10 ms·

I don't have a crazy large music collection, and mine is 85 GB of 192 kbps MP3s. With FLAC that'd be 250-ish GB of music. That's a significant chunk of most m

by wheels 4y ago

I don't have a crazy large music collection, and mine is 85 GB of 192 kbps MP3s. With FLAC that'd be 250-ish GB of music. That's a significant chunk of most modern SSDs. Why would you use 3x the storage space if you can't hear the difference for a non-trivial percentage of your available storage? Literally, by definition, according to your own terms, it serves no purpose. I'm a musician and audio developer, and it's only really in my own music, that I've listened to over and over again while creating it, that I notice the degradation in a 192 kbps MP3 – and occasionally in the high-hats of CDs that I listened to hundreds of times in high school. FLAC's great, and definitely serves a purpose, but I use it mainly for archives, not for casual listening.

blibble 4y ago
> With FLAC that'd be 250-ish GB of music. at current prices that's about $25 of SSD
- doubleunplussed 4y ago
  One cannot simply add more SSDs to one's laptop, regardless of price.
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    But one can buy a multi-TB drive that plugs into the laptop's USB 3.0 port. The "multi" part of it keeps getting larger, for the same price. And you can keep an extra one at another site in case your house burns down.
- wheels 4y ago
  It's about $50 for a Macbook Pro. And I have my music on 4 devices. Sure, I could throw $100-200 at music storage that I can't hear any difference in, but why the fuck would I? Again, this is golden-speaker-cables stuff.
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    Why carry it around on portable device? I've been streaming FLAC from a NAS for close to 10 years originally over sshfs and then later via plex. In 3G era I just used Google Music which transcoded my FLAC collection to 320kbps mp3 and I streamed it this way on the go. This was feasible around as early as 2009?
    - Cupertino95014 4y ago
      > Why carry it around on portable device? Well, because you're carrying the portable device around anyway. And it doesn't require a network connection, so it works even when you have no cell coverage. I don't quite understand how your "streaming it this way on the go" worked?
      - joecool1029 4y ago
        It's pretty rare I go anywhere that lacks good enough cell service to stream FLAC with. I don't even live in a city, but I get it if you're really remote or can't afford cell service.
        Cupertino95014 4y ago
        It's rare for me, too, but just last week I was up near Volcano, CA, and there's no Verizon there.
    - wheels 4y ago
      I only have 3 GB of data in my data plan, which is always more than enough for me, unless I'm working over my cell connection. I could get more data, but doing that just to stream music (when I already have a working solution for such) seems silly. I think in the US people often have much more expensive and large data plans than elsewhere. (My entire cell phone bill is €12/month, including 3 GB data, and unlimited calls and texts.) I also very regularly go places with mediocre cell service: country side, airplanes, boats, and festivals.
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  ...or $150 if you want to store it on your phone.
Cupertino95014 4y ago
Why would I use it? Because, as I said, it all fits on a microSD card (and that's a 256GB card, which is not the largest you can get). Yours would fit on the larger-sized card with plenty of space left over. No, I did not say "it serves no purpose." Those are your words. And I didn't say I can't hear the difference, either, I said I don't care if I can't. My purpose is "you don't throw away information."
- wheels 4y ago
  Sorry, I meant that not being able to discern any difference is literally the definition of useless. And MP3s get stored on a lot of things that aren't SD cards, so that's a pretty weird metric. But you're getting dangerously into gold-audio-cable-and-tinfoil-hat territory. Most people (including me, literally an audio expert) can't hear the difference in most cases so you're arguing for the increased space, and significant cost based solely on some notion of purity. That makes sense for archives, where they're being preserved for posterity and potential future processing, but not for casual listening. Would you prefer that all websites served you only PNGs?
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    Gold audio cables? Now you're talking tinfoil hat territory :) It IS "archival." Maybe when I'm dead and gone, so distant relative will be listening to this. Maybe they'll be able to hear the difference. Who knows? I don't think the SD card is a weird metric at all. It fits in the phone, so even if, worst case, I'm traveling and rent a car (assuming it has Bluetooth), I still have all the music. I'd gain absolutely nothing by having them as MP3s, and the price of a TB is only going to keep dropping. Of course, I'd also gain nothing if you switched to FLACs. You perceive different tradeoffs than I do, so that's fine.
    - wheels 4y ago
      I still listen to my dad's classic rock records from the 60s and enjoy the hell out of it. But they sound like shit. ;-) If anyone someday down the line inherits your FLAC collection, they'll be listening to it out of nostalgia, not for the pristine audio quality. You started with "I don't know why you'd..." and the answer is "because it's a waste of money" and "because you (mostly) can't hear a difference" and "because they work in my car". As a side note, I have a phone that does take an SD card (in part because I like having my complete music collection there), but most people don't.
aqwsde 4y ago
For god's sake, there is opus. I just don't understand, why people stick with their 90s codecs.
- wheels 4y ago
