Why would you use 3x the storage space if you can't hear the difference for a non-trivial percentage of your available storage? Literally, by definition, according to your own terms, it serves no purpose.

I'm a musician and audio developer, and it's only really in my own music, that I've listened to over and over again while creating it, that I notice the degradation in a 192 kbps MP3 – and occasionally in the high-hats of CDs that I listened to hundreds of times in high school.

FLAC's great, and definitely serves a purpose, but I use it mainly for archives, not for casual listening.

No, I did not say "it serves no purpose." Those are your words. And I didn't say I can't hear the difference, either, I said I don't care if I can't.

My purpose is "you don't throw away information."

And MP3s get stored on a lot of things that aren't SD cards, so that's a pretty weird metric.

But you're getting dangerously into gold-audio-cable-and-tinfoil-hat territory. Most people (including me, literally an audio expert) can't hear the difference in most cases so you're arguing for the increased space, and significant cost based solely on some notion of purity. That makes sense for archives, where they're being preserved for posterity and potential future processing, but not for casual listening.

Would you prefer that all websites served you only PNGs?

It IS "archival." Maybe when I'm dead and gone, so distant relative will be listening to this. Maybe they'll be able to hear the difference. Who knows?

I don't think the SD card is a weird metric at all. It fits in the phone, so even if, worst case, I'm traveling and rent a car (assuming it has Bluetooth), I still have all the music.

I'd gain absolutely nothing by having them as MP3s, and the price of a TB is only going to keep dropping.

Of course, I'd also gain nothing if you switched to FLACs. You perceive different tradeoffs than I do, so that's fine.

You started with "I don't know why you'd..." and the answer is "because it's a waste of money" and "because you (mostly) can't hear a difference" and "because they work in my car".

As a side note, I have a phone that does take an SD card (in part because I like having my complete music collection there), but most people don't.

You know why they sound like that? Because sound recording and copying technology was also shit. Garbage in, garbage out.

FLAC was made 50+ years after these records, and is basically indistinguishable from the real thing when made from something close to the original WAV masters, and played back on decent but affordable equipment. Until recently, this wasn't possible.

Not only that - with sufficient care, it will literally never degrade even by a single binary bit when it's being copied or stored, no matter how many times it's played or duplicated.

I have no problems listening to a FLAC now, or when I'm 90. I'm sure my descendants, if they care about my taste in music, wouldn't mind listening to the same files (possibly transcoded to another lossy format, or somehow improved by [REDACTED]) well into the 22nd century.

I beg to differ on that. The 30s jazz records that are so wonderful musically still sound like shit nowadays. That's a major deterrent to playing them.

> I have a phone that does take an SD card ... but most people don't.

I can't say about the numbers, but I didn't have much trouble finding a phone that took them in April 2021.

In general terms: over the last 50 years, it's never been a terrible move to waste CPU cycles or disk storage. Especially if it's a permanent choice.

I don't have great hearing, and I don't try to pretend to hear the difference between one well-enoded lossy file and the next. I can't.

However, audio that's been through multiple lossy encoding steps is generally not good.

    > Sorry, I meant that not being able to discern any difference is literally the definition of useless.

> This seems rude.

I meant it tautologically: literally the definition of useless is a difference which has no measurable impact.

As the recipient: I've decided to cut @wheels some slack. You should, too. It's difficult to tell whether your online interlocutor is really a jerk, or just guilty of occasional jerk-seeming behavior. Who of us can say they've never done the latter?

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

The arguments for lossy codecs vs. dithering / bit reduction aren't identical, but it's a pretty good indictment of the SAVE ALL THE BITS argument. On the same domain as the parent article.

> Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48

Also see the 'Lossless formats' paragraph.

But yeah, it's probably wasted.

The article is about Redbook CD audio (44.1/16) vs. "HiRes" lossless audio. It's about the limits of the human ear, and the engineering tradeoffs available for supporting resolutions and depths > 44.1/16.

That's not what the FLAC vs. lossy discussion is about, at all.

The argument Montey is making for 44.1/16 vs. 192/24 is partly about the hardware and distortion of higher formats, but he spends a lot more time in there talking about what we don't hear.

The real point is: what we hear is the important quantifier for audio formats. Arguments from data purity are almost entirely the same quasi-religious stuff that the hi-fi world has been producing since at least the 70s.

(And again, it's weird: there's nothing similar in images: lossless photos just don't make sense for general consumption; they're only useful for archival and post-processing purposes. But there are immeasurably less imagephiles than audiophiles. My guess is that it's because there was a time when being an audiophile was a class signifier.)

Even the original thread author was mostly making an argument from purity rather than from audio quality. Audio quality is the only thing that matters.

FLAC is great for some stuff (again, where you may need to reencode, where you're creating archives, etc.), but for casual listening, it's entirely pointless. For the same reason Montey spends most of that article on: because you can't hear a difference.

