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.
FLAC degrades quicker because there is so much of it to degrade and it is physically heavier than MP3. Think of it like an ancient stone pillar where the lead has been forced by its own weight and time to seep to the base.
Logan Watson
i used to have multiple terrabytes of flac back in the golden age of blogs. my collection was insane. shilled out for tonnes of amp and headphones gear as well.
now i rip random compressed tracks from youtube and listen to them through earbuds. made it 2 da top.
I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University 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).
Aaron Thomas
>not using a clean room to prevent digital dust
God damn poorfags.
Jaxson Ortiz
I prefer the more authentic sound of MP3 in the same way I prefer vinyl over CD. Flac is too cold and clinical, MP3 is more warm and artisanal.
Ian Reed
>when you dl a 2003 scene release complete with .nfo file, .m3u file,.sfv file, as well as original filenames and folder name intact
Flac sounds livelier and has a higher dynamic range when played through toshiba HDs. MP3 sound more punchier and have higher top end resolution played through samsung HDs.
Jayden Anderson
Dude looks like a ghoul from Fallout.
Mason Brooks
Honestly I don't think any mp3 can match the quality and signature sound of a high quality handcrafted FLAC™
I have a Professorship in Applied Theoretical Audio Relativity and Spatial Noise Distribution. I am currently developing an Extra Lossless Flac system for use in the near future which will supersede the outdated and stale Flac format.
Through megabyte multiplicity it actually improves the source format immeasurably by enhancing its size by pi to the square root of 3.33, which as any audiophile knows is the perfect audio length. In lay terms this means that CDs ripped to a storage device sound considerably better and bigger. I have been working on this for decades, but due to storage limitations it has been impractical until now. Thankfully the internet is at a stage where 7gb for a four minute song is feasible.
Case in point: we placed headphones and a blindfold on a seasoned duck hunter in Canada and he was unable to discern between Extra Lossless Flac Quacks and real quacks. I feel this was the greatest achievement of my career.
>I have a Professorship in Applied Theoretical Audio Relativity and Spatial Noise Distribution
what an absolute peasant, you're not even qualified to take out my garbage
Logan Ross
>7gb for a four minute song is feasible
wat. My hard drive is only 2tb, that means I could only store like 40 albums.
Kevin Brooks
Actually the ideal method for Extra Lossless Flac is a 256gb SSD with no more than three albums per drive. I only listen to Pet Sounds, Revolver and Highway 61 Revisited is this does not present a problem for me.
Gabriel Myers
Only CDs
Anthony Barnes
Between torrents and streaming I haven't downloaded a proper scene release for ages, really miss the ascii art and ripper notes aswell as "proof.jpg" files
>2018 >not listening to Extra Lossless Flac Quacks
Lincoln Johnson
Fun fact: The first google result for >rotational velocidencity Is an urban dictionary definition.
Zachary Ortiz
I personally use a rotating NAS in perpetual back up. You see my Network Accessed SSDs replicate my library multiple times to fill the SSD. And every night at 2:30 AM it overwrites itself. This ensures that no lossy degradation occurs as the files are kept perpetually "new". Of course the replication process is kept extremely redundant and every new copy checked to every other file and 0 deviation is tolerated. Using my method I find that I can get up to 10 albums on an SSD no problem.
Sebastian Ortiz
Doesn’t mean it isn’t every bit as real as infetterence.
