MP-3 users, don't you regret going into "audiphile" relams ?

[Sherwood]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Al_Gore /img/forum/go_quote.gif I do not regret taking the initiative and venturing forth into "audiophile" realms. After all, taking the initiative is what I'm all about.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Al_Gore /img/forum/go_quote.gif Also, lockboxes.

Let's play a game: "how annoying can a one-note song get in a day?"

Are there no better ways for you to spend a Saturday? 8-year-old political humor?

EDIT: It appears that Mr. Gore was deemed to be electioneering, and since his posts were within 100 feet of a school they have been removed.

 

[audioholik]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Uncle Erik /img/forum/go_quote.gif No regrets! I listened to CDs and AAC files for a good while. I've since largely moved to SACD and vinyl. I'm happier and enjoy the music more. There were some upfront costs, but now I just add more music and enjoy the setup.

I also listen mainly to SACDs and FLACs, currently I'm looking forward to checking some high resolution FLAC files (24/96) although I don't expect to hear any benefits over SACD quality, I think it's yet another good option to experience heaven on headphones

 

[REB]

No regrets. Once I went lossless, I started to enjoy my recordings more.

 

[jonathanjong]

A little bit of regret. My 500 GB hard drive just ran out of space...

I can't tell the difference between 320 kbps mp3/aac and ALAC, so that's how I'm going now. I back up my CDs in ALAC though, just in case.

 

[matt_wants]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shoreman /img/forum/go_quote.gif At the risk of stating the obvious, or reiterating something you're already aware of, you've wasted alot of space on your ipod by ripping to "full quality" AIFF. Ripping to ALAC accomplishes the same thing qualitatively and would leave you with considerably more space to fill with music.

Which option is ALAC in iTunes? I merely used 'full quality' as that is one of two options for lossless in iTunes that I can see and I chose AIFF simply because Garageband exports in AIFF and have never used Apple Lossless. If I can use another form of lossless which uses less space then I'd be appreciative to be told which option is best.

 

[mow_the_hawk]

I have been using 320 kbps but now I am ripping ALAC. It sounds much better.

 

[QuadwinG]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DefectiveAudioComponent /img/forum/go_quote.gif MP3s also sound much better with good gear. Don't take my word for it, just listen.

Truth

 

[Shoreman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by matt_wants_hp890s_again /img/forum/go_quote.gif Which option is ALAC in iTunes? I merely used 'full quality' as that is one of two options for lossless in iTunes that I can see and I chose AIFF simply because Garageband exports in AIFF and have never used Apple Lossless. If I can use another form of lossless which uses less space then I'd be appreciative to be told which option is best.

You should see "Apple Lossless Encoder" as one of your options in the "Import Using:" drop-down menu. That is ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). AIFF and ALAC are both lossless, but ALAC will save you roughly 30-40% more space since it is a compressed format.

 

[matt_wants]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shoreman /img/forum/go_quote.gif You should see "Apple Lossless Encoder" as one of your options in the "Import Using:" drop-down menu. That is ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). AIFF and ALAC are both lossless, but ALAC will save you roughly 30-40% more space since it is a compressed format.

Cheers.

 

[Shoreman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by matt_wants_hp890s_again /img/forum/go_quote.gif Cheers.

Right back at ya...

 

[gav17]

320 kbps sounds too bad for me. Too big difference from cd-audio

 

[tintin47]

Quote:

Originally Posted by krmathis /img/forum/go_quote.gif Lossless codec (like ALAC, FLAC, WavPack, ...) indeed use compression. lossless compression just like Zip, Rar, 7z, ...

I thought that lossless just deleted the wavelengths above hearing volume and the info for wavelengths that aren't being used at a given time. That is why an acoustic album can have lossless of 600kbps and more rock albums can have ~1000kbps

Also, for me, I feel like an idiot sometimes because the differences i hear depend on the music so much. With spoon's album ga ga ga ga ga barely hear the diff between 160 and lossless. With other albums, tho the mp3s hurt my ears because they sound so bad. Anyone got an explanation for this?

 

[ericj]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tintin47 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I thought that lossless just deleted the wavelengths above hearing volume and the info for wavelengths that aren't being used at a given time. That is why an acoustic album can have lossless of 600kbps and more rock albums can have ~1000kbps Also, for me, I feel like an idiot sometimes because the differences i hear depend on the music so much. With spoon's album ga ga ga ga ga barely hear the diff between 160 and lossless. With other albums, tho the mp3s hurt my ears because they sound so bad. Anyone got an explanation for this?

No, see, that would represent a loss of data, and thus wouldn't be considered "lossless".

 

[tintin47]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ericj /img/forum/go_quote.gif No, see, that would represent a loss of data, and thus wouldn't be considered "lossless".

Then how do you explain that different songs ripped lossless have different bitrates? Also, how would you explain that lossless files take up only 50-60% of the space that the information would require were it directly recorded onto a harddrive?

Edit: I misunderstood what I read. The files are smaller because the program looks for redundant data and uses that to make the overall file smaller.

 

[ericj]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tintin47 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Then how do you explain that different songs ripped lossless have different bitrates? Also, how would you explain that lossless files take up only 50-60% of the space that the information would require were it directly recorded onto a harddrive?

As for your second question, they take up a fraction of the original space for the same reason as a zip or rar file takes up a fraction of the space occupied by the original files in it. I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty details, but at least in FLAC for sure, no information at all is discarded. If you want to know more, google it. Lossless data compression is nothing new, the lossless audio codecs are just compression schemes that are tailored for audio streams.

If you can't believe it's true, that's your problem. Zip up a spreadsheet and then unzip it. Your data is still there. The math is different but the theory is the same.

As for differing bitrates, for any given lossless compression system - whether it's compressing spreadsheets or music - the compression ratio necessarily dependent on how easy it is to find redundant bits in it and then describe them, and most compression systems can be configured variably for how hard to look.

zip for example has 9 levels of 'compression' that are really just 9 different settings for how wide a net it should cast. On higher levels, it spends more cycles on the search, and has a harder time describing it (with the result that zip -9 sometimes creates a slightly larger file than a lower setting might have). I don't have intimate familiarity with all the lossless formats, but the existence of this sort of functionality would come as no surprise.

If someone were to apply a bandpass filter to the audio before compressing it, as you suggest, this would reduce the size of the resulting file somewhat - but then the file could not truly be called lossless, and whoever created it would rightly be made the recipient of much scorn.

Some lossless codecs, like OptimFROG, offer a hybrid mode where some data is stored in a lossy format. FLAC and ALAC do not.

What i propose to you is to rip a short track from a CD as WAV, encode that WAV as FLAC, and then decode the FLAC back to another WAV file. This should be easy to do with mplayer/mencoder or other free tools. Then you can use any of innumerable free binary file comparison tools to determine what, if any differences exist between them. You will find that file header information differs between the wav files, but as long as both wavs are in the original S16LE format as used on the CD, the audio stream will be identical.