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Re:FLAC 1.3.4 by corysama on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @04:02AM (#30439170)
Optimization is about trade offs. My career has been data processing pipelines for commercial game engines. I’m quite familiar with the trade offs of compressing all kinds of formats, including audio.

FLAC is at least as complex as OGG+gzip. That’s reasonable to deal with because there are libraries with many thousands of hours of effort put into them freely available.

But, trivial is trivial. Anyone who has had to deal with format support rot will sing praises of trivial.

My argument is that it’s a disappointing archive format given that any teenage coder can come within 30-50% of it in an afternoon by doing the most trivial thing possible.

Expectedly, few people here are arguing with me about archives. Instead we’re talking about streaming podcasts over 4G. Even for for high-end music, saying your personal bandwidth ethics/budget necessitates FLAC but not Opus seems more than a bit of a stretch, in my opinion.

Re:FLAC 1.3.4 by Dylan16807 on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @04:43AM (#30439413)
> Anyone who has had to deal with format support rot will sing praises of trivial.

Anyone who has had to deal with finding and recovering old data should appreciate the ability to fit significantly more on a disk. More redundancy and cheaper storage means more data survives.

> teenage coder [...] in an afternoon

Finding a FLAC decoder is very unlikely to take longer than that, even 50 years from now.

Re:FLAC 1.3.4 by raverbashing on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @04:37AM (#30439369)
I see

If your point is that most users of FLAC would be happier with AAC/Opus etc I agree (and with a more significant savings)

And yeah if you're looking at longer archival times, PCM probably makes more sense. But I think FLAC suffers way less rot than, for example WMA

Re:FLAC 1.3.4 by astrange on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @04:40AM (#30439390)
FLAC bitrots less than WAV, because WAV doesn't have checksums.
Re:FLAC 1.3.4 by rakoo on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @04:48AM (#30439453)
If you're concerned about bitrot (and I feel everyone should be), you're going to checksum at the filesystem level, so it doesn't make a difference
Re:FLAC 1.3.4 by astrange on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @05:07AM (#30439573)
The more the better. Sometimes there's a bit flip on the way to the streaming server…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25335936

Re:FLAC 1.3.4 by corysama on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @05:17AM (#30439627)
As someone pointed out above, WAV bitrots results in unreported micro-blips. FLAC bitrot results in reported large-scale failure.
Re:FLAC 1.3.4 by kzrdude on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @05:31AM (#30439708)
It bitrots at the same rate, but you detect that it happened with FLAC
Re:FLAC 1.3.4 by astrange on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @05:47AM (#30439783)
And then you restore it from backup/rip the CD again/download it from the original source again. And test your RAM.