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.
WHY?! WHY MUST YOU TORMENT ME SO WITH THESE JEZEBELS? All I want to do is come here for an asexual experience that will exercise my brain but I am constantly titillated by these vixens with their prodigious hips and provocative figures. Can I never satiate this thirst, will I ever know the touch of a woman and enter between her loins? Will my seed ever drip from her moistened hole?
Life is a constant hell. No wonder I resent women too.
Josiah Butler
FLAC doesn't actually help, other than that it's higher quality so you can afford to lose more data. To be really secure you need error correction like on CDs. However, the degradation is a LOT slower than the pasta claims so don't worry about it. Buy CDs or vinyl records (or pirate ISOs if you can find them I guess) for music that you REALLY love and want to last 50 years, and use FLAC/mp3 for the rest.
Dominic Thompson
>>>/wizchan's music board
There posting a pic like or implying that you've ever had sex gets you a permaban. Enjoy
Owen Robinson
I've discovered during the last two years, since I can take CD-Rs home from the mastering plant, that there's an astonishing variation in quality between different CD plants. If you think digital is perfect, I have news for you. Many of us have been fooled by this myth that it's just 0s and 1s and therefore copies perfectly. It doesn't. The variations in quality are pretty wild, and random. Just the way you hook up a cable can make a difference. And there's no quality control in these CD plants, other than someone checking whether there's any level being transferred.
Most of us take it for granted that a CD is a CD, and we almost never discuss about varying standards of manufacture. I can't say too much about current US manufacturer's because I have few US made CDs. I have still detected a general shrillness to many US CDs ("let's tweek the high end to make them sound sharp to delude the general public that our CDs sound better than vinyl and tape"). Tweeking the high end also accentuated the hiss. After so many disappointments and revelations having heard import versions after getting US discs I have concentrated on acquiring import pressings.
As for maunfacturers themselves: on the import side I like the clarity of Nimbus UK but they can be hissier and lighter on low end than MPO France which produces well rounded sounding CDs. PDO have been fine except for the recent PDO UK disc rot problem. Sonopress in Germany are adequate. I used to shy away from DADC in Austria (Sony Europe uses them) but have realised that was a personal bias. Nimbus USA (Virginia) vary. Their reissues of the OMD catalogue were shoddy. DADC in Indiana (Sony/Columbia) are so so.
Cooper Baker
You needed to look that up?
Tyler Martinez
...
Ryan Ward
white country, white pride.
James Bennett
Not trying to refute OP's point and pretty much unrelated, but I have a digital copy of a secret Swans concert in the Czech Republic in the 80s, so super low quality, and for some reason the uploader decided to encode it in FLAC Still confuses me to this day
Justin Scott
lol
Camden Bailey
You gonna upload it or what?
Connor Bell
Just search Brno in the archive I can't upload now cause I'm on my phone, but if the dl's dead, and this thread is still up when I next get on, I might upload it
Imagine what the quality would have been without FLAC's fidelity preserving qualities. 30+ years of mp3 rot would have turned that Swans concert into a Merzbow album.
Juan Cook
>
Tyler Martinez
archival, you can convert it to a more convenient format when one shows up with mp3, it's stuck as an MP3 forever, converting it will just make it worse
Adam Smith
>have portable music player with tons of space that plays flac feels gud
