By all means never try listening to a .flac audio file - Page 2

o_afx · 07-09-2006, 05:20 PM

There is a difference, but not such a difference to warrant the difference in filesize between an aps mp3 and a flac file, Not unless that is you have a huge amount of diskspace.

I think half the time a lot of the difference is imagined anyway, i seem to recall hydrogenaudio doing a blind test mp3 v flac, on some very high end equipment and the difference was nowhere near as clearcut as you'd expect.

Defrag · 07-09-2006, 06:01 PM

Indeed. I've seen tests conducted with vinyl, CDs and VBR mp3s and everyone taking part in the test (including some musicians) had a lot of difficulty picking the best sounding format. Obviously it'll be CD/Vinyl, but the mp3 was there or there abouts (to the layman and musician alike). I would imagine the kind of music you're listening to would also have a bearing on whether flac would really result in a noticeable quality increase. Some music tracks will compress better than others. In my experience, flac ain't worth the extra disk space. It usually is a good 3-4x bigger than a high quality VBR mp3.

o_afx · 07-09-2006, 07:06 PM

I was bored so i ripped in flac, one of my cd's that i already had a good quality vbr v2 mp3 rip of, Lo and behold no difference on my quite good soundcard thats hooked up to my hifi. Seriously i couldnt hear a single ounce of difference, Im not saying it'd definitely be the case if i had an incredibly good receiver and speakers, but on my fairly decent ones the staggering difference just isnt there.

Rather than worry about flac, it'd be far better to see people latch onto the fact that 128k/160k/most mp3s are shit, and simply taking a bit of time to set up a decent ripping program will result in hugely improved mp3's with hardly any filesize increase.

Getting exactaudiocopy and following this guide will be a big help, It takes a little setting up but you end up with far superior files.
http://www.fryth.com/eacfaq/ < Lame link in there is broken: http://www.rarewares.org/dancer/dancer.php?f=35

Also i use this command link in eac:
-V 2 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d

Hope thats of help to someone :P, cos flac wont be much use to 99% of you.

However anyone wishing to try out Flac, could follow this guide and set it up with eac:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...howtopic=30959

Its just a case of saving the relevant configs for both flac and your mp3s, so theres no need to keep messing with the settings.

o_mescalito · 07-09-2006, 07:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Defrag

Indeed. I've seen tests conducted with vinyl, CDs and VBR mp3s and everyone taking part in the test (including some musicians) had a lot of difficulty picking the best sounding format. Obviously it'll be CD/Vinyl, but the mp3 was there or there abouts (to the layman and musician alike). I would imagine the kind of music you're listening to would also have a bearing on whether flac would really result in a noticeable quality increase. Some music tracks will compress better than others. In my experience, flac ain't worth the extra disk space. It usually is a good 3-4x bigger than a high quality VBR mp3.

It may not be worth to put it on a portable mp3 player (unless you're a purist and using external DAC etc..) but storing music in lossy format is really silly. In the future when there are better codecses will be developed or whatever, you'll be stuck with whatever you encoded your stuff to. You don't wanna transcode lossy to lossy.

+it's not 4x bigger like you say

that's 247 megs.

Edit: erm actually that's pretty huge. i'd prolly get 60 megs out of it with ogg. but still, storage space is not such a problem as it was, lets say, 6 years ago..

o_afx · 07-09-2006, 08:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mescalito

It may not be worth to put it on a portable mp3 player (unless you're a purist and using external DAC etc..) but storing music in lossy format is really silly. In the future when there are better codecses will be developed or whatever, you'll be stuck with whatever you encoded your stuff to. You don't wanna transcode lossy to lossy.

+it's not 4x bigger like you say

Edit: erm actually that's pretty huge. i'd prolly get 60 megs out of it with ogg. but still, storage space is not such a problem as it was, lets say, 6 years ago..

I'd need a whole 500 gig drive dedicated to music files if mine we're stored in flac, and i dont even have that many in comparison to some people i know.

