5 ms·

I’m not clear how you are jumping from “30% of a few hundred gigs is a bad complexity trade off” to “100000% of terabytes is worthless” :p Thanks for at least

I’m not clear how you are jumping from “30% of a few hundred gigs is a bad complexity trade off” to “100000% of terabytes is worthless” :p Thanks for at least arguing against the use case I argued for. Even if you were a bit hyperbolic. I get that I’m being a cranky old engineer. As someone who has spent a couple decades optimizing and maintaining bespoke high performance file formats, the particular use case of FLAC as an archive format still seems like a bad complexity vs benefit trade. I’d rather have something that’s trivial for any software to work with everywhere forever. I know FLAC feels like forever. But, so did a lot of dead formats I used to work with.

astrange 5y ago
FLAC isn't an unmaintainable "engineering marvel", the algorithm is pretty simple and all the data is checksummed. That's enough to make it a better archival format than WAV.
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  Checksumming isn't enough to make something a good archival format. You need to go beyond being able to detect data corruption to being able to correct or cope with data corruption. For a FLAC file, if you flip a bit in the file, then the checksum will detect that the file has been corrupted, but that chunk of the file will be unrecoverable. If you flip a bit in PCM data, likely you won't even hear the difference. If you want to know whether corruption has occurred, you can always run md5sum on it. For FLAC, if you want to be able to cope with data corruption, you'll need to create something like par2 recovery data.
- Aachen 5y ago
  This. My dad is very skeptical of compression, not understanding the concept of lossless and thinking it reduces quality to compress it. Even if you explain it in terms of "so instead of writing 1111111 it writes 7x1, look how much less space that takes! But it's the same information in the end." Even NTFS compression is a checkbox he insisted I disable. So it's wav all the way. Recently had hard drive issues and I copied all data to a new drive at painstaking speeds (the hdd was barely limping). I now have no idea which files might have glitches from broken bits or sectors in them. I guess a checksummed filesystem or keeping hash sums somewhere (the standard utilities make it pretty easy to verify many files with one simple command) is the solution for him. For me... just use a normal format and save half the space and money. Heck, go one step further and use opus: a healthy young individual can't hear the difference at a good bitrate let alone my "audiophile" "listens to too loud music" old man.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Some of the older generation have been convinced there's a difference with lossless compression, usually by British salesmen using words like "jitter" and "PRAT". It's sad that by the time you're old enough to afford being an audiophile, you probably don't have high-end hearing anymore.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      Actually, from my experience, hi-fi audio is more about the complete sound rather than details itself. I've played in orchestras and have a respectable system at home, and the biggest differentiator is not the details, but how these details interact and create a bigger, more immersive soundstage. Yes, you can hear subtle sounds of a bow or a cymbal, but the exciting part is how sounds mesh and play with each other. So, as I age, the excitement of listening the same or new songs with that system doesn't fade away. I still get the same joy, and shiver when I hear that soundstage. Actually, jitter is really something about audio CDs burned in CD Writers. I still have a Yamaha CRW-F1 CD recorder, and it has a feature to abuse Red Book standard to record audio with bigger pits to ease the CD player's job of tracking the disc. It reduces a 80 minute disc to 66 minutes, but with a higher quality CD like TDK, the sound was noticeably different on the system I aforementioned in this comment. Currently, that set is fed by a much better CD player, and I'm sure that its tracking is leaps and bounds ahead of the older player, but it was really made a difference back then. I'm not sure with today's electronics, it'd make such a difference anymore.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        > more about the complete sound rather than details itself Agreed. My sound system isn't by any stretch audiophile; and I have the hearing of a 65-year-old. I can't point to things I can hear on a FLAC that I can't hear on an MP3; I hear the same notes, and the same instruments, with much the same tonality. But the former has a presence and vibrancy that is lacking in the latter; when I listen to MP3s, my involvement in the music rapidly tails off. I suspect that you don't have to be able to hear higher harmonics in isolation, for those higher harmonics to affect what you do hear. That is, even if my hearing range cuts off at 12KHz, I can still tell the difference between an unfiltered sound, and a sound that is low-pass-filtered at 15KHz. The difference seems to be clearest with voices.
bayindirh 5y ago
> Even if you were a bit hyperbolic. It was an intentional dramatization to showcase some slippery slope, tbh. Genuinely sorry if that sounded too harsh, or rude. That wasn't the intention. > I’d rather have something that’s trivial for any software to work with everywhere forever. I know FLAC feels like forever. But, so did a lot of dead formats I used to work with. I understand the fear and pain of obsolescence in the world of file formats. VQF is the first notable example in my mind, but we need to keep in mind that FLAC is proper FOSS, and it'll live on in one way or another. People still keep Commodore64 kernals, emulators alive. Similarly MiniDisc has a cult following. On the worst case, I can install an old distro to a VM, and convert my music via that VM to something more modern. I personally don't think FLAC as an "Archival Format". It's more of a bona fide storage format for me. I'm a serious music listener, and I tag my archives ambitiously, and besides being lossless and provides space advantages, it supports proper tagging via ID3 tools and allows me to store a truckload of metadata with my music. To prevent corruption in my archives, I'd rather store recovery data and take regular backups. There's no other way in my book to keep data safe.
sylware 5y ago
"bad complexity vs benefit trade" that makes me think of "C compiler" (actually C89 with benign bits of c99/c11) vs "c++ compiler", or "javascript web browser" vs "noscript/basic (x)html browser". that said, aren't the 30TB hard drives around the corner?
- corysama 5y ago
  Exactly. We are currently debating $10 vs. $6 to store 1000 hours of music. The only answer to my actual question so far indicates that when it gets down to $1 vs 60c, they’ll just say “Whatever. Leave it uncompressed.” Thus 90% of the discussion has instead been about 4G streaming lossless real time voice and podcasts to mobile devices with price-gouged storage to be listened to through very lossy Bluetooth compression :p And, 9% has been about how FLAC as a container format did a good job standardizing metadata. But, that has nothing to do with audio encoding within the container :P

astrange 5y ago

FLAC isn't an unmaintainable "engineering marvel", the algorithm is pretty simple and all the data is checksummed. That's enough to make it a better archival format than WAV.

