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These comments answer some questions I have concerning FLAC... starwed wrote on September 11th, 2012 at 1:29 pm: Isn’t FLAC already* open and royalty-free?*

These comments answer some questions I have concerning FLAC... starwed wrote on September 11th, 2012 at 1:29 pm: Isn’t FLAC already* open and royalty-free?* Dusk wrote on September 11th, 2012 at 1:40 pm: FLAC is a lossless codec — it typically generates output at a bitrate orders of magnitude* higher than lossless codecs such as OPUS, and there’s no way to “dial it down”.* natermer wrote on September 11th, 2012 at 2:30 pm: You want to archive audio with 100% quality using Flac. Opus is for were you are willing to give up some amount of audio quality for the ability to massively increase compression ratio. Using low bit rate Opus may yield a 3MB file for a song, were as FLAC may end up being 150MB for the same audio. What I do for audio is to store it using flac, but encode it on the fly using other codecs for streaming for transfering to devices. That way I always get the best audio quality possible to go along with the best compression possible.

masklinn 14y ago
> Using low bit rate Opus may yield a 3MB file for a song, were as FLAC may end up being 150MB for the same audio. 3MB will get you POTS-quality audio though. Lossless codecs usually compress audio to half the original size (so a 150MB FLAC file — for music — will correspond to ~300MB of raw bitstream). Lossy compression to something worth listening to will usually be around 10x compression, so ~30MB for an original 300MB bitstream. A 35mn song compressed in 3MB probably won't be worth listening to.
- ZoFreX 14y ago
  If you were using AAC (or anything else that's more advanced than MP3) a 3MB file would actually be listenable for a short song. A 150MB FLAC file would be about 20-30 minutes long (based on a typical bitrate of 700-1000 kilobits per second).
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > If you were using AAC (or anything else that's more advanced than MP3) a 3MB file would actually be listenable for a short song. Even mp3 works for "a short song", that's not the context of my comment though, its context is a 150MB FLAC file (~300MB bitstream) recompressed to 3MB with Opus. > A 150MB FLAC file would be about 20-30 minutes long A point I noted in my comment.
    - ZoFreX 14y ago
      Oops, I misread your comment quite heavily. Apologies for the extremely redundant follow-up!

masklinn 14y ago

> Using low bit rate Opus may yield a 3MB file for a song, were as FLAC may end up being 150MB for the same audio. 3MB will get you POTS-quality audio though. Lossless codecs usually compress audio to half the original size (so a 150MB FLAC file — for music — will correspond to ~300MB of raw bitstream). Lossy compression to something worth listening to will usually be around 10x compression, so ~30MB for an original 300MB bitstream. A 35mn song compressed in 3MB probably won't be worth listening to.

ZoFreX 14y ago
If you were using AAC (or anything else that's more advanced than MP3) a 3MB file would actually be listenable for a short song. A 150MB FLAC file would be about 20-30 minutes long (based on a typical bitrate of 700-1000 kilobits per second).
- masklinn 14y ago
  > If you were using AAC (or anything else that's more advanced than MP3) a 3MB file would actually be listenable for a short song. Even mp3 works for "a short song", that's not the context of my comment though, its context is a 150MB FLAC file (~300MB bitstream) recompressed to 3MB with Opus. > A 150MB FLAC file would be about 20-30 minutes long A point I noted in my comment.
  - ZoFreX 14y ago
    Oops, I misread your comment quite heavily. Apologies for the extremely redundant follow-up!