What is the point of lossless music?

What is the point of lossless music?
couldn't you use those 30 mb to download the full HD music video instead?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Decay_of_storage_media
theregister.co.uk/2015/05/07/flash_banishes_the_spectre_of_the_unrecoverable_data_error
smbitjournal.com/2012/05/when-no-redundancy-is-more-reliable/
superuser.com/questions/284427/how-much-time-until-an-unused-hard-drive-loses-its-data/312764#312764
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_corruption#Silent_data_corruption
xiph.org/flac/documentation_format_overview.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WavPack#Hybrid_mode
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Lossless files don't lose quality over time, lossy do. The point of FLAC is storage.

Rotational velocidensity.

they are impermeable to digital dust which make them best for archival purposes

The space and speed necessary for collecting lossless music is a non-issue for most people nowadays. With that said, lossless music provides superior quality (even if it's imperceptible), perfect or near perfect preservation, and the files can be converted to any format without generational loss, also they are better for editing and remixing.

OK. I get that you can't tell the difference between lossless and 28kb/s .wma files on your chink ipod knockoff and dollarama earbuds.
But if your rich uncle dies and leaves you a decent stereo, your going to wish the 92 Gb of torrents you pirated were flac so you could burn some good cds.
And what if there's a breakthrough in phone audio tech 6 months from now. All you're mp3s will go into the trash.

>downloading music videos

Do you actually believe this? Do you really think that if you give it enough time, your files on your hard drive will magically degrade (=change content) all by themselves? Get real. The crappy 128 kbps mp3 you downloaded 15 years ago will sound literally exactly the same it did when you first played it. The only thing that may have changed are your speakers.

mac fags dont understand flac
they boast about theyre amazing iphone (with no expandable memory slot) and cry about flac files being to large

nice b8 m8

Idiots don't understand how lossy file formats work. They believe they will magically loose data with out moving or touching the file at all they jump on the lossless meme, flac is just the most common lossless audio

>Do you really think that if you give it enough time, your files on your hard drive will magically degrade (=change content) all by themselves?

They will, retard.

Honesty just leave this board you tech illiterate fuckwit, a simple Google search and you could have the correct answer

Bit rot you fucking dumbass.

I use flac because I like to pretend I have a little music museum

kek

>Do you actually believe this? Do you really think that if you give it enough time, your files on your hard drive will magically degrade (=change content) all by themselves?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Decay_of_storage_media

The only time lossy files drop quality is during compression and decompression any other drop is across every file in the system and would happen regardless of format.

I'm gonna need some actual proof for that claim. Rotational velocidensity is nothing but a laughing matter.

The reason your 15 years old MP3s sound way worse now than 15 years ago is because 15 years ago you had worse speakers and now you can hear how crappy these MP3s actually were all this time.

>This article possibly contains original research.
Yeah, like I'm gonna believe that.

I never said anything about format. Nice backpedal.

>Do you actually believe this? Do you really think that if you give it enough time, your files on your hard drive will magically degrade (=change content) all by themselves? Get real. The crappy 128 kbps mp3 you downloaded 15 years ago will sound literally exactly the same it did when you first played it. The only thing that may have changed are your speakers.

>what is rotational velocidensity

Am I even on Sup Forums?

Ohh fuck sorry about that forgot that every post on Sup Forums is a snapshot completely separate from the context of the rest of the argument

...

I don't want my music degrading over time

If you have a lot of music in FLAC you do have a little museum.

Read error rates are a manufacturer-quoted figure.

theregister.co.uk/2015/05/07/flash_banishes_the_spectre_of_the_unrecoverable_data_error
smbitjournal.com/2012/05/when-no-redundancy-is-more-reliable/

superuser.com/questions/284427/how-much-time-until-an-unused-hard-drive-loses-its-data/312764#312764

FLAC has more error correction built into it than MP3

I have a 128GB iPhone 6s and use ALAC files for my music :^)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_corruption#Silent_data_corruption

Does it really? I can't find any citation on that

I love how half the posts in these threads are about how pointless flac or lossless is, and the other half are about how vastly superior opus or whatever meme of the month codec is to other lossy formats.

xiph.org/flac/documentation_format_overview.html
All I can see is that it has CRCs built in so it can detect errors (and replace them by silent blocks instead), nothing to support the hypothesis of it including error correction.

