FLAC

>FLAC

>APE

If for no other reason, it's good to keep around in the event that you ever need to convert it from a high quality source file. It's just good archive-keeping.

>WAV

This. When/If mp3 becomes out of date or just less popular, you can convert a FLAC file into the new standard.

>M4A

>he only downloads lossless formats
>listens to music on fucking headphones
Hahahahaha

what if he has a very good headphone?

B-but I don't want people to hear my weird music.

>1-bit delta-encoded samples embedded in PROG-ROM

Hard drive space is so cheap these days it's pointless to download lossless

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.

How the fuck do files ''degrade''

they dont, it's a stitch-up

>How the fuck do files ''degrade''
By being stored in a lossy format instead of in lossless, it's like food going stale and expiring, but that post isn't 100% right. I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from U of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.

So over the past months there's been some discussion about the merits of lossy compression and the rotational velocidensity issue. I'm an audiophile myself and posses a vast collection of uncompressed audio files, but I do want to assure the casual low-bitrate users that their music library is quite safe.

Being an audio engineer for over 21 years, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. While rotational velocidensity is indeed responsible for some deterioration of an unanchored file, there's a simple way of preventing this. Better still, there have been some reported cases of damaged files repairing themselves, although marginally so (about 1.7 percent for the .ogg format).

I don't think I follow

I think he wanted to say lossy

I did. Thank you.

how new are you

this is my favourite copy pasta

I just now remembered that was a pasta

God dammit.

>he listens to music past the age of 14

There will never be a greater copypasta than this.

what is your point exactly?

his point is he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about

>miss out on collecting records all your life because you fell for the no difference meme

My point is very simple: if you do that, you're just wasting space for nothing.
Get a decent hifi set-up at least.

Space barely costs anything these days and I'm not in a position where I can use a decent hifi set up often.

I would like to hve one but for the moment FLAC over a decent pair of headphones is absolutely fine.

>one of my friends actually took this bait and his entire reason why he listen to FLACs instead of MP3
what an idiot

If I never downloaded music I wouldn't have listened to half as much.