  Do you mean Ogg Vorbis? Opus is a codec for speech. I hate pulling rank so fiercely, but I literally wrote the second (i.e. first non-reference) implementation of the Ogg container format (which Opus, Vorbis and sometimes FLAC use). I know these codecs. Ogg Vorbis and AAC hit similar levels of quality as a 192 kbps MP3 around 160 kbps. (That actually depends a fair amount on the MP3 encoder. The LAME VBR is particularly good.) But I have an 11 year old receiver and a 12 year old car that can't play them. Hell, even iTunes can't without third-party codec plugins. MP3s are about as universal as it gets. Being able to play my files everywhere is pretty high up on my list of concerns.
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    MP3 is indeed universal, and iTunes doesn't support FLAC. However, on my Mac there are any number of third party players that do (e.g. I have Elmedia Player at the moment), and on the Android almost every music player app supports FLAC. I don't know about an iPhone. I assume you can find apps that support it.
    - joecool1029 4y ago
      I actually went digging for a bit on information about audio codecs being decoded in Qualcomm's hexagon DSP. I'm no expert but it seems like recent generations of the platform (anything post-2013 or so) don't bother with hardware decoding for audio codecs (except for in voice calling with AMR and EVS). It appears to be all software codecs for many generations now. Makes sense as even the efficiency cores on modern mobile devices are way overkill for audio.
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    >Opus is a codec for speech. As I understood things Xiph intended for it to replace both speex (for low-bandwidth low-latency voice) and vorbis (for medium bitrate lossy audio). Is this understanding wrong? >Ogg Vorbis and AAC hit similar levels of quality as a 192 kbps MP3 around 160 kbps. (That actually depends a fair amount on the MP3 encoder. The LAME VBR is particularly good.) While this is true there's a bit of nuance to add. Some people really don't like the sound of vorbis's artifacts on difficult to compress audio. Maybe it's growing up with fried mp3 recordings being common, but mp3's artifacts are less jarring.
PapuaNewGuinea 4y ago
Lossy codecs suck at gapless playback. Some have support via vendor-specific extensions, but it’s hit or miss whether a particular player will support it. With FLAC you can always be 100% sure that your album is gapless.
- edflsafoiewq 4y ago
  That's just MP3, Vorbis and Opus don't have that problem.
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    Nope. Opus and Vorbis are better, but they still don't support 100% gapless playback. E.g. create a full-scale sine wave, split it into two files, then convert them to "gapless" Opus. Now open the files in Audacity and you'll see that there's a small amount of ringing at the boundary, so it is not truly gapless. If you try the same with AAC using Apple's gapless metadata (i.e. iTunSMPB) you'll find that the boundary is perfectly continuous.
    - edflsafoiewq 4y ago
      AFAIK iTunSMPB just tells you where playback should start/end, which is also all the Ogg metadata does for you. MP3s can have iTunSMPB too, it's just a matter of if a player supports it. Is there any specific feature of AAC that makes gapless playback possible?
      - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
        Nope, there’s nothing special to gapless playback. But as it stands, libopus cannot produce truly gapless files right now. Is it a bug in libopus? Most likely.
thirdsun 4y ago
So you manage a lossless and a lossy library? That sounds like a lot of work. My collection is lossless and nearing 2 TB in size. Too large for mobile usage on iOS, where I don't really need that kind of fidelity anyway. However I still don't want to manage a second lossy library and keep them both in sync. Luckily Apple's Music app can be configured to transcode your lossless audio to a lossy format on the fly whenever you sync your collection to your iPhone. That way I can have my whole collection in my pocket without having to manage it.
BuildTheRobots 4y ago
Depending on context, you can tell the difference; especially on larger sound systems. 192kbps MP3s played through a 2 kilowatt sound system in a club don't just sound bad, but they feel bad as well. I've got a couple of DJ friends that have taken to ripping their collections (CDs and vinyl) to WAV files as most DJ software didn't support FLAC playback at the time.
- wheels 4y ago
  That's questionable. Again, I don't believe anyone who claims things about sound unless they're doing a blind test with well-encoded files. You need to make a stronger argument than "they feel bad". Why? What frequencies are not being reproduced accurately and why do you think that makes them sound bad? A "2 kW" sound system doesn't have any special properties by nature of its wattage, but a club does have a sound system which can reproduce frequencies that are below that what a typical home (or studio) system can. MP3s are usually encoded with a high-pass filter (usually around 20 Hz), and some club systems can get down close to that range (more often 30 Hz), but it's very questionable that they're hitting border. It is true though that on those types of systems, you're more likely to expose the effects of doing things like double lossy encoding, use of bad encoders, etc.
  - dTal 4y ago
    The further away from the "ideal" reference listening case of high fidelity headphones in a quiet room, the less likely that the assumptions behind the psycho-acoustic model used in the lossy codec are valid. Frequencies can be missing because of shitty speakers, room cancellation, or deliberate post-processing, and expose sounds that the codec thought would be masked. On my surround sound, the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a FLAC is not only audible but obvious when played in Pro Logic 2 mode, which exploits phase information to place different sounds in different speakers.

