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.
Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression...
cool meme, what is the rotational velocidensity of my SSD?
i just realised this copy pasta is over 8 years old
Yup.
1275347344807.jpg
On this machine (December 2016), all my music is/will be in FLAC.
Legit
...
Compressed music always sounds like shit.
On a serious note, do lossy encodes actually "degrade" over time?
zozzle
No.
Just take a second to think about it, really.
yes, have you ever listened to mp3s of music from the early 20th century? That's what happens over 100 years, they didn't have SSDs back then.
SSDs make degradation worse, only not in the troll way this thread is on about.
Yes, but not as much as OP says.
A 320kbps will degrade to about 310kbps in ten years. You won't even notice the difference. Even in 20 years it will still be ~300kbps. Only after a long while do you start noticing.
As pointed out, listen to recordings from the 50s and 60s and hear how shitty they sound.
it's impossible to store uncompressed signals as digital information
You, are retarded.
Nice.
I like this because it's true.
>tfw there's probably someone out there who actually believes this pasta
Try a random audiophile.
The format matters a lot too, MP3 has a relatively decent shelf life, but go watch old Flash animations, the Macromedia audio format has degraded rapidly over the last decade or so.
zozzle
You, don't know, how; to! use... punctuation? correctly--
Don't listen to these idiots, time doesn't matter, only what you send the audio through. Technically all cables will degrade your audio, but common cheap cables will probably eat away at least 32-48kbps in just a few years. Diamond cables (like pic) still don't prevent ALL degradation but you'll probably only lose a few kbps a decade, and by then you'll probably be listening to new songs anyway.
It's funny because as DACs and drivers increase in quality every year, the quality of sound keeps improving. And there's a funny side effect to lossy formats, which is they're "good enough" based on whatever hardware using to do the comparison, but maybe next year that comparison won't be good enough.
It won't be long before every normie gets his hands on next-gen DACs and drivers, and suddenly realizes that unlike every previous year, the quality of sound didn't increase. Instead, they hear more and more difference between MP3 and FLAC.
It's like people back in the day that said they couldn't tell the difference between a 16 color GIF and 24bit JPEG on their shitty monochrome screens. Where are they now?
I do, but since we're on an online imageboard where that doesn't really matter, I used the comma to emphasise the word you.
>Where are they now?
Dead?
The same thing happens with music videos too, every wondered why every music video on youtube pre 2010 looks like absolute trash now?
That's because Google didn't have SSD's in their servers at this point.
This isn't too much of a worry for home users though, provided you only access your video files when absolutely necessary and avoid unnecessarily moving the files between drives.
The reason the degradation is so bad in google's case is that they're using server drives, which much higher RPM than standard desktop drives, meaning the bits are travelling at a much faster speed and more likely to detach from the disk platter when subjected to electro-magnetic interference. (This is what bit loss is, and the reason you're supposed to ground yourself before installing or removing harddrives).
SSD's are static so even if bits become dislodged by EMI, they will eventually fall back into place as there is no rotational velocity to cause them to become detached.
>using text to communicate
>punctuation doesn't matter
wew
Both lossy and lossless files can be subject to bit rot, where a few bits may be flipped while the files are sitting on your hard drive. The result of which is usually imperceptible.
Also, a 128 kbit/s mp3 from 10 or 15 years ago might sound worse than a more recent one because the encoders were shit.
>Encoder difference
This is actually partially true
this is all fucking retarded, all you have to do is copy paste the files at least once every 5 years to negate degredation
old recordings sound like shit because old mics were shit
No.
Imaging the nightmare that would arise from this happening to encrypted containers if this WERE to be true. For the record again - it is not true.
Although this is a troll thread, I still find it interesting because data degradation is a real thing. Although I thought CDs/DVDs were the best for that because they needed to be physically damaged to degrade, not just lose their magnetic charge (like on HDDs).
>Dead?
See? That's what you get when you deal with lossy formats.
wat lol
You're right its retarded, but old recordings do not sound any worse really than new ones (especially not "old" recordings from 2001). Microphone technology really hasn't changed much since microphones were first invented. The only notable differences I can think of is the introduction of neodymium in the 80s, and the size/shape of microphones. Some companies like shure are still selling the identical microphones they sold almost 50 years ago, and they still sound great
I took some CD-Rs I burned in 2004 and some of them were completely unreadable. That is, the file system structure was there, but lots of the files were filled with seemingly random garbage.
Back then I used them to move all the shit I downloaded at school to my shitty home PC that only had a dialup connection. So luckily nothing of value was lost.
If you flip your hard drive upside down the effect reverses. Many of my mp3s from years ago are almost back up to 320kbps, and some are actually higher than 320 now. My first mp3 from 2001 had degraded all the way to about 20 kbps, but now it's up to about 180, and it was 128 when I got it.
Just lol