I use FLAC because I fucking can.
I have a good sound system and I can notice the difference from 320kbps MP3 and any FLAC file over 1000kbps.
I have a ton of storage space available.
I'm also a music producer, so it's essential to use FLAC if I want to cut and stretch samples.

>I have a good sound system and I can notice the difference from 320kbps MP3 and any FLAC file over 1000kbps.
No you can't

Yes I can.

>open file in Audition
>look for cutoff/blocks

Here, I noticed a difference!

T. poorfag

Ebin.

>.T
What does this mean?
I keep seeing it everywhere.

How about a test. We'll send you pairs of FLACs and you'll listen to them and tell which one is a transcode on astream (including your desktop so we can see you're not cheating with a frequency analyzer).

You can. The creator of the MP3 codec said that MP3 would particularly deteriorate tracks with high-pitched instruments such as harpsichords.

And unless you're Superman or a dog, you won't register that deterioration.

FLAC IS FOR ARCHIVAL PURPOSES
THERE IS NO AUDIBLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LOSSLESS AND TRANSPARENT LOSSY

FLAC IS THERE SO YOU DON'T NEED TO CONVERT LOSSY TO LOSSY WHEN THE WORLD MOVES ON FROM MP3

that's all, folks.

I like your style, we should be friends

The point of lossless music is to have a RIP that's identical in quality to what the sound engineers intended for distribution. If space is an issue, then just transcode to high bitrate Ogg Vorbis or MP3.

As it stands, I actually buy music rather than pirate shit wholesale and haul it. I have roughly two continuous days of music in FLAC format and the entire thing takes up 20gb. I'm certain that the affordability and capacity of flash storage will grow faster than my music library.

t. is short for 'terveisin'
Newfag

actually, there is still a noticeable deterioration

or fuck off

Archival. MP3 is not really a great format, so it's nice to be able to re-encode the audio without losing quality.

Can Sup Forums guess in which format I have the pic related album?

PCM

.opus

>PCM
its not a format..

So, wait...

flac is a lossless media, but, here is a scenario i'm interested in...

So, i have a collection of mp3's stored on my mpd server. This server is exposed to my LAN, so I can stream music whenever.

Each time I stream an mp3, it sends a copy of that data over the wire to my other device (in this example, its an android).

Now, that copy of the data is recieved on my android device, and then it is briefly cached, but ultimately, it will be deleted.

Now, if I were using my android device to send that music to other devices, then degradation would be an issue, but in this scenario- i am only sending the data over the wire one time. The original file is read, and a copy is sent. The original file wont degrade, and although the copy is going to be slightly degraded, it wont matter because the copy is discarded.

Is that all correct?

flac vs mp3 seems to be like jpg vs png.

Theres a reason why jpgs are standard. The loss doesnt matter because the server copy is always preserved.

Yamaha Twin VQ.

Completely underrated post

I think having FLAC is useless, but having the source music in its highest quality without and compression defects ensures when you want to use said music, it will be gud.

Well, you're completely full of shit.

I will offer $10,000 to anybody who can prove to me in a double blind listening experience that they can distinguish between MP3 CBR 320 kbps (encoded with the most recent version of LAME) and lossless.

There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support that any single human individual in the history of ever has ever been able to do this, so I have good reason to believe you also can't.

Have your parents dropped you on head from golden bridge while you were a baby child that you developed autism that is mixed with seizure from time to time later on or is it perhaps a permanent one?

>The creator of the MP3 codec said that MP3 would particularly deteriorate tracks with high-pitched instruments such as harpsichords.
He was most likely talking about 64 or 128 kbps. It's no myth that lossy codecs distort the audio as you reduce the bitrate. That's in their design.

But give any lossy codec enough bits to work with, and it will be perceptually transparent. Not just “good enough”, fully transparent.

For MP3 with recent LAME, that point of transparency is SIGNIFICANTLY below 320 kbps. At 320 kbps you're overkilling it and then some.

.APE

archiving.

especiallywhen editing

mp3 = listening

FLAC = archive, listening, editing, burning on CD, albums with pre-emphasis, collection value in digital form (having a 1:1 copy of rare CD rip)

Data is never degraded from simply copying(or at least its not supposed to be). It might be lost during transit but that's not the same thing.

>FLAC

forgot to mention: Encoding to other formats if necessary

So you can transcode or edit your music without a loss in quality. Archiving your media in lossy formats is shortsighted.