by wheels 4y ago

blibble 4y ago

> With FLAC that'd be 250-ish GB of music. at current prices that's about $25 of SSD

doubleunplussed 4y ago
One cannot simply add more SSDs to one's laptop, regardless of price.
- Cupertino95014 4y ago
  But one can buy a multi-TB drive that plugs into the laptop's USB 3.0 port. The "multi" part of it keeps getting larger, for the same price. And you can keep an extra one at another site in case your house burns down.
wheels 4y ago
It's about $50 for a Macbook Pro. And I have my music on 4 devices. Sure, I could throw $100-200 at music storage that I can't hear any difference in, but why the fuck would I? Again, this is golden-speaker-cables stuff.
- joecool1029 4y ago
  Why carry it around on portable device? I've been streaming FLAC from a NAS for close to 10 years originally over sshfs and then later via plex. In 3G era I just used Google Music which transcoded my FLAC collection to 320kbps mp3 and I streamed it this way on the go. This was feasible around as early as 2009?
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    > Why carry it around on portable device? Well, because you're carrying the portable device around anyway. And it doesn't require a network connection, so it works even when you have no cell coverage. I don't quite understand how your "streaming it this way on the go" worked?
    - joecool1029 4y ago
      It's pretty rare I go anywhere that lacks good enough cell service to stream FLAC with. I don't even live in a city, but I get it if you're really remote or can't afford cell service.
      - Cupertino95014 4y ago
        It's rare for me, too, but just last week I was up near Volcano, CA, and there's no Verizon there.
  - wheels 4y ago
    I only have 3 GB of data in my data plan, which is always more than enough for me, unless I'm working over my cell connection. I could get more data, but doing that just to stream music (when I already have a working solution for such) seems silly. I think in the US people often have much more expensive and large data plans than elsewhere. (My entire cell phone bill is €12/month, including 3 GB data, and unlimited calls and texts.) I also very regularly go places with mediocre cell service: country side, airplanes, boats, and festivals.
ThePadawan 4y ago
...or $150 if you want to store it on your phone.

