flac vs mp3 file audio?

[frankly frankie]

I think that's largely a myth too.  There's no logic to it - if the hi-res is remastered in some different (implication: better) way why wouldn't the 16/44 version gain equal benefit from that remastering?  It's not as though there's anything outside the bounds of 16/44 that is actually audible.

[Kim]

I think that's largely a myth too.  There's no logic to it - if the hi-res is remastered in some different (implication: better) way why wouldn't the 16/44 version gain equal benefit from that remastering?  It's not as though there's anything outside the bounds of 16/44 that is actually audible.

Because 'better' in terms of appealing to the sort of people who pay for high-res recordings (dynamic range) isn't the same as 'better' for mass market music sales (moar louder).  Or just plain different in some arbitrary way to justify selling the same music twice.

Of course the 16/44 would benefit from the same treatment, but then there wouldn't be a reason to buy the high-res version.

[Kim]

Or even 32-bit floating point...  Massively overkill for audio, but general purpose computers are pretty good at it.

[quixoticgeek]

Or even 32-bit floating point...  Massively overkill for audio, but general purpose computers are pretty good at it.

As much as anything can be good at floating point. Using floating point you can be 100.0000000000001% sure that you're going to have fun issues with debugging it down the line...

J

PS At college I had to contest getting 0% on a maths assignment. This was because they had done everything using floating point and decimals, rounding at each stage of calculations, where as I'd used fractions through out and only produced a decimal number at the end result, giving me a more accurate result, but it didn't agree with the one the lecturer had got. I got 100% on appeal...

[frankly frankie]

It's not as though there's anything outside the bounds of 16/44 that is actually audible.

When recording, mixing, mastering (and, as we are talking about it, ripping) all within the limits of 16 bit 44.1kHz, the dithering processes themselves can have a problem not being able to maintain a high enough quality that artefacts are always inaudible.

Similarly, when I work in Photoshop I prefer to work at a 4x higher resolution and when I am done I then render the final image at the target resolution. I get better pictures that I would if I only worked from start to finish at no higher resolution than the final image.

So, back to audio. It has been normal for many years to work at 24 bit instead of 16 and domestic systems are usually 48kHz, professional 96kHz and some 192kHz. That helps the creative and engineering processes to produce a final product as nice-sounding, hi-fi 24 bit 48kHz digital files.

But I have wandered off-topic from the comparative sound of flac vs mp3 files.

I'm not talking about the process, where I fully agree with your points.  I'm only talking about the end user format.  And yes my DAC up-samples everything for its internal processes but that's irrelevant.

I can't hear a difference between flac and (good) mp3, regardless of equipment, but that means nothing because I'm over 70 and spent all my working life in sound control rooms, where monitoring levels sometimes stray too high for safety.  What I do believe however, is that the science backs up that there is no significant difference to hear.

[Ben T]

Use WAV ftw 

[Jaded]

Nah! AIFF.

[pcolbeck]

Use WAV ftw 

Nope as its an uncompressed file format. Wastes space. What you want for archival is lossless but with compression (as in file compression not audio compression).

[Lightning Phil]

Nah! AIFF.

Both just containers for PCM though they can hold other formats including compressed ones.

[Lightning Phil]

Use WAV ftw 

Nope as its an uncompressed file format. Wastes space. What you want for archival is lossless but with compression (as in file compression not audio compression).

Not necessarily WAV is a container and though most likely contains PCM audio format, it can contain compressed audio formats.

P.S. Flac is usually about 50% size of WAV so not a huge saving in the context of storage these days.  100 albums in WAV is no more than 70Gb.  Since you can get 1Tb of spinny stuff for £30, the size of the files is neither here nor there.

[tonycollinet]

... The main advantage of FLAC as I see it, is that once you've ripped a CD to it, you'll never need to do it again ...

This - Audio files are tiny compared to modern hard disks (yes even lossless ones). Ripping CD's is time consuming, and you never know when you might want lossless in the future. I've got everything ripped to apple lossless - and Itunes automatically down codes to 256kb/s for the phone.

[Mr Larrington]

A pendant writes: iTunes is still called iTunes on Windows systems.  And its updating mechanism leaves something to be desired.

[Tim Hall]

A pendant writes: iTunes is still called iTunes on Windows systems.  And its updating mechanism leaves something to be desired.

See this? This is my "surely not?" face.

[Mr Larrington]

The other week it tried to update but kept buggering up the security settings on the directory wot it lives in, necessitating much use of system restores, Bad Swears and finally the removal of all FruitCo products except the Airport utility (which is more than five years old and thus unencumbered with the kind of embuggerations that more recent Stuffs carries by the bucketload) and then reinstalling.  Which I had to do on another PC a year or so ago.  Which suggests that the problem may indeed lie with the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia in spite of their denials.  And now you can't download a fresh juicy install from FruitCo and use your cunningly-contrived scripture to propagate it to other machines on TowersNet, no, you have to use the poxy Microsith Store.  Bah!

It remains to be seen how the Store-obtained version will handle updates.  I suspect the answer is “badly”.