Flac is a great format.

I've been making music for years and I often work with samples. Luckily, Ableton Live accepts .flac files. It's important to have high quality samples considering manipulating the sound (especially time-stretching) can easily alter its quality.

Unfortunately, it's still hard to obtain music in Flac format. Few online music stores offer tracks in that format. [1] It's maybe a marketing issue. Everybody knows what an Mp3 is. It also took me some time to learn that such a format as Flac existed. But it's also a size issue. Although the compressing algorithm is incredible, people prefer to download (legally or illegally) a 80 MB album rather than a 500 MB one, regardless of its quality, because they either won't hear the difference or just don't care. And considering iTunes doesn't support Flac (only their own Alac format that is even less known), Flac isn't meant to be widely adopted yet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_stor...

I think these days it's pretty easy to buy lossless audio - if you just look a little bit further than iTunes & Co. you'll find Qobuz, Boomkat, HDTracks, Bandcamp and similar stores.

I pretty much find everything I need, including rather obscure music.

Bleep! They also offer 24bit wav versions.

I know you're probably looking for a legal solution, but private torrent sites like what.cd offer a very large selection of .flac files. If only the music industry would do the same.

I'm in the camp of people who literally can't perceive the difference, so why would I download the much larger audio?

In fact I can't even tell the difference between 128kbps MP3 and the CD it's encoded from, let alone superior formats like Opus or AAC or higher-bitrate MP3.

For the consumer listener, I agree with you. On the vast majority of consumer sound systems and consumer ears, as you point out, compressing that further into a 128kbs MP3 isn't noticeable. For me it personally is, but on most music say 192VBR MP3 isn't.

Currently at the end of the line all audio is going to be squished, at best, to 44k 16bit sampling. Most audio production and engineering is going to be taking place at quality levels than what the final CD master is, however. /During/ production working with higher quality sources such as a higher sample rate, higher bit rate FLAC sample means that you can 'do more' with it before you start running into the walls of unintended artifacts and distortions. Think of all audio processing as a destructive process - the more you have to begin with the more you can do before the destruction becomes noticeable.

Intentionally ignoring all debates on aesthetics, obviously in many artistic circumstances the artifacts and distortions are desired - but when they are you can easily achieve them in an /intentional/ way. Avoiding them is the challenge.

And there are certain contexts in which it is more noticeable: high quality club sound-systems, custom home and car audio systems, etc. My vehicle's sound system has a very easily audible difference between a 128KBS MP3 and an uncompressed 44k 16bit CD for most music, and in that context you are damn sure I want the uncompressed experience. So having an /option/ for high quality lossless formats such as FLAC available universally helps to serve such niche markets.

tldr; if you are in camp that can't tell the difference, you shouldn't download the higher quality larger files. They aren't for you. Other camps do exist, however.

edit edit: And this all ignores the annoying 'loudness war' trend in modern audio engineering to use compressors to flatten out all dynamic range anyway. Le sigh

Flac is future proof. You can always take losslessly compressed audio and convert it to another lossless or lossy format.

You can convert lossy formats but there is no way to tell how the artifacts will interact.

And yet we save movies to h.264 or WebM and save photographic images to JPEG.

Lossless formats do have their place but it's not as if lossy formats literally sustain bit rot; they lose information one time and that's it. Unless, of course, you convert lossy formats, but you should know not to do that.

If you do have to convert between lossy formats or absolutely need every bit of data (e.g. RAW photography) then that's one of the places you might find lossless archival storage useful. But most uses don't need it at all.

Lossy formats are useful, no doubt about that. I was just pointing out an advantage of a lossless format.

I've only ever heard a difference for sure in one song: Who Said (Stuck in the UK) by Planet Funk. At one point there's a synthesized high frequency warble that MP3 at any bitrate is apparently unable to encode properly.

Another excellent test case is the track "Second Bad Vilbel" by Autechre. The rockets at the beginning pose an insurmountable challenge for most codecs. Last I checked, MP3 at any bitrate couldn't do it, and Ogg Vorbis fell down unless you went up to at least -q7, which is a rather high bitrate (~224kbps).

I was too. Now I find the superior formats sound better, but more importantly I find they hurt my ears less. I found mp3 and lower formats really hurt my ears, frequently causing uncomfortable numbness.

What are you listening with/on when you perform these comparisons? You probably won't hear any difference when listening with set of standard ear buds that come with your smart phone or laptop speakers. If you have a nice pair of headphones/speakers, the difference is easier to hear.

Who knows, maybe any differences I think I hear are just placebo effects :-)

Exactly this. The most astounding difference between MP3 and FLAC I've ever heard was Teen Spirit by Nirvana. In the opening riff there's just such a huge difference in depth and clarity. On the MP3 everything sounds flat and lifeless, on the FLAC recording you can hear each individual thrum, every single vibration as the song spins into life. There's nothing quite like listening to lossless Nirvana through some nice headphones/speakers.

