, not even an "audiophile", can tell the difference under any listening conditions. For mp3 (depending on encoder), the bitrate that achieves transparency is about 256 kbits/sec, though there are so-called "killer samples" that can break certain encoders at that bitrate. AAC (again, depending on encoder) is transparent closer to 192 kbits/sec. The state of the art has advanced remarkably since either were released: Opus is transparent in the vast majority of cases all the way down to 128 kbits / sec, and still sounds great at bitrates below that. The problem is that just seeing the file extension gives you no guarantees about what the bitrate is. A 128 kbits/sec mp3 is going to sound like mush on a good system. If you convert that mp3 to FLAC it's still going to sound like mush, because you're using a lossy source. But a FLAC made from a CD will sound much better, as will a 320 kbits/sec mp3. So if all you care about is transparency, getting 320 kbits/sec mp3s or 128 kbits/sec Opus files is probably good enough for you. The issue with "generational loss" I was referring to is when a lossy file is used as a source for another lossy encode. This is kind of like saving a file as a jpeg twice: you always lose more than just saving it once, even if the "quality" setting in the encoder is the same. Plus if you convert an AAC file to mp3, there's an even worse problem, which is that the different codecs try to compress the file in slightly different ways, which can lead to unexpected interactions and sometimes end up sounding like crap. The point of keeping around a FLAC file is that you have a permanent archive of what was on the CD, and you have a source that you can use to make future lossy encodes from without the generational loss problem. All my albums are ripped to FLAC, but from those FLAC files I encode Opus files that are small enough to take with me on my phone.

sjy 7y ago

FLAC is an archival format. It's valuable because you can use whatever codec you like to stream the audio or store it on a device with limited space, including future codecs that haven't been developed yet. Lossy-to-lossy encoding is bad.

pimeys 7y ago

How do you convert lossy music to another lossy format? I'm having my music encoded in 96kbps opus in my phone and it is much more convenient to encode them from flac than another lossy format. I have hundreds of albums bought and ripped to flac on my NAS server. They take about 300 GB out of the 40something terabytes available. I have real rarities stored in there and I pay about 1 euro a month for the cloud backup.

Nux 7y ago
Which cloud backup are you using?
- freedomben 7y ago
  Not OP but BackBlaze B2 has been amazing for me. Very affordable as long as you don't re-download your data super often.
- executesorder66 7y ago
  not OP, but checkout rsync.net. Especially their borg repo options.

tellak 7y ago

You’re so confused. > FLAC has no benefit over traditional 16/24 encoded content Yes it does. It’s anywhere from 70-30% the size depending on genre. That’s a benefit. > you might think that FLAC/lossless is audibly better. No I think and expect it to sound audibly identical. That’s the whole point.

mruts 7y ago

I don't think you understand what FLAC is. FLAC is a lossless compression format, that's it. FLAC also can be encoded in 16/24 or other bitrates like 24/192. Moreover, you can't (or shouldn't) do lossy to lossy encoding, so if you want to future proof your collection, you should store it FLAC or another lossless format because when/if mp3's go obsolete, you'll be stuck with it.