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FLAC?
- Thread starter Nick_Leo
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Supreme [H]ardness
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well you'd need to be ripping your cd's to FLAC or 320 in the first place.
astrallite
Gawd
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as far as online I think itunes store sells ALAC format which is also lossless, I'm not certain but im sure there are conversion algorithms from ALAC to FLAC with minimal losses (if any).
The only place I know to download music in .FLAC is from private torrent sites, which I don't think we can discuss here. Otherwise, ripping a CD to .FLAC is the only way. Like other already said, its pointless to convert a lossy format to .FLAC, it'd be just a waste of space.
Pinipig523
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You can't add what's not there.
Menelmarar
Supreme [H]ardness
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I think I heard itunes now has a lossless/DRM-free format you can purchase?
PCMusicGuy
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It's not likely Itunes will ever do that. I rip my CDs to flac. There is an alac to flac converter to use with dbpoweramp. Seems to work fine for me.
Holy shit. I'm gone for a few days and this is what happens?
You mean where do you buy better ones? Amazon usually has MP3s encoded with LAME 3.97 at the V0 setting, resulting in files averaging around 250kbps, though sometimes you'll receive CBR files encoded with fairly old versions of LAME.
What exactly would the point of that be?
The iTunes store doesn't sell ALAC (yet), only AAC at 128kbps or 256kbps (encoded with the iTunes AAC encoder with constrained VBR settings). There is zero data loss incurred by converting from FLAC to ALAC, because both formats are lossless. Odds are converting from ALAC to FLAC will reduce the file size slightly at the expense of decode speed.
No, you can, but there's no real point in doing so.
Nope, iTunes Plus is still lossy (though DRM free, yeah).
Joe Average
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The best way to explain it is like this:
Content on the original CD = CD quality, meaning the best it's going to get based on the capabilities of CD audio, 44.1 kHz sampling rate, 16 bits per sample. Sure there's SuperAudioCD, and Digital Audio Discs, but that's going too far. We're talking about regular old CDs you buy at Wal-Mart or some chain music retailer or bookstore these days.
FLAC = a "lossless" audio codec (hence the name FLAC = Free Lossless Audio Codec). FLAC is a format of psychoacoustic audio compression - fancy term for compressing the audio data into a smaller "package." The big thing to learn and understand is the difference between lossless and lossy:
Think of a text file, say a story you wrote. Now, let's say it's a few hundred thousand bytes long - each character being one byte of information. You decide you want to put that story into a Zip file to email it to friends, family, etc. You fire up your compression program, could be WinZip, WinRAR, 7Zip, whatever. When that compression program is done, you end up with a <insert file extension here> file that's a helluva lot smaller than the original text file, don't you? Of course.
Now, let's say you want to uncompress or extract that file and get your text file back, so you fire up the software (if required) and do the uncompress extract task. Guess what - you now have the same file again, a copy of it as you don't want to delete the original, and they're exactly the same in terms of size, content, etc.
That's an example of lossless compression - compression happened, and decompression happened, and you ended up with exactly the same results in the end, the same file, without losing a single dotted i or a crossed t. Got it?
Ok, now let's say you did that and when you decompressed the archive you actually got the file back, but it was missing oh say, half the content, and instead of a sentence looking like this:
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country."
you got this:
" ow i th t me f r al go d me to com t the ai of th ir cou ry."
Missing some parts there, but in a weird sort of way you may even be able to still read it. Wheel Of Fortune was always fun for me as I'd get the answers way way before the people on TV did... seriously.
The compression was lossy in the sense that it did compress the original file - as the audio data would be compressed - but when "played back" it's just a rough facsimile of the original but you can just make out that it's the orignal file, to some degree.
Yes this is a somewhat clumsy analogy for the lossy compression side of it, lossless is easy - you get back exactly what you put into it after decompression. With respect to audio data, when using lossless compression, when that lossless file (FLAC, or some other lossless format) is decompressed and played back so you can hear it, you get back exactly the same audio data (bit for bit) that you have in the original content on the CD. They're exactly the same.
