I’ve accidentally put on MP3 copies of my music on my good system and been quite happy with them, so I must stress that the differences are really, really marginal. I’ve never been listening to a decent VBR MP3 and thought “ugh, MP3”.
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I don’t believe that’s true at all. If you can’t identify it with blind listening then your opinion can’t be trusted. Hearing is a very imprecise sense in many ways, and susceptible to all kinds of cognitive biases.
No, FLAC as well, but again, for archival purposes. because what happens if in 150 years there is no mechanism for decoding FLAC?
The EBU recommendations for archiving (Which is just one recommendation, but the one I’m replying to here) is actually no compression at all as you can see from my post above and for this specific reason.
Not because it is not “good enough” but because it makes the archival process dependent on a codec that may or may not be available long term.
The audio archive should, whenever possible, avoid the use of audio compression and it
should preferably be organised in PCM audio format
There is no possible reason why an audio archive should be at the mercy of the continuing
availability of a decompression codec with which to access its contents.
It makes no sense to use any compressed format for archival purposes. For listening to it? Day to day use? HiFi purists? Audibly better than mp3? Sure. it does what it says on the tin.
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My friend and I sat and blind tested (two files randomly sorted in a playlist with a search bar) and I was allowed to play certain sections over again and I got the MP3s every time within a maximum of two comparisons. I’m not some “golden ear” type, although I am sensitive to high frequencies and wear ear plugs a fair amount to deal with noisy places. It’s just a case of knowing what to listen for.
Could I spot MP3 in a completely random ABX? Probably not, but with testing conditions where I can control the playback of segments of tracks I choose? Absolutely, and you could too.
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Why would there be no mechanism for decoding FLAC? It’s just an algorithm, if somehow we misplace all of the exes we can just write a new one, it’s not even proprietary technology, it’s a completely open format. And if we lose the capability of hanging onto the descriptions of basic compression algorithms it’ll probably be because of some civilization wide catastrophe and we’d have bigger things to worry about than decoding audio archives. Your argument would equally apply to PCM audio as well (and there are multiple ways of encoding PCM), they’re all just data formats.
I don’t believe you.
That’s nice.
If you play the same portion of, say, a splash cymbal over and over again using two different formats, the differences are more clearly audible than if you played them once each. You don’t have to believe me. Repetition is the crucial part.
Again, it’s hardly pronounced. MP3 is a perfectly decent format, but FLAC has other advantages and disk space is hardly an issue these days.
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Here’s a test done where out of all the people who took the test, some people were able to consistently identify the lossy files. Scroll down to “Individual Cases”. Their observations (transients seem to be the main giveaway) mirror mine.
FLAC provides the benefit of not taking up closet space.
On the other hand, my closet space lets me keep music if my HDD crashes and my music provider of choice goes out of business.
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I’m sad that Sansas no longer support Rockbox, I loved it. I still wish they’d make a decent android port, it was a very good player for podcasts and books, I’ve not found an android app that can do everything it could with a playlist. But I don’t miss snagging the cord on something and the jack breaking, I use bluetooth headphones now.
Being able to tell the difference is one thing. But will MP3 make you cry the same way? Make you sing, dance? Jump up and down, or howl in rage?
I would posit: probably.
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Why? Because its still a world better than hissy, muddy tapes, popping and jumping Lps, or scratch prone CD’s. To us old farts mp3’s are still a miracle, and our hearing sucks too bad from stupidly loud concerts and clubs in our youth to tell the difference anyway.
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Of course. I’m not some audiophile nut who thinks MP3 is a terrible stain on the world, I just weighed up the benefits of converting CDs to FLAC versus MP3 and, when disk space was removed, FLAC won in every other way. I’m the first to admit the audible benefits are so close to zero as to be meaningless to 99.9% of all listeners, and they don’t bother me at all except when you start reaching below 192 kbps.
I still do recommend that if one is ripping CDs to choose FLAC as it’s literally no difference in effort and you can convert to any format from your FLAC files with one click and no generation loss, which has pretty audible effects to most ears.
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Since selling my CDs in 2003, I haven’t looked back much file format-wise. I still have 140 gigs of high bit-rate, genre separated downloads on an external drive, but with Mix/Soundcloud for DJ podcasts and a streaming service for other genres, it’s hard to justify the time to transfer files back and forth. I am looking forward to buying another Technics deck (or similar) one day for all my vinyl. And maybe a sweet media server for those 140 gigs of music.
I built a home server using an HP Microserver running FreeNAS. It’s a bit of a pain to set up, but itruns like a champ. There are 4 drive bays, but I have a pair of 3TB WD Reds mirrored for security and it’s been a pleasure to use.
If you run FreeNAS, the ZFS filesystem needs a minimum of 8GB RAM, so budget for that.
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