FLAC or WAV (Lossless) Audio

jimbo45

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Hi there
For years I've stored my music collections as FLAC - however with massive size HDD's is it worth it any more -- - WAV can easily be stored -- mind you all my players even on the mobile phone handle FLAC so should I just keep using it.

Note I'm not interested in compressed formats like Mp3 - only LOSSLESS. As both (WAV and FLAC) are free OPEN codecs I can't see them disappearing any time soon. I'm not going to be suckered into using proprietary stuff like WMV either though.

32 / 64 GB micro SD cards on phone ensures I can store More than enough music on the device and these days fast access to remote computer via internet means I can always download other music to the device if I need it at any time.

The only slight disadvantage with FLAC on the phone is that the battery usage is slightly higher due to the hardware having to convert the FLAC to analog (takes a wee bit more processing power than using WAV - the hardware in the phone is actually the DAC - Digital to Analog converter).

Even on a phone I am using a high quality pair of Bose headphones so typically compressed mp3 files don't interest me --however that type of file is fine for those Bud type earphones though.

Just interested in what other people are using for High Quality Audio.

(BTW I've done enough tests on High quality STUDIO grade equipment to show that a FLAC file can be restored 100% to the original WAV file so the FLAC lossless compression really is LOSSLESS even though it's compressed).

Cheers
jimbo
 

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I suppose you could do .wav and compress to .flac if space becomes an issue. I had use for .wma for my car stereo CD player. I found .wma ripped directly from CD at 192 kbit sounded as good or better than 320 .mp3 from the same source. With .wma I could easily get 4 or 5 CDs worth of music on one data CD. If I hit a pothole the original CDs were safe at home.
 

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Most people can't hear the difference between 192kbps and 320kbps bitrate. There's a difference between 128 and 192 that is noticeable to the trained ear, but any higher than that isn't needed in my opinion. Especially since 192 - 256 is already considered studio or CD quality. I would recommend WAV over FLAC though, just my preference. There's much more support on the WAV side from my experience as an audio visual technician. Either way PCM as an encoding is usually the basis for lots of the equipment that I deal with. Anything after that is an afterthought, or considered after PCM decoders are implemented.

Other than that, unless you are a record company, it's the same viewpoint from myself as 4K video. Unless you have a huge screen where the pixel density between 4K resolution and 720 or 1080p is noticeable, there's really no point in 4K, and especially until later when 4K devices are less expensive and more mainstream. Most people don't have high quality equipment, or the ear, to detect the difference between say 320kbps and lossless. MP3 is capable of those nitrates, but at a much smaller filesize. I have no problem with MP3 for that reason.

It was tougher back when MP3 capable players, were less common, but now it's near a standard.

Just my two cents. If you need lossless, my preference is WAV. :geek:
 

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The point is that .wma at 192 is better than .mp3 at 320. In my experience .mp3 at 192 is fine if the source is pristine. For example one of the Postcards Jazz CDs. Whereas some older jazz CDs such as bluenote from the 60s or OJC label may need to be at 320(for mp3) to get as much sound as there is available.

For those who can't hear the difference there's MTV. :)
 

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Bitrate does not matter if the source is bad, so comparing filetypes that way is irrelevant. Bitrates are constant.
 

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If the source is bad there's no sense saving the audio. Every time I post about wma 192 being better than mp3 320 there's a response about people with bad hearing. If they can't hear the difference fine. But if they can hear and reject without trying then they can't see. It's the same thing when I posted on Linux about defragging ext2 partitions. I got all this theoretical jazz about how ext2 does not get fragmented and how defrag is a waste of time. When I knew from actual experience the contrary was the case. Theory is fine. But concrete is harder.

edit: btw the comment "bitrate is constant" assumes the 2 lossy formats have equivalent quality at equivalent bitrate. Which begs the question. To me it's obvious that if wma 192 sounds better than mp3 320 it will certainly sound better than mp3 192. Take a Postcard jazz CD and rip it twice. Once to wma 192 and once to mp3 320. Listen to both. That's what I did when selecting my CDs for traveling music. The author of AudioGrabber felt the same way. If I'm crazy at least I'm not alone. :)
 

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I listen to audio all day long at work through some nice Grado SR125's, and I listen at home via my Marantz receiver and my Audio Technica ATH-M50's and I'm perfectly happy with the quality of my music using a VBR bitrate MP3 over 192Kbps. I do know audio pretty well, I actually do some audio mixing at our church (which is very large and uses some very nice equipment. (Digico consoles, L-acoustics line arrays and amps, crown amps). Aside from pure travelers who need the noise cancellation, I'm not a fan of most things made by Bose. Most are overpriced and under performing. For my own personal CD's, I have ripped most with AudioGrabber, or EAC. For anything in the last 2 years, I've bought it using Amazon MP3.