Theres nothing silly about storing files in a lossy codec, if your playback equipment isn't capable of showing any difference. And even then its hardly worth the extra filesize.

Its one of those things where you have to agree to disagree, some people just seem to get off on the fact that they have the best of the best, even if its pointless, i.e see most audiophiles.

o_ekim · 07-09-2006, 09:00 PM

Never mind the quality of the playback equipment, human ears cannot physically hear a lot of the information which lossy formats get rid of.

o_ginger lord · 07-09-2006, 09:20 PM

I can't tell the difference.

MP3's go on my mp3 player because to be honest, I'm not wanting an exact replica of the day the song was recorded. I'll be on a train/plane/car where background noise will be coming through to ruin it anyway. Buy better headphones? No, the standard creative ones I got are fine, sure they arnt the best but I don't want bulkier ones and its not worth the money, sounds fine as is.

Same for on my PC, Audigy 2 and my 5:1 setup cost me about £80 all in, works fine. Can't tell the difference between anything over 192kbps, 128kbps is a very very slight difference, but nothing I care about.

Sure .flac is great for lossless file format, I just don't think its worth the extra hassle and disk space. It may well be superior but Betamax was and we all know what happened to that.

Defrag · 07-09-2006, 09:20 PM

Firstly, It's easily 3x bigger. .flac runs at roughly 6 megs per minute, whereas you can get about 1.5 megs per minute for a high VBR mp3. I've got a DB remix album on flac and it's 48 minutes and 293 megs. I've also got another DB album that runs exactly 48 minutes and it's VBR running from roughly 224-320 kpbs. That album is 100 megs on the button.

Secondly, there's nothing 'silly' about having lossy music. I can't tell the difference between .flac and VBR mp3s, so it's not 'silly'. The only way it would be silly is if you're storing your own stuff or rare stuff, or you have lost the original source and the music is likely to be re-encoded in future.

Thirdly, it's not a case of "mp3s are only good for portable devices" as that blatantly isn't true. If you're an audiophile with a really good stereo, then fine. Most people aren't in this position.

o_frenchtoast · 07-09-2006, 11:01 PM

Let me just throw my 2 cents in here.

When I can get 1738 full length songs in .flac format on one 30 GB iPod I'll switch.

o_osiris · 07-09-2006, 11:50 PM

When I succeeded to achieve 3500 full songs on my 30gig ipod I decided to upgrade my play count, and when I surpassed the drive space of the ipod by 100% I gave up trying to make them fit and I decided to start switching.

**mervaka** · 07-10-2006, 12:19 AM

sorry if my 'ignorance' comments came out a bit offensive defrag, but as i said, don't knock it until you've properly heard a good recording on a good grands worth of hifi, (ie not the crap from currys) and a good quality chain of D->A equipment. my mate has these KEF speakers, and i was lost for words when he stuck his peter gabriel CD in.

my course leader at college has these 1970s electrostatic speakers. they are aparently pure sex to listen to, so i wanna hear for myself one day.

EDIT: can i also point out there's also this halfway house of audiophiles with just more money than sense. reading some audiophile forums are quite hilarious when these people show up boasting about how their solid silver power cables solved their transient problems!

o_frenchtoast · 07-10-2006, 01:12 AM

He should die for using Firefox? You should die for saying that.

**mervaka** · 07-10-2006, 01:13 AM

dude, you know thats an apple skin for windows?

o_osiris · 07-10-2006, 01:21 AM

And the only reason it's an apple skin is because I couldnt find one with the same style as this one that didnt have the apple.

o_|404|innoc-tpf- · 07-10-2006, 02:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 651ett

You should die for 3 reasons.
1. Using a Mac.
2. Using Firefox.
3. Using Windows IM on a Mac.

Edit: NVM that's MSN, my bad.

Die for Firefox? JIHAD ON 651ett! DURKA! DURKA!