7digital have a few too, I made a list here: http://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2012/02...

Flac is genuinely great, but I don't see the problem with people using mp3. I use Flac for my meditation sounds because of binaural tones encoded into them, otherwise for music mp3 is just fine, I am just enjoying it, not producing.

That's why I like buying from bands in Bandcamp.

A few artists on soundcloud.com also make their music available as flac (and as lossless wav).

I love FLAC, I just wish it had more mainstream support: I'm looking at you iTunes Player & 160GB iPod Classic.

Agreed... It was an interesting discovery that Google Music allows you to upload FLAC, though. While I'm pretty sure actual playback is something lossy, at least it prevents them transcoding lossy format into another lossy format for streaming... (or so I heard...)

The Google Music Manager program just transcodes FLAC to 320kbps MP3 before uploading.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1100462?hl=en

The one thing I know, though, they require FLAC upload for their commercial music distribution service.

It's actually better than some place, which actually requires a physical CDDA ROM...

Oh, didn't see that. Thanks for clarification!

At least you can re-encode to ALAC without loss of quality, just loss of time and perhaps sanity.

"libFLAC encoder was defaulting to level 0 compression instead of 5"

Level 5 is better imho, as I guess most of us want smaller files not faster encoding. Computers today are fast enough to do this without a significant wait.

Also this: Created: 2007-10-19 Closed-fixed: 2009-01-02 Released: 2013-05-26

Yeah, any idea why development slowed on this so much? Did they get the codec so perfect that there was nothing left to do? It's kind of interesting that something that has seen so little development over the past several years still dominates this market, or whatever you call it.

I would imagine that it's reached the point of diminishing returns -- it would take months of hard work to squeeze another 1% compression out of the format, in which time hard drive space per dollar has gone up by 10% with no effort (on the part of the software developer) at all.

(There are probably still compression technologies waiting to be invented; but applying them within the constraints of an existing format is hard or impossible, and creating a new format means you need a /massive/ improvement to make switching attractive for the consumer)

Level 0 uses less CPU (and improves battery life).

Only (significantly) on the compression side. Decompressing is about the same whether you used 0 or 9.

I think they wanted hardware support, which means that much of it is set in stone.

The same holds for MP3, does it not? Come to think of it, the only CODEC stuff you really hear about after its launch is video related.

MP3 itself may not change much, but it's been superseded in the commercial world a long time ago by AAC.

The same applies though - how often do you hear AAC news? In the last few years I remember maybe one or two stories about improvements in slightly-incompatible variations; no changes to the base spec. Looking at wikipedia, even AAC+ v2 (which I believe is considered current?) seems to have been stable since 2006.

That's not really true. MP3 and AAC are designed, like many video codecs, so that the decoder is standardized and unchanging (except for performance tuning) but the encoders can continue to tweak and experiment to increase quality, reduce size etc.

The LAME encoder was the x264 of its day, and there's forums where people who care test competing audio codec implementations and newer encoder revisions to see how progress is going just like they do for video.

I'm not saying it really matters to end users in a big bang wow sense that you can hang a blog post news item on, but codecs gradually getting better benefits everyone and is continually happening in the background.

Not quite designed, but the effect is the same.

For most lossy encoding formats, there are many ways to compress a single file, and in general, we do not know how to pick the best size/encoding quality encoding of all possible encodings. You can get better compression/better quality at the same compression by searching harder or by searching smarter.

Typically, compression settings deal with the 'searching harder' approach.

Searching smarter is what the successive generations of encoders do, but sometimes, this also is controlled by the compression setting because an alternative approach may be better in compression quality, but so much slower that an quality-wise inferior but faster algorithm is kept as an option.

Besides having a lossless compressed audio file, I often wonder, if one can actually hear the difference between a well compressed mp3 (say, converted from a flac) and the actual original flac? Is there a real benefit for the average consumer? The problem I see is the quite large file size.

FLAC is intended for music archival storage, so its not really about perceptual loses, but preventing things like generational loss if you are using music for stuff like mixing/re-encoding etc.

Even if I could hear a difference, I'm certain it would be drowned out in "real life" situations where I'm listening to music.

Riding my bike or walking down the street, I'm not going to notice tiny artifacts in an mp3...

I have invested a lot of money into good headphones and good speakers and I can't tell the difference between good lame mp3s and flac...

Blind test? HydrogenAudio forums will tell you that if it's not a blind A/B test you can fool yourself very easily.

You might also like to try AAC (or ogg) at a similar bitrate: MP3 has a couple of encoding peculiarities that are an unavoidable function of the format & if you know what to listen out for they're fairly obvious even at higher bitrates. (I'd still be surprised if you could tell the difference between flac and 320kps mp3 in a blind test though.)

I think you misread "can't" and "can".

oops: Mea culpa.

The official announcement http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2013-June/004223.ht...

if anyone wants different compiles for windows of a whole lot of various encoders, including FLAC 1.3.0, check out http://www.rarewares.org been using it for years