That's not the case with lossy compression. Lossy compression works off acoustic principles like the fact that in a loud room with a lot of noisy people talking and making loud noises with music playing very loudly because there's a loud band on stage playing music loudly that you probably can't consciously hear the guy sitting in the corner tapping his foot on his barstool.
But theoretically his tapping is still making a sound that's traveling through that room and is somewhere lost in the jumble of all the other sounds to the point where your conscious mind just filters it clean on out. Ever been in a room like that, with music and people talking or screaming so loud you can't even hear yourself screaming to your friend standing right beside you that maybe you should go out side to get some fresh air when you suddenly hear someone calling your name - even with all that damned noise happening? And then you look around and see a friend clear on the other side of the room, standing right beside one of the tower speakers on the stage, and you can see he's calling you - his mouth is moving and his hands are cupped to focus his voice in your direction?
And you actually hear it, but logic and rational thinking disagree and you just forget about it as you make your way across the room and never think twice that the level of sound in the room itself was probably 5 times louder than he could scream to save his life - and yet you heard him?
Yeah, we humans... we're a piece of work.
Anyway, lossy compression will take the original audio data and subject it to some fairly complex mathematical models and processes that determine what you would consciously hear and take note of at any given moment of time and what you would not hear consciously - and then it takes the part(s) that you would not hear (the tapping of the foot, from the example above) and then throws it out, literally. Those bits, that audio information expressed in a digital form is simply removed from the equation and what you're left with is less information overall but enough to let you hear what you wanted in the first place:
The music the band was playing. Yeah, I took the long road to get that explanation done, but... that's about it.
Hence, the file you end up with - typically an mp3 file - is about 10x smaller in general because literally 90% of the audio from the original data isn't consciously noticed or paid attention to and according to the mathematics and the psychoacoustic model used by the mp3 encoder literally throws all that stuff out. You're left with what you'd consciously hear, period. The reason that lossy compression works so well in most respects is that our frail limited human hearing can easily deal with the ripped out gutted audio that we get as the result of audio compression: it's not the same as the original, and can be proven to be totally different, but when decoded and played back, to the vasty majority of us, it sounds good enough like the original data off the CD. That's where the quality of each encoder comes into play (no pun intended).
Some encoders do this type of conversion from original data to compressed lossy format very well, and as far as mp3 goes, LAME is the best. AAC is another format, very popular, with a different psychoacoustic model that sounds different because it works differently than mp3 does, but the concept is the same: it throws out data that isn't consciously noticed leaving just the meat and potatoes, you could say.
Bleh. If you want to learn more about this sort of thing, the place to go is www.hydrogrenaudio.org - the home of psychoacoustic audio compression discussions and other related topics on the Internet. Can't recommend it enough...
Content on the original CD = CD quality, meaning the best it's going to get based on the capabilities of CD audio, 44.1 kHz sampling rate, 16 bits per sample. Sure there's SuperAudioCD, and Digital Audio Discs, but that's going too far. We're talking about regular old CDs you buy at Wal-Mart or some chain music retailer or bookstore these days.
FLAC = a "lossless" audio codec (hence the name FLAC = Free Lossless Audio Codec). FLAC is a format of psychoacoustic audio compression - fancy term for compressing the audio data into a smaller "package." The big thing to learn and understand is the difference between lossless and lossy:
Think of a text file, say a story you wrote. Now, let's say it's a few hundred thousand bytes long - each character being one byte of information. You decide you want to put that story into a Zip file to email it to friends, family, etc. You fire up your compression program, could be WinZip, WinRAR, 7Zip, whatever. When that compression program is done, you end up with a <insert file extension here> file that's a helluva lot smaller than the original text file, don't you? Of course.
Now, let's say you want to uncompress or extract that file and get your text file back, so you fire up the software (if required) and do the uncompress extract task. Guess what - you now have the same file again, a copy of it as you don't want to delete the original, and they're exactly the same in terms of size, content, etc.
That's an example of lossless compression - compression happened, and decompression happened, and you ended up with exactly the same results in the end, the same file, without losing a single dotted i or a crossed t. Got it?