FWIW, my MP3's are ripped at max bit rate. I listen to them on my computer and in my truck. Neither place is an audiophile setup nor is my home system. I have far better things than nitpick over barely perceptable (if at all) differences from formats.

o_vertical · 07-10-2006, 03:14 AM

I will say that with higher bitrate mp3's, the difference is very little between other formats and mp3. For example:

I downloaded the Rascal Flatts - Life is a Highway at 192BR and it sounds like 8x better than the Tom Cochrane - Life is a Highway at 128BR. Basically, I'm just going to have to find some higher quality mp3's 192 & up. The filesizes aren't much larger, but they sound tons better. (Perhaps if 128 was ripped "correctly" it would sound better, but either way 192 and up sound alot better) Unfortunatly, 95% of my mp3s are 128BR. Some are friggin 64 and some even lower (only probably 20 or so out of thousands, and only because they are rare) But I do wish that all of mine where 192 and higher (ripped correctly) but since I've never owned but 1 CD, I have no idea what goes into ripping them to the computer really... (I mean I have ripped a few CD's, prolly 10 or so, and encoded to mp3 and wma. The ones I encoded weather it was correctly done or not sound really good, I believe I encoded only to 320BR using the LAME encoder, and default wma encoder)

Anyhow...

PS: Whats so bad about FireFox? (Also, anybody tried viewing "The Battlegrounds" mod website in IE7 lol, it lags terrible, and I dunno why. www.bgmod.com if you have IE7 (I don't remember it doing so in IE6) [If you reply on this, also reply on the topic at hand!

]

o_|404|innoc-tpf- · 07-10-2006, 05:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vertical

I will say that with higher bitrate mp3's, the difference is very little between other formats and mp3. For example:

I downloaded the Rascal Flatts - Life is a Highway at 192BR and it sounds like 8x better than the Tom Cochrane - Life is a Highway at 128BR. Basically, I'm just going to have to find some higher quality mp3's 192 & up. The filesizes aren't much larger, but they sound tons better. (Perhaps if 128 was ripped "correctly" it would sound better, but either way 192 and up sound alot better) Unfortunatly, 95% of my mp3s are 128BR. Some are friggin 64 and some even lower (only probably 20 or so out of thousands, and only because they are rare) But I do wish that all of mine where 192 and higher (ripped correctly) but since I've never owned but 1 CD, I have no idea what goes into ripping them to the computer really... (I mean I have ripped a few CD's, prolly 10 or so, and encoded to mp3 and wma. The ones I encoded weather it was correctly done or not sound really good, I believe I encoded only to 320BR using the LAME encoder, and default wma encoder)

Anyhow...

PS: Whats so bad about FireFox? (Also, anybody tried viewing "The Battlegrounds" mod website in IE7 lol, it lags terrible, and I dunno why. www.bgmod.com if you have IE7 (I don't remember it doing so in IE6) [If you reply on this, also reply on the topic at hand!

]

I messed around with bit rates for a while and just decided to ignore the file size and just do 320. What I found is that VBR makes some MP3 playback devices choke. The MP3 "capable" deck in my Jeep wigs out with VBR and there were some issues with earlier firmware of my Zen XTRA Jukebox. I may eventually buy an iPOD when the prices drop and the capacities grow.

o_osiris · 07-10-2006, 09:44 AM

I wouldnt expect the prices on an iPod to drop any time soon, from what I've heard about the history of them is that Apple likes to "update" the iPod with some new features each year and discontinue the old models so they wont have to lower the prices at all.

o_afx · 07-10-2006, 03:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by |404|Innoc-TPF-

I messed around with bit rates for a while and just decided to ignore the file size and just do 320. What I found is that VBR makes some MP3 playback devices choke. The MP3 "capable" deck in my Jeep wigs out with VBR and there were some issues with earlier firmware of my Zen XTRA Jukebox. I may eventually buy an iPOD when the prices drop and the capacities grow.