Cupertino95014 4y ago

Why would I use it? Because, as I said, it all fits on a microSD card (and that's a 256GB card, which is not the largest you can get). Yours would fit on the larger-sized card with plenty of space left over. No, I did not say "it serves no purpose." Those are your words. And I didn't say I can't hear the difference, either, I said I don't care if I can't. My purpose is "you don't throw away information."

wheels 4y ago
Sorry, I meant that not being able to discern any difference is literally the definition of useless. And MP3s get stored on a lot of things that aren't SD cards, so that's a pretty weird metric. But you're getting dangerously into gold-audio-cable-and-tinfoil-hat territory. Most people (including me, literally an audio expert) can't hear the difference in most cases so you're arguing for the increased space, and significant cost based solely on some notion of purity. That makes sense for archives, where they're being preserved for posterity and potential future processing, but not for casual listening. Would you prefer that all websites served you only PNGs?
- Cupertino95014 4y ago
  Gold audio cables? Now you're talking tinfoil hat territory :) It IS "archival." Maybe when I'm dead and gone, so distant relative will be listening to this. Maybe they'll be able to hear the difference. Who knows? I don't think the SD card is a weird metric at all. It fits in the phone, so even if, worst case, I'm traveling and rent a car (assuming it has Bluetooth), I still have all the music. I'd gain absolutely nothing by having them as MP3s, and the price of a TB is only going to keep dropping. Of course, I'd also gain nothing if you switched to FLACs. You perceive different tradeoffs than I do, so that's fine.
  - wheels 4y ago
    I still listen to my dad's classic rock records from the 60s and enjoy the hell out of it. But they sound like shit. ;-) If anyone someday down the line inherits your FLAC collection, they'll be listening to it out of nostalgia, not for the pristine audio quality. You started with "I don't know why you'd..." and the answer is "because it's a waste of money" and "because you (mostly) can't hear a difference" and "because they work in my car". As a side note, I have a phone that does take an SD card (in part because I like having my complete music collection there), but most people don't.

aqwsde 4y ago

For god's sake, there is opus. I just don't understand, why people stick with their 90s codecs.

wheels 4y ago
Do you mean Ogg Vorbis? Opus is a codec for speech. I hate pulling rank so fiercely, but I literally wrote the second (i.e. first non-reference) implementation of the Ogg container format (which Opus, Vorbis and sometimes FLAC use). I know these codecs. Ogg Vorbis and AAC hit similar levels of quality as a 192 kbps MP3 around 160 kbps. (That actually depends a fair amount on the MP3 encoder. The LAME VBR is particularly good.) But I have an 11 year old receiver and a 12 year old car that can't play them. Hell, even iTunes can't without third-party codec plugins. MP3s are about as universal as it gets. Being able to play my files everywhere is pretty high up on my list of concerns.
- Cupertino95014 4y ago
  MP3 is indeed universal, and iTunes doesn't support FLAC. However, on my Mac there are any number of third party players that do (e.g. I have Elmedia Player at the moment), and on the Android almost every music player app supports FLAC. I don't know about an iPhone. I assume you can find apps that support it.
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    I actually went digging for a bit on information about audio codecs being decoded in Qualcomm's hexagon DSP. I'm no expert but it seems like recent generations of the platform (anything post-2013 or so) don't bother with hardware decoding for audio codecs (except for in voice calling with AMR and EVS). It appears to be all software codecs for many generations now. Makes sense as even the efficiency cores on modern mobile devices are way overkill for audio.
- joecool1029 4y ago
  >Opus is a codec for speech. As I understood things Xiph intended for it to replace both speex (for low-bandwidth low-latency voice) and vorbis (for medium bitrate lossy audio). Is this understanding wrong? >Ogg Vorbis and AAC hit similar levels of quality as a 192 kbps MP3 around 160 kbps. (That actually depends a fair amount on the MP3 encoder. The LAME VBR is particularly good.) While this is true there's a bit of nuance to add. Some people really don't like the sound of vorbis's artifacts on difficult to compress audio. Maybe it's growing up with fried mp3 recordings being common, but mp3's artifacts are less jarring.