While I do agree that hard drives are huge and file size shouldn't be the #1 issue anymore, but you also probably should also have backups of this stuff and that will also chew up more space and lots more time. I also keep lots of music on my phone and on an SDCard in my car. The road noise from the car negates any advantage in my opinion to any higher quality file format.
 

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So if I buy more expensive techie stuff I'll be right and you'll be wrong? That's what it sounds like(pun intended.) :)

Anyway it was fun arguing about it. :)
 

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^ No, that wasn't the point that i was trying to make.

Obviously, a lossfile file format is going to technically have more bits and will by default have better sound than other compressed formats. However, on most equipment used by consumers, even the pro-consumer market place, it's most likely that most users are never going to notice a difference with the human ear. Couple that with fact that so many people play music from a smartphone, iPod or crappy headphone jack from a computer, an an environment with ambient background noise, traffic noise, road noise, office noise or HVAC noise and often times any gains in audio fidelity will be negated.

So, it's my opinions that storing things in a FLAC or WAV format simply because hard drives are cheap is going to probably just result in larger amounts of space being consumed for storage and backup storage while probably not providing that much benefit for those who aren't in an audio equipped studio, with high end studio monitors.

I tested a ton a long while back using multiple rippers, (foobar, eac, audiograbber, cdex and fair stars), I used FLAC, WMA, MP3. I switched between CBR, and VBR. I played with a variety of bitrates. From my listening, with my equipment and my headphones, it was almost impossible for me to discern any difference in blind tests between FLAC and a VBR between 1 and 2 with MP3. If I really want to nitpick exactly where the benefits are, I can almost talk people into noticing what might be missing, but the second you add any ambient noise and so forth and most consumer equipment, it's mostly negated.

But these are just my opinions. I'm not saying I am right, perhaps my ears are substandard.
 

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A lossless file will also consume more battery because of the higher sample rate read. Lossless WAV has about 1411kbps and FLAC also about 800 - 1400kbps depending on settings.

If space is not an issue: go for it, why not. But we don't have Clark Kent's ears to hear all those subtle details do we? 192 - 320kbps of MP3, AAC or WMA will do in most cases, as it was mentioned, if the source file is good enough.

I'm not going fully lossless, due to some small disks, lossy formats are good enough if your settings are right...
I prefer AAC and have converted all older MP3's (for the consistency) and newer files to M4A. All is set to variable bitrate (VBR) 256kbps is excellent already. Since Win7 we have mp4, AAC and M4A native support.
One of my Zen players hasn't got enough space on it and all my songs are sampled down at 96kbps in M4A and I can say that it' s better than 128kbps MP3. This sounds good to the ear while more songs fit on the device. After all AAC/M4A is the successor of the MP3 format technically speaking so it has some extra advantages in compression efficiency.

To achieve good quality at low bitrates (example: M4A/AAC @96kbps) one might best use a good quality input file (one of those lossless WAV or FLAC) to get the best possible output (lowest filesize, lowest bitrate at the best sound quality).
 

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Wow! Reading this thread brought back memories of arguments about vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassettes and the debates over sound quality. Not to mention the heated discussions over tube versus transistor amplifiers. :geek:

Oh analog, such a different time.
 
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If the source is bad there's no sense saving the audio. Every time I post about wma 192 being better than mp3 320 there's a response about people with bad hearing. If they can't hear the difference fine. But if they can hear and reject without trying then they can't see. It's the same thing when I posted on Linux about defragging ext2 partitions. I got all this theoretical jazz about how ext2 does not get fragmented and how defrag is a waste of time. When I knew from actual experience the contrary was the case. Theory is fine. But concrete is harder.

edit: btw the comment "bitrate is constant" assumes the 2 lossy formats have equivalent quality at equivalent bitrate. Which begs the question. To me it's obvious that if wma 192 sounds better than mp3 320 it will certainly sound better than mp3 192. Take a Postcard jazz CD and rip it twice. Once to wma 192 and once to mp3 320. Listen to both. That's what I did when selecting my CDs for traveling music. The author of AudioGrabber felt the same way. If I'm crazy at least I'm not alone. :)

If the source was bad and it was the only version of that audio available, then perhaps there would be sense in saving it. Not everything was high quality recorded. You pinpoint my statement as theory because I use some supporting evidence against the average audio file, whether it be an mp3 or wma, which is inaccurate. There are cases where you would need lossless, but more often than not in an average environment, it is not the case.