That is one of the probs with vbr, some things just wont play them back correctly. Cant say ive had a prob on either my ipod or in my car though

07-09-2006, 06:01 PM	#22
Defrag Retired FF Staff Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Scotland Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	Indeed. I've seen tests conducted with vinyl, CDs and VBR mp3s and everyone taking part in the test (including some musicians) had a lot of difficulty picking the best sounding format. Obviously it'll be CD/Vinyl, but the mp3 was there or there abouts (to the layman and musician alike). I would imagine the kind of music you're listening to would also have a bearing on whether flac would really result in a noticeable quality increase. Some music tracks will compress better than others. In my experience, flac ain't worth the extra disk space. It usually is a good 3-4x bigger than a high quality VBR mp3. __________________ Fortress Forever. Level Designer, Gameplay Dude and whatnot.

07-09-2006, 09:20 PM	#28
Defrag Retired FF Staff Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Scotland Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	Firstly, It's easily 3x bigger. .flac runs at roughly 6 megs per minute, whereas you can get about 1.5 megs per minute for a high VBR mp3. I've got a DB remix album on flac and it's 48 minutes and 293 megs. I've also got another DB album that runs exactly 48 minutes and it's VBR running from roughly 224-320 kpbs. That album is 100 megs on the button. Secondly, there's nothing 'silly' about having lossy music. I can't tell the difference between .flac and VBR mp3s, so it's not 'silly'. The only way it would be silly is if you're storing your own stuff or rare stuff, or you have lost the original source and the music is likely to be re-encoded in future. Thirdly, it's not a case of "mp3s are only good for portable devices" as that blatantly isn't true. If you're an audiophile with a really good stereo, then fine. Most people aren't in this position. __________________ Fortress Forever. Level Designer, Gameplay Dude and whatnot.

07-10-2006, 12:19 AM	#31
mervaka A Very Sound Guy! Fortress Forever Staff Join Date: May 2005 Location: UK Posts Rated Helpful 15 Times	sorry if my 'ignorance' comments came out a bit offensive defrag, but as i said, don't knock it until you've properly heard a good recording on a good grands worth of hifi, (ie not the crap from currys) and a good quality chain of D->A equipment. my mate has these KEF speakers, and i was lost for words when he stuck his peter gabriel CD in. my course leader at college has these 1970s electrostatic speakers. they are aparently pure sex to listen to, so i wanna hear for myself one day. EDIT: can i also point out there's also this halfway house of audiophiles with just more money than sense. reading some audiophile forums are quite hilarious when these people show up boasting about how their solid silver power cables solved their transient problems! __________________ Support FF:

07-10-2006, 01:13 AM	#33
mervaka A Very Sound Guy! Fortress Forever Staff Join Date: May 2005 Location: UK Posts Rated Helpful 15 Times	dude, you know thats an apple skin for windows? __________________ Support FF:

07-09-2006, 05:20 PM	#21
o_afx Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Walsall,UK Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	There is a difference, but not such a difference to warrant the difference in filesize between an aps mp3 and a flac file, Not unless that is you have a huge amount of diskspace. I think half the time a lot of the difference is imagined anyway, i seem to recall hydrogenaudio doing a blind test mp3 v flac, on some very high end equipment and the difference was nowhere near as clearcut as you'd expect.

07-09-2006, 07:06 PM	#23
o_afx Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Walsall,UK Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	I was bored so i ripped in flac, one of my cd's that i already had a good quality vbr v2 mp3 rip of, Lo and behold no difference on my quite good soundcard thats hooked up to my hifi. Seriously i couldnt hear a single ounce of difference, Im not saying it'd definitely be the case if i had an incredibly good receiver and speakers, but on my fairly decent ones the staggering difference just isnt there. Rather than worry about flac, it'd be far better to see people latch onto the fact that 128k/160k/most mp3s are shit, and simply taking a bit of time to set up a decent ripping program will result in hugely improved mp3's with hardly any filesize increase. Getting exactaudiocopy and following this guide will be a big help, It takes a little setting up but you end up with far superior files. http://www.fryth.com/eacfaq/ < Lame link in there is broken: http://www.rarewares.org/dancer/dancer.php?f=35 Also i use this command link in eac: -V 2 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d Hope thats of help to someone :P, cos flac wont be much use to 99% of you. However anyone wishing to try out Flac, could follow this guide and set it up with eac: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...howtopic=30959 Its just a case of saving the relevant configs for both flac and your mp3s, so theres no need to keep messing with the settings.