mnw21cam 5y ago
Checksumming isn't enough to make something a good archival format. You need to go beyond being able to detect data corruption to being able to correct or cope with data corruption. For a FLAC file, if you flip a bit in the file, then the checksum will detect that the file has been corrupted, but that chunk of the file will be unrecoverable. If you flip a bit in PCM data, likely you won't even hear the difference. If you want to know whether corruption has occurred, you can always run md5sum on it. For FLAC, if you want to be able to cope with data corruption, you'll need to create something like par2 recovery data.
Aachen 5y ago
This. My dad is very skeptical of compression, not understanding the concept of lossless and thinking it reduces quality to compress it. Even if you explain it in terms of "so instead of writing 1111111 it writes 7x1, look how much less space that takes! But it's the same information in the end." Even NTFS compression is a checkbox he insisted I disable. So it's wav all the way. Recently had hard drive issues and I copied all data to a new drive at painstaking speeds (the hdd was barely limping). I now have no idea which files might have glitches from broken bits or sectors in them. I guess a checksummed filesystem or keeping hash sums somewhere (the standard utilities make it pretty easy to verify many files with one simple command) is the solution for him. For me... just use a normal format and save half the space and money. Heck, go one step further and use opus: a healthy young individual can't hear the difference at a good bitrate let alone my "audiophile" "listens to too loud music" old man.
- astrange 5y ago
  Some of the older generation have been convinced there's a difference with lossless compression, usually by British salesmen using words like "jitter" and "PRAT". It's sad that by the time you're old enough to afford being an audiophile, you probably don't have high-end hearing anymore.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Actually, from my experience, hi-fi audio is more about the complete sound rather than details itself. I've played in orchestras and have a respectable system at home, and the biggest differentiator is not the details, but how these details interact and create a bigger, more immersive soundstage. Yes, you can hear subtle sounds of a bow or a cymbal, but the exciting part is how sounds mesh and play with each other. So, as I age, the excitement of listening the same or new songs with that system doesn't fade away. I still get the same joy, and shiver when I hear that soundstage. Actually, jitter is really something about audio CDs burned in CD Writers. I still have a Yamaha CRW-F1 CD recorder, and it has a feature to abuse Red Book standard to record audio with bigger pits to ease the CD player's job of tracking the disc. It reduces a 80 minute disc to 66 minutes, but with a higher quality CD like TDK, the sound was noticeably different on the system I aforementioned in this comment. Currently, that set is fed by a much better CD player, and I'm sure that its tracking is leaps and bounds ahead of the older player, but it was really made a difference back then. I'm not sure with today's electronics, it'd make such a difference anymore.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      > more about the complete sound rather than details itself Agreed. My sound system isn't by any stretch audiophile; and I have the hearing of a 65-year-old. I can't point to things I can hear on a FLAC that I can't hear on an MP3; I hear the same notes, and the same instruments, with much the same tonality. But the former has a presence and vibrancy that is lacking in the latter; when I listen to MP3s, my involvement in the music rapidly tails off. I suspect that you don't have to be able to hear higher harmonics in isolation, for those higher harmonics to affect what you do hear. That is, even if my hearing range cuts off at 12KHz, I can still tell the difference between an unfiltered sound, and a sound that is low-pass-filtered at 15KHz. The difference seems to be clearest with voices.

bayindirh 5y ago

> Even if you were a bit hyperbolic. It was an intentional dramatization to showcase some slippery slope, tbh. Genuinely sorry if that sounded too harsh, or rude. That wasn't the intention. > I’d rather have something that’s trivial for any software to work with everywhere forever. I know FLAC feels like forever. But, so did a lot of dead formats I used to work with. I understand the fear and pain of obsolescence in the world of file formats. VQF is the first notable example in my mind, but we need to keep in mind that FLAC is proper FOSS, and it'll live on in one way or another. People still keep Commodore64 kernals, emulators alive. Similarly MiniDisc has a cult following. On the worst case, I can install an old distro to a VM, and convert my music via that VM to something more modern. I personally don't think FLAC as an "Archival Format". It's more of a bona fide storage format for me. I'm a serious music listener, and I tag my archives ambitiously, and besides being lossless and provides space advantages, it supports proper tagging via ID3 tools and allows me to store a truckload of metadata with my music. To prevent corruption in my archives, I'd rather store recovery data and take regular backups. There's no other way in my book to keep data safe.

sylware 5y ago

"bad complexity vs benefit trade" that makes me think of "C compiler" (actually C89 with benign bits of c99/c11) vs "c++ compiler", or "javascript web browser" vs "noscript/basic (x)html browser". that said, aren't the 30TB hard drives around the corner?

corysama 5y ago
Exactly. We are currently debating $10 vs. $6 to store 1000 hours of music. The only answer to my actual question so far indicates that when it gets down to $1 vs 60c, they’ll just say “Whatever. Leave it uncompressed.” Thus 90% of the discussion has instead been about 4G streaming lossless real time voice and podcasts to mobile devices with price-gouged storage to be listened to through very lossy Bluetooth compression :p And, 9% has been about how FLAC as a container format did a good job standardizing metadata. But, that has nothing to do with audio encoding within the container :P