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FLAC 1.3.0 Released
- bdz 13y ago"libFLAC encoder was defaulting to level 0 compression instead of 5" Level 5 is better imho, as I guess most of us want smaller files not faster encoding. Computers today are fast enough to do this without a significant wait. Also this: Created: 2007-10-19 Closed-fixed: 2009-01-02 Released: 2013-05-26
- Jgrubb 13y agoYeah, any idea why development slowed on this so much? Did they get the codec so perfect that there was nothing left to do? It's kind of interesting that something that has seen so little development over the past several years still dominates this market, or whatever you call it.
- grimman 13y agoThe same holds for MP3, does it not? Come to think of it, the only CODEC stuff you really hear about after its launch is video related.
- icebraining 13y agoMP3 itself may not change much, but it's been superseded in the commercial world a long time ago by AAC.
- Shish2k 13y agoThe same applies though - how often do you hear AAC news? In the last few years I remember maybe one or two stories about improvements in slightly-incompatible variations; no changes to the base spec. Looking at wikipedia, even AAC+ v2 (which I believe is considered current?) seems to have been stable since 2006.
- ZeroGravitas 13y agoThat's not really true. MP3 and AAC are designed, like many video codecs, so that the decoder is standardized and unchanging (except for performance tuning) but the encoders can continue to tweak and experiment to increase quality, reduce size etc. The LAME encoder was the x264 of its day, and there's forums where people who care test competing audio codec implementations and newer encoder revisions to see how progress is going just like they do for video. I'm not saying it really matters to end users in a big bang wow sense that you can hang a blog post news item on, but codecs gradually getting better benefits everyone and is continually happening in the background.
- Someone 13y agoNot quite designed, but the effect is the same. For most lossy encoding formats, there are many ways to compress a single file, and in general, we do not know how to pick the best size/encoding quality encoding of all possible encodings. You can get better compression/better quality at the same compression by searching harder or by searching smarter. Typically, compression settings deal with the 'searching harder' approach. Searching smarter is what the successive generations of encoders do, but sometimes, this also is controlled by the compression setting because an alternative approach may be better in compression quality, but so much slower that an quality-wise inferior but faster algorithm is kept as an option.
- sunseb 13y agoLevel 0 uses less CPU (and improves battery life).
- Freaky 13y agoOnly (significantly) on the compression side. Decompressing is about the same whether you used 0 or 9.
- Shish2k 13y agoI would imagine that it's reached the point of diminishing returns -- it would take months of hard work to squeeze another 1% compression out of the format, in which time hard drive space per dollar has gone up by 10% with no effort (on the part of the software developer) at all. (There are probably still compression technologies waiting to be invented; but applying them within the constraints of an existing format is hard or impossible, and creating a new format means you need a /massive/ improvement to make switching attractive for the consumer)
- pronoiac 13y agoI think they wanted hardware support, which means that much of it is set in stone.
- bbx 13y agoFlac is a great format. I've been making music for years and I often work with samples. Luckily, Ableton Live accepts .flac files. It's important to have high quality samples considering manipulating the sound (especially time-stretching) can easily alter its quality. Unfortunately, it's still hard to obtain music in Flac format. Few online music stores offer tracks in that format. [1] It's maybe a marketing issue. Everybody knows what an Mp3 is. It also took me some time to learn that such a format as Flac existed. But it's also a size issue. Although the compressing algorithm is incredible, people prefer to download (legally or illegally) a 80 MB album rather than a 500 MB one, regardless of its quality, because they either won't hear the difference or just don't care. And considering iTunes doesn't support Flac (only their own Alac format that is even less known), Flac isn't meant to be widely adopted yet. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_stores http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_stor...
- thirdsun 13y agoI think these days it's pretty easy to buy lossless audio - if you just look a little bit further than iTunes & Co. you'll find Qobuz, Boomkat, HDTracks, Bandcamp and similar stores. I pretty much find everything I need, including rather obscure music.
- bdz 13y agoBleep! They also offer 24bit wav versions.
- samolang 13y agoI know you're probably looking for a legal solution, but private torrent sites like what.cd offer a very large selection of .flac files. If only the music industry would do the same.
- e12e 13y agoA few artists on soundcloud.com also make their music available as flac (and as lossless wav).
- conradfr 13y ago
- darylfritz 13y agoI love FLAC, I just wish it had more mainstream support: I'm looking at you iTunes Player & 160GB iPod Classic.
- mikeash 13y agoAt least you can re-encode to ALAC without loss of quality, just loss of time and perhaps sanity.
- unsignedint 13y agoAgreed... It was an interesting discovery that Google Music allows you to upload FLAC, though. While I'm pretty sure actual playback is something lossy, at least it prevents them transcoding lossy format into another lossy format for streaming... (or so I heard...)
- dcg 13y agoThe Google Music Manager program just transcodes FLAC to 320kbps MP3 before uploading. https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1100462?hl=en https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1100462?hl=en
- unsignedint 13y agoOh, didn't see that. Thanks for clarification!
- unsignedint 13y agoThe one thing I know, though, they require FLAC upload for their commercial music distribution service. It's actually better than some place, which actually requires a physical CDDA ROM...
- macalicious 13y agoBesides having a lossless compressed audio file, I often wonder, if one can actually hear the difference between a well compressed mp3 (say, converted from a flac) and the actual original flac? Is there a real benefit for the average consumer? The problem I see is the quite large file size.
- throwaway2048 13y agoFLAC is intended for music archival storage, so its not really about perceptual loses, but preventing things like generational loss if you are using music for stuff like mixing/re-encoding etc.
- mitchi 13y agoI have invested a lot of money into good headphones and good speakers and I can't tell the difference between good lame mp3s and flac...
- pja 13y agoBlind test? HydrogenAudio forums will tell you that if it's not a blind A/B test you can fool yourself very easily. You might also like to try AAC (or ogg) at a similar bitrate: MP3 has a couple of encoding peculiarities that are an unavoidable function of the format & if you know what to listen out for they're fairly obvious even at higher bitrates. (I'd still be surprised if you could tell the difference between flac and 320kps mp3 in a blind test though.)
- macalicious 13y agoI think you misread "can't" and "can".
- pja 13y agooops: Mea culpa.
- jlarocco 13y ago
- leeoniya 13y agoif anyone wants different compiles for windows of a whole lot of various encoders, including FLAC 1.3.0, check out http://www.rarewares.org http://www.rarewares.org been using it for years
- bdz 13y agoThe official announcement http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2013-June/004223.html http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2013-June/004223.ht...