Montey is the creator of Vorbis. He's spent a lot of time thinking about what people do and don't hear. The reasons people don't hear differences in 192 kHz and 44.1 kHz are different than the reasons people don't hear the difference between a 256 kbit MP3 and a FLAC (at 256 kbps, virtually noone can hear a difference), but it's still an appeal to ears being the important instruments in measuring audio quality, not bits, or gold plated cables, or other esoteric things that seem to beleaguer impassioned audio hobbyists.

I know that Neil Young's "solution" went nowhere. I have all my music now, and I'm certainly not going to convert it all just to save some GBs. But you've certainly eliminated any temptation on my part to evangelize. Happy listening.

I hate pulling rank so fiercely, but I literally wrote the second (i.e. first non-reference) implementation of the Ogg container format (which Opus, Vorbis and sometimes FLAC use). I know these codecs.

Ogg Vorbis and AAC hit similar levels of quality as a 192 kbps MP3 around 160 kbps. (That actually depends a fair amount on the MP3 encoder. The LAME VBR is particularly good.)

But I have an 11 year old receiver and a 12 year old car that can't play them. Hell, even iTunes can't without third-party codec plugins. MP3s are about as universal as it gets. Being able to play my files everywhere is pretty high up on my list of concerns.

Opus also is very good on music, better than Ogg. At higher bitrates (~160) any of the lossy codecs will do fine but Opus sounds good under 100.

https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Opus#Indicative_...

As I understood things Xiph intended for it to replace both speex (for low-bandwidth low-latency voice) and vorbis (for medium bitrate lossy audio). Is this understanding wrong?

>Ogg Vorbis and AAC hit similar levels of quality as a 192 kbps MP3 around 160 kbps. (That actually depends a fair amount on the MP3 encoder. The LAME VBR is particularly good.)

While this is true there's a bit of nuance to add. Some people really don't like the sound of vorbis's artifacts on difficult to compress audio. Maybe it's growing up with fried mp3 recordings being common, but mp3's artifacts are less jarring.

[0]: https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other...

The same holds true for cassette tape decks in old cars.

> even iTunes [...]

That's Apple's policy. Personally I wouldn't use the word "even" here. It's like saying "Not even the butcher sells vegetables!".

Apart the Apple ecosystem, opus is as established as it gets. Android supports it natively since 2013(?) (Android 5.0).

So, yes, if you want TeX-like backward-compatibility, it might be a good choice.

For all others: knock knock The new millennium arrived!

P.S. I do think that I don't have the worst hearing and kind of decent listening equipment and I can nearly half the file size using opus at a comparable quality.

I don't know about an iPhone. I assume you can find apps that support it.

E.g. create a full-scale sine wave, split it into two files, then convert them to "gapless" Opus. Now open the files in Audacity and you'll see that there's a small amount of ringing at the boundary, so it is not truly gapless.

If you try the same with AAC using Apple's gapless metadata (i.e. iTunSMPB) you'll find that the boundary is perfectly continuous.

at current prices that's about $25 of SSD

I also very regularly go places with mediocre cell service: country side, airplanes, boats, and festivals.

Well, because you're carrying the portable device around anyway. And it doesn't require a network connection, so it works even when you have no cell coverage.

I don't quite understand how your "streaming it this way on the go" worked?

And you can keep an extra one at another site in case your house burns down.

I've got a couple of DJ friends that have taken to ripping their collections (CDs and vinyl) to WAV files as most DJ software didn't support FLAC playback at the time.

A "2 kW" sound system doesn't have any special properties by nature of its wattage, but a club does have a sound system which can reproduce frequencies that are below that what a typical home (or studio) system can. MP3s are usually encoded with a high-pass filter (usually around 20 Hz), and some club systems can get down close to that range (more often 30 Hz), but it's very questionable that they're hitting border.

It is true though that on those types of systems, you're more likely to expose the effects of doing things like double lossy encoding, use of bad encoders, etc.

My collection is lossless and nearing 2 TB in size. Too large for mobile usage on iOS, where I don't really need that kind of fidelity anyway. However I still don't want to manage a second lossy library and keep them both in sync. Luckily Apple's Music app can be configured to transcode your lossless audio to a lossy format on the fly whenever you sync your collection to your iPhone. That way I can have my whole collection in my pocket without having to manage it.

Maybe in another decade.

So are MP3s, unless you compress them to crap. FLACs are more like low 10s of MB, about 2.5× high quality MP3s in my experience.

You have to know what to listen for, and even if you do, why should you care? It's a small price to pay for being able to store several times as much music on your phone, or for saving on bandwidth while streaming.

On the go, the listening environment is far from perfect, so Opus is fine. I still want the FLAC files on my NAS as an archive or for listening in a better environment in my home.

I can't predict what manufacturers will do, of course, but with headphones, you have Bluetooth. What's the corresponding substitute for the SD slot?

Which, btw, is another unconventional observation of mine: you no longer need the newest, fanciest phone from Samsung, Apple, or Google. At one time you did. The cheaper ones are more than adequate nowadays and most likely you'll be replacing it every couple years anyway. YMMV.