PapuaNewGuinea 4y ago

Lossy codecs suck at gapless playback. Some have support via vendor-specific extensions, but it’s hit or miss whether a particular player will support it. With FLAC you can always be 100% sure that your album is gapless.

edflsafoiewq 4y ago
That's just MP3, Vorbis and Opus don't have that problem.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  Nope. Opus and Vorbis are better, but they still don't support 100% gapless playback. E.g. create a full-scale sine wave, split it into two files, then convert them to "gapless" Opus. Now open the files in Audacity and you'll see that there's a small amount of ringing at the boundary, so it is not truly gapless. If you try the same with AAC using Apple's gapless metadata (i.e. iTunSMPB) you'll find that the boundary is perfectly continuous.
  - edflsafoiewq 4y ago
    AFAIK iTunSMPB just tells you where playback should start/end, which is also all the Ogg metadata does for you. MP3s can have iTunSMPB too, it's just a matter of if a player supports it. Is there any specific feature of AAC that makes gapless playback possible?
    - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
      Nope, there’s nothing special to gapless playback. But as it stands, libopus cannot produce truly gapless files right now. Is it a bug in libopus? Most likely.

thirdsun 4y ago

So you manage a lossless and a lossy library? That sounds like a lot of work. My collection is lossless and nearing 2 TB in size. Too large for mobile usage on iOS, where I don't really need that kind of fidelity anyway. However I still don't want to manage a second lossy library and keep them both in sync. Luckily Apple's Music app can be configured to transcode your lossless audio to a lossy format on the fly whenever you sync your collection to your iPhone. That way I can have my whole collection in my pocket without having to manage it.

BuildTheRobots 4y ago

Depending on context, you can tell the difference; especially on larger sound systems. 192kbps MP3s played through a 2 kilowatt sound system in a club don't just sound bad, but they feel bad as well. I've got a couple of DJ friends that have taken to ripping their collections (CDs and vinyl) to WAV files as most DJ software didn't support FLAC playback at the time.

wheels 4y ago
That's questionable. Again, I don't believe anyone who claims things about sound unless they're doing a blind test with well-encoded files. You need to make a stronger argument than "they feel bad". Why? What frequencies are not being reproduced accurately and why do you think that makes them sound bad? A "2 kW" sound system doesn't have any special properties by nature of its wattage, but a club does have a sound system which can reproduce frequencies that are below that what a typical home (or studio) system can. MP3s are usually encoded with a high-pass filter (usually around 20 Hz), and some club systems can get down close to that range (more often 30 Hz), but it's very questionable that they're hitting border. It is true though that on those types of systems, you're more likely to expose the effects of doing things like double lossy encoding, use of bad encoders, etc.
- dTal 4y ago
  The further away from the "ideal" reference listening case of high fidelity headphones in a quiet room, the less likely that the assumptions behind the psycho-acoustic model used in the lossy codec are valid. Frequencies can be missing because of shitty speakers, room cancellation, or deliberate post-processing, and expose sounds that the codec thought would be masked. On my surround sound, the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a FLAC is not only audible but obvious when played in Pro Logic 2 mode, which exploits phase information to place different sounds in different speakers.