07-09-2006, 09:00 PM	#26
o_ekim Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Bristol UK Posts Rated Helpful 1 Times	Never mind the quality of the playback equipment, human ears cannot physically hear a lot of the information which lossy formats get rid of.

07-09-2006, 09:20 PM	#27
o_ginger lord Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Carlisle, UK Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	I can't tell the difference. MP3's go on my mp3 player because to be honest, I'm not wanting an exact replica of the day the song was recorded. I'll be on a train/plane/car where background noise will be coming through to ruin it anyway. Buy better headphones? No, the standard creative ones I got are fine, sure they arnt the best but I don't want bulkier ones and its not worth the money, sounds fine as is. Same for on my PC, Audigy 2 and my 5:1 setup cost me about £80 all in, works fine. Can't tell the difference between anything over 192kbps, 128kbps is a very very slight difference, but nothing I care about. Sure .flac is great for lossless file format, I just don't think its worth the extra hassle and disk space. It may well be superior but Betamax was and we all know what happened to that.

07-09-2006, 11:01 PM	#29
o_frenchtoast Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Markham, Ontario, Canada! Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	Let me just throw my 2 cents in here. When I can get 1738 full length songs in .flac format on one 30 GB iPod I'll switch.

07-09-2006, 11:50 PM	#30
o_osiris Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: In your pants. Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	When I succeeded to achieve 3500 full songs on my 30gig ipod I decided to upgrade my play count, and when I surpassed the drive space of the ipod by 100% I gave up trying to make them fit and I decided to start switching.

07-10-2006, 01:12 AM	#32
o_frenchtoast Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Markham, Ontario, Canada! Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	He should die for using Firefox? You should die for saying that.

07-10-2006, 01:21 AM	#34
o_osiris Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: In your pants. Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	And the only reason it's an apple skin is because I couldnt find one with the same style as this one that didnt have the apple.

07-10-2006, 03:14 AM	#36
o_vertical Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: USA, KY Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	I will say that with higher bitrate mp3's, the difference is very little between other formats and mp3. For example: I downloaded the Rascal Flatts - Life is a Highway at 192BR and it sounds like 8x better than the Tom Cochrane - Life is a Highway at 128BR. Basically, I'm just going to have to find some higher quality mp3's 192 & up. The filesizes aren't much larger, but they sound tons better. (Perhaps if 128 was ripped "correctly" it would sound better, but either way 192 and up sound alot better) Unfortunatly, 95% of my mp3s are 128BR. Some are friggin 64 and some even lower (only probably 20 or so out of thousands, and only because they are rare) But I do wish that all of mine where 192 and higher (ripped correctly) but since I've never owned but 1 CD, I have no idea what goes into ripping them to the computer really... (I mean I have ripped a few CD's, prolly 10 or so, and encoded to mp3 and wma. The ones I encoded weather it was correctly done or not sound really good, I believe I encoded only to 320BR using the LAME encoder, and default wma encoder) Anyhow... PS: Whats so bad about FireFox? (Also, anybody tried viewing "The Battlegrounds" mod website in IE7 lol, it lags terrible, and I dunno why. www.bgmod.com if you have IE7 (I don't remember it doing so in IE6) [If you reply on this, also reply on the topic at hand! ]

07-10-2006, 09:44 AM	#38
o_osiris Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: In your pants. Posts Rated Helpful 0 Times	I wouldnt expect the prices on an iPod to drop any time soon, from what I've heard about the history of them is that Apple likes to "update" the iPod with some new features each year and discontinue the old models so they wont have to lower the prices at all.

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