Any differences in bitrate from conversions are due to the decoding and/or encoding process. Different audio formats do not read the same way as all other audio formats, and this is why with any old receiver, you can't just play any kind of audio format out there. It highly depends on what programs you're using, and you'd better be sure that the conversion is reliable too. I can take a 64kbps audio file, and rewrite it to a file of 320kbps quite easily. But it wouldn't guarantee that I'm getting my expected 320kbps quality audio. If I'm converting audio types, and especially if the original source is not a completely lossless filetype, even if I'm converting to 320kbps, that may be true on the technical details for bitrates, but the quality may not be the same as other similar bitrates even of the same filetype. The encoding/conversion process is critical.

Just a cleaner version perhaps of the junk that it originally was. Junk data to make up for those extra bits per second would have to be created.

There is also variable bitrate, and constant bitrate, so bringing that into the equation here, introduces many more difficulties if you were to ever try and compare as well. But the fact remains that unless you have junk data being processed per second, 192kbps is 192kbps for ideal conversions. There's no way that WMA could sound better unless the WMA output was more clean, than the conversion to MP3.

I could write a pretty lame WMA encoder to show you that a 320kbps audio file sounds worse than a 192kbps audio file if I wanted for that reason. Keep note that it also depends on the complexity of the sounds and frequency range within the audio file itself, so there really is no way of telling what kind of quality you will get, because different encodings, unless completely lossless, will interpret sounds in different ways. The best you'll get from iTunes if you actually pay for your music is 256kbps, but in AAC format.

I listen to audio all day long at work through some nice Grado SR125's, and I listen at home via my Marantz receiver and my Audio Technica ATH-M50's and I'm perfectly happy with the quality of my music using a VBR bitrate MP3 over 192Kbps. I do know audio pretty well, I actually do some audio mixing at our church (which is very large and uses some very nice equipment. (Digico consoles, L-acoustics line arrays and amps, crown amps). Aside from pure travelers who need the noise cancellation, I'm not a fan of most things made by Bose. Most are overpriced and under performing. For my own personal CD's, I have ripped most with AudioGrabber, or EAC. For anything in the last 2 years, I've bought it using Amazon MP3.

While I do agree that hard drives are huge and file size shouldn't be the #1 issue anymore, but you also probably should also have backups of this stuff and that will also chew up more space and lots more time. I also keep lots of music on my phone and on an SDCard in my car. The road noise from the car negates any advantage in my opinion to any higher quality file format.

Agreed (in co-ordinance with your Bose statement). The only reason why Bose is regarded as such high quality, and is expensive, is because of their marketing strategies. Aside from that, they aren't a really good speaker. They are okay, perhaps above average, but their enclosures are where their design is nice. They've been able to master the way lower frequencies vibrate inside of their cases, and most people like the power in the bass that their line of speakers give off.

In my basement I've got speakers that I've put together that have a sensitivity of 105db @ 1W, and an active crossover completes the range of frequencies over the bass mid and high with the tweeter. 3 separate amplifiers of different wattage's, because it doesn't take as much as it does for the other 2 components as it does my tweeter. Those amps and speakers are a few years old, and I still haven't seen anyone with a new Bose system who is able to beat my setup. I've had it fully EQ'd, and my old house used to be sound barrier-ed as well, so I've had them up to 128db in the past. :geek:
 
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Wow! Reading this thread brought back memories of arguments about vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassettes and the debates over sound quality. Not to mention the heated discussions over tube versus transistor amplifiers. :geek:

Oh analog, such a different time.

Hi there.

Your ears still use ANALOG so all modern digital sound equipment has DAC's (Digital to Analog Converters) in them . What these do is sample chunks of the digital sound and by means of complex transforms (such as Fourier analysis and other highly complex mathematics) and produce complex sine waves that your ear perceives as Sound.

To get decent sound obviously you need the following pieces of equipment -- in this order.

1) A good pair of EARS !! without those everything else is pointless.

2) Good headphones / Speaker system --if this is bad then as with EARS - every thing else is pointless.

3) A Good Sound source - if this is rubbish then all you can do is remove extraneous bits of noise and hiss but you can't improve the base quality.

4) Good piece of equipment containing the DAC (or DACS - expensive equipment have several as specific DACS can handle special ranges, types of signal etc).

Mp3 gear is usually cheaper end so the DAC's aren't top quality either - you will often find that some mp3 sounds actually sound far worse than they should because you are using cheap equipment. - If you have those bud ear phones - especially the white one's where most of the "music" leaks out to irritate fellow passengers on buses / trains etc then highly compressed mp3's probably are fine - even WAV sounds won't appear very different.