Ok, now let's say you did that and when you decompressed the archive you actually got the file back, but it was missing oh say, half the content, and instead of a sentence looking like this:
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country."
you got this:
" ow i th t me f r al go d me to com t the ai of th ir cou ry."
Missing some parts there, but in a weird sort of way you may even be able to still read it. Wheel Of Fortune was always fun for me as I'd get the answers way way before the people on TV did... seriously.
The compression was lossy in the sense that it did compress the original file - as the audio data would be compressed - but when "played back" it's just a rough facsimile of the original but you can just make out that it's the orignal file, to some degree.
Yes this is a somewhat clumsy analogy for the lossy compression side of it, lossless is easy - you get back exactly what you put into it after decompression. With respect to audio data, when using lossless compression, when that lossless file (FLAC, or some other lossless format) is decompressed and played back so you can hear it, you get back exactly the same audio data (bit for bit) that you have in the original content on the CD. They're exactly the same.
That's not the case with lossy compression. Lossy compression works off acoustic principles like the fact that in a loud room with a lot of noisy people talking and making loud noises with music playing very loudly because there's a loud band on stage playing music loudly that you probably can't consciously hear the guy sitting in the corner tapping his foot on his barstool.
But theoretically his tapping is still making a sound that's traveling through that room and is somewhere lost in the jumble of all the other sounds to the point where your conscious mind just filters it clean on out. Ever been in a room like that, with music and people talking or screaming so loud you can't even hear yourself screaming to your friend standing right beside you that maybe you should go out side to get some fresh air when you suddenly hear someone calling your name - even with all that damned noise happening? And then you look around and see a friend clear on the other side of the room, standing right beside one of the tower speakers on the stage, and you can see he's calling you - his mouth is moving and his hands are cupped to focus his voice in your direction?
And you actually hear it, but logic and rational thinking disagree and you just forget about it as you make your way across the room and never think twice that the level of sound in the room itself was probably 5 times louder than he could scream to save his life - and yet you heard him?
Yeah, we humans... we're a piece of work.
Anyway, lossy compression will take the original audio data and subject it to some fairly complex mathematical models and processes that determine what you would consciously hear and take note of at any given moment of time and what you would not hear consciously - and then it takes the part(s) that you would not hear (the tapping of the foot, from the example above) and then throws it out, literally. Those bits, that audio information expressed in a digital form is simply removed from the equation and what you're left with is less information overall but enough to let you hear what you wanted in the first place:
The music the band was playing. Yeah, I took the long road to get that explanation done, but... that's about it.
Hence, the file you end up with - typically an mp3 file - is about 10x smaller in general because literally 90% of the audio from the original data isn't consciously noticed or paid attention to and according to the mathematics and the psychoacoustic model used by the mp3 encoder literally throws all that stuff out. You're left with what you'd consciously hear, period. The reason that lossy compression works so well in most respects is that our frail limited human hearing can easily deal with the ripped out gutted audio that we get as the result of audio compression: it's not the same as the original, and can be proven to be totally different, but when decoded and played back, to the vasty majority of us, it sounds good enough like the original data off the CD. That's where the quality of each encoder comes into play (no pun intended).
Some encoders do this type of conversion from original data to compressed lossy format very well, and as far as mp3 goes, LAME is the best. AAC is another format, very popular, with a different psychoacoustic model that sounds different because it works differently than mp3 does, but the concept is the same: it throws out data that isn't consciously noticed leaving just the meat and potatoes, you could say.
Bleh. If you want to learn more about this sort of thing, the place to go is www.hydrogrenaudio.org - the home of psychoacoustic audio compression discussions and other related topics on the Internet. Can't recommend it enough...
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- Jun 6, 2000
- Messages
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^^^^ wow long reply.
OP can always try an XMod.
I actually dump all my audio into wav from vinyl.. when I need the space I will compress to lossless but space is real cheap nowadays but I'm more lazy than anything.
OP can always try an XMod.
I actually dump all my audio into wav from vinyl.. when I need the space I will compress to lossless but space is real cheap nowadays but I'm more lazy than anything.