.dead

Why are you responding to my post?

Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.

jpg isnt standard. png is always better

Because I can.
I like you!

Musepack

>Musepack
jesus... who the fuck use that?

why not just archive at 430k? we caqnt hear above it anyway and for burning audio has fixed playback so making it louder doesnt make the quality worse, only makes artifacts noticeable

Is there a possibility to convert from MP3 to FLAC so I don't lose the so-called quality over time? I have an mp3 file you can't find anywhere on the internet of a song, and I want to stop the degradation if it's possible (not looking to make it sound better, or add any other shit, just stop the corruption that mp3 has).

if i convert an mp3 to flac (lets say the mp3 is the only known copy in exsistance), will the flac be as big or bigger than the mp3?

Because you archive the CD content, you don't mess with it.

You better leave.

There is no reason to use lossless compression on something that was lossy encoded.

I believe the mp3 would be smaller though probably.

what the fuck are you talking about? How to bits degrade?

Well duh, do you expect a contained glass of dirty water bring back to bottle and make it clean again?

>seriously responding to b8 threads

Audiophiles are mentally ill and that's a fact.

nono, its to make it archival i guess, so that the original stays fresh. why would the flac be larger if its still at 320kbs?

not the arguement

>not the arguement

Well it is actually!

You can't magically add the bits of the original data that was cut away when you encode lossless to lossy.

>Exercise for dummies
Take any PNG image, compress to 20% Jpeg then convert back to PNG, I'm waiting for your astonishing discovery.

>nono, its to make it archival i guess
Stop believing on everything you read on the internet and look up on different sources before being conclusive.

There's no purpose data does not simply degrade randomly. The only data degradation is hardware failure and that affects both formats.


>why would the flac be larger if its still at 320kbs?
The data that the flac compresses is completely uncompressed.

During the conversion the mp3 is deconstructed and uncompressed and it becomes like 50x larger than the source file. Then flac compresses this fuckhuge file down to like 1/3-1/5 of its original size. You're not recompressing the mp3 itself you're compressing an uncompressed copy of the data that the mp3 contained.

Used to be good, though MP3 progressed to the point it barely makes any difference between it (VBR) and lossless formats, so ussually there's no reason to store lossless.

Harpsichords are particularly difficult for MP3 because they have both sudden onset transients (codec would like to use short blocks to avoid pre-echo/time-smear) and extremely tonal content (codec would like to use long blocks to avoid spectral smear) at the same time.

All DCT codecs are going to have some kind of problem with that: it's a trade-off. Either it doesn't "ring" as much, or you can hear the "ring" slightly before the string gets plucked. As soon as you start removing DCT coefficients, either one or the other artefact will happen. Neither is perfect: but lossy codecs are never about perfect - they're about using what we know about the sound and the human auditory system to try to make intelligent choices about what artefacts we can get away with. Your ears care more about the specific frequencies in a flute or clarinet than a hi-hat or drum, in which the sudden snap onset is more important.

That doesn't mean that every codec makes perfect choices. MP3 has a particular problem with the short-block/long-block choice in general: pre-echo in maracas is another common "problem sample".

Opus does by far the best here - it can make the block-size choice on a per-frequency basis. That is an incredible step forward - probably the last incredible step forward in lossy audio codecs, because realistically we are about at end-game here and we are unlikely to be able to do much better.

Of course FLAC is perfect in this regard: it is lossless, and pays for that with much bigger files. And, outside of a very few select "problem samples" almost all audio content is transparent at, for example, LAME -V2, or Opus 160kbps.

Repeated ABX trials are the only way to scientifically know if you can tell the difference. If you fail an ABX, you can't tell. Where you can tell the difference, ABC-HR is one of the better tests to know which, of the versions which sounds different, sounds the closest to the original (useful for low bitrates).

Well creamed and memed my anonymouse friendo

i always wondered, can these graphs be converted into music?

This.

Maybe not now, but in 50 years.

Would it be possible to make a better version of FLAC by using Opus to lossily encode the signal and then losslessly compress the difference between the original and the compressed signal?

Lossless TO Lossless = 1:1 Copy

Don't try to defy the math here

Did you try reading my post before you responded to it?

What you're saying sounds a lot like wavpack's "hybrid" feature

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WavPack#Hybrid_mode

No

The difference wouldn't pack at all.

This, rotational velodensity.

>you're