However if you play into high end studio type gear then you most certainly WILL hear the difference -- high end studio gear also handles things like Harmonics which can occur outside the human hearing range but still give the music "Presence" - you have to experience this to understand what I'm saying here - but it very much does make a difference.

I suppose with all these things it depends on your point of view -- in any case I regard the Audio a bit like "Old fashioned film negatives" -- I might want to re-create the ORIGINAL again at some future date - who knows wht hardware will be available in the future -- and with lossless you can manipulate the file as many times as you want. With Lossy compression you lose more each time you manipulate the file too so it will degrade considerably after a few edits.

The DAC in most decent smartphones - especially the newer ones - iPhone / Samsung Galaxy etc is reasonable - I can definitely tell the difference in the same piece of music when played in FLAC or MP3 at 192 kbs -- apart from any thing else the FLAC plays gaplessly if you want it to and the mp3 files tend to have odd "artifacts" in them together with the odd click. Whether this is important if you are listening in a noisy public place is up to you but I certainly don't want these types of effects at home.

I travel a lot so I like the Noise cancelling phones by Bose -- expensive - but do the job decently and aren't HUGE like those "Street Cred DJ BEATS" type which youngsters are finding popular. At home I have a nice set of Mission Studio quality speakers specifically for MUSIC listening -- note nothing to do with TV surround sound --that's a totally different ballgame. I never use my TV surround system for music listening either.

Finally if you've ever travelled in "Cattle Class" for say 10 hrs on a flight from Manchester UK to LA - worse the other way around as it's night time - with a load of howling babies on board you'll appreciate those Noise cancelling phones !!.


Incidentally the part about newer hardware is true -- for instance I've scanned some of my original photo negatives and today I can produce a far far better print than I ever could in the "Old fashioned Wet darkroom" and far more cheaply. However I still need the original as copying scanned images for adjustment / alteration will progressively degrade the image each time more and more. Having the original always means I can start from Scratch again.

The same is true of the Music files.

Cheers
jimbo
 

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It seems to me to be a dodge. Either wma can contain more sound information at a lower bit rate than mp3 or not. Just like mp4 can contain more video information than mpg2. In your scenario we could disparage FLAC even though it's lossless provided you coul show that the bottom of the line consumer gear played mp3 better than FLAC. It's apples and oranges.

There are color blind people so let's just forget about mp4 since mpg2 bw video is good enough for 'em.
The original question I don't understand either unless the OP just wants to be encouraged in a decision already made. :)
 

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If you're looking for good quality sound devices, most people can hear roughly in the range of 37Hz to 15 or 18Khz, so you'll want something that can handle this range. I've seen speakers that are manufactured to handle ranges from 5Hz to 25Khz. Most professional grade equipment is in and around 95-100 db @1W efficiency for a full blown cabinet. If you are in that category or above, then you're doing quite well.

The SHURE's SE535, has a sensitivity of 119 dB SPL/mW for instance, and a frequency range of 18Hz – 19kHz. A theoretical 133 dB SPL @1V is pretty darn good... Regardless, playing the devils advocate, you're not going to get the same energy over the full frequency range, high versus mid and low.
 

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Wow! Reading this thread brought back memories of arguments about vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassettes and the debates over sound quality. Not to mention the heated discussions over tube versus transistor amplifiers. :geek:

Oh analog, such a different time.

Same here on the memories! :)

Lol! We were surely amplifying a lot of distortion way back with analog. When I heard a digital CD for the first time it was like listening to music all over again. Songs like "Hey Jude" has something like 17 instrumental and voice parts to it. I'm lucky if I heard five or six of them with analog!
 

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Well, back to topic: I'd stick to FLAC. For me it's the perfect format. It's lossless but it also saves space if you compare it to wave. I've also tested it, you can always restore the original wave file out of a FLAC file. I don't see why I should sacrifice more space for storing wave files if there is no quality gain (how should there be as we are talking about lossless audio).
 

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My opinion... Stay with .flac takes up less space.
But you could also try both.. mix and match.. what the heck!
Maybe over time you'll detect some differences that push you towards one or the other.

I've grown less picky these days.. an mp3 player at the beach or in the car is fine with me.
I've grown so used to the compressed Dolby digital being broadcast on the TV.. its even more lossy than mp3.
Now even MP3's sound good.
 

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    Asrock Z97 Extreme 6
    Memory
    Corsair Vengeance DDR3L-2133 (2 x 4GB)
    Graphics Card(s)
    using imbedded Iris Pro 6200 from CPU
    Browser
    IE 11
    Antivirus
    Defender
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