[Jesse40902]

I was asking a friend this question online. he said bascially any music that is encoded at higher than 320 kbs...any truth to that?

 

[darkninja67]

no truth to that. Lossless is just that: It retains the originals information. MP3, ATRAC, AAC, WMA are all lossy formats. They use codecs to compress the file size down to more manageable sizes (for DAPs like iPods and such)

 

[Jesse40902]

So what is considered Lossless music then? Which format is considered lossless.....

I heard people around here love to put lossless type of music in their portables ( ie: ipods)

 

[Gaughtfried]

Would .wav be considered a lossless format...?

 

[Jimothy]

No, you can have OGG and MPC higher than 320 I believe.
Lossless gives you the (actual, not just perceived) quality of a WAV file, with a smaller size and tags. Lossless codecs inlude FLAC, Monkey's Audio (APE), ALAC, SHN, and a few others.

For the record, this question doesn't belong in the Headphones forum.

Edit: whoa I certainly wasn't the first to jump on this one.

Lossless formats that can be used on portables so far are WAV, FLAC, ALAC, and Kenwood's proprietary format for their own player.

 

[Vul Kuolun]

"Lossless" means no information is lost during the compression process;
lossless:11110000=4x1,4x0
lossy: "as you cant hear the last too "00" anyway, so lets just not store it"

Something like that, i think.

 

[darkninja67]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vul Kuolun "Lossless" means no information is lost during the compression process; lossless:11110000=4x1,4x0 lossy: "as you cant hear the last too "00" anyway, so lets just not store it" Something like that, i think.

perceptual encoding?

IIRC ATRAC and high bit rate MP3s take out the data (music) that is obscured by louder notes in a file. This is how the file ends up being smaller than the original (CD or .wav file). I may be wrong here though.

 

[Ahriman4891]

Lossless is basically just a characteristic of a compression format--it means when decompressed, the file will be identical to the original source. E.g. .ZIP, .RAR, etc. are lossless formats--an unzipped text file is a BIT-PERFECT copy of the original file.

Now, whether the original file was "lossless" is a totally different question. E.g. a zipped 64K mp3 is technically a lossless compression (in comparison to the mp3), but the source (the mp3 itself) was lossy to begin with. Some people will argue that CD-audio is also lossy, since it cannot store frequencies over 22.05 KHz and thus some harmonics will be lost from the actual sound in the studio.

However, 99% of music is sold on CDs. "Lossless" refers to file formats (.FLAC, .ALAC, Monkey Audio, etc.) such that if you convert that file back to .WAV, it will be a bit-perfect copy of the original source you had on the CD.

Hope this wasn't too confusing

 

[Vul Kuolun]

Quote:

Originally Posted by darkninja67 perceptual encoding? IIRC ATRAC and high bit rate MP3s take out the data (music) that is obscured by louder notes in a file. This is how the file ends up being smaller than the original (CD or .wav file). I may be wrong here though.

As you can´t hear a information because it is masked by something louder, it is discarded during the encoding; At least, this is what i believe.

Let the scientists speak.

 

[stmpjmp]

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....ess_comparison

If you need an actual definition of lossless still, click the first hyperlink on that page.

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jesse40902 I was asking a friend this question online. he said bascially any music that is encoded at higher than 320 kbs...any truth to that?

That myth comes from most people not being able to hear the difference between the original and the "lossy" copy when its encoded at 320kbs. That doesnt mean info wasnt lost, it WAS. Simply means that people (for the most part) dont notice whats missing.

 

[ZackT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by stmpjmp http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....ess_comparison If you need an actual definition of lossless

As I understand it in order to squeeze music on a CD they already leave information out. So a CD is technically not as lossless as it could be. But when people talk of Lossless encoding they are normally taking the CD as the orig format, then, any file ripped from that CD, with no info lost - is lossless.

 

[angler31337]

The confusion here is between a lossless and an audibly lossless format. Lossless formats have been well explained thus far. One way to think about a true lossless format is that you can (in theory, at least) uncompress it to get back to the original sound file.

Something is audibly lossless if it is compressed in such a way that those details which are inconsistent with the master copy are either inaudible or unperceivable to a human ear. I think 320 lame is actually a good example of this; it doesn't seem too likely that most people can tell the difference between a 320 mp3 and the original wav.

-Angler

 

[catscratch]

Quote:

Originally Posted by angler31337 Something is audibly lossless if it is compressed in such a way that those details which are inconsistent with the master copy are either inaudible or unperceivable to a human ear. I think 320 lame is actually a good example of this; it doesn't seem too likely that most people can tell the difference between a 320 mp3 and the original wav.

I think that calling something lossless when it's audibly lossless to - let's name an arbitrary figure here - 85% of the population is dangerous and misleading. If you start calling 320k mp3's lossless, then you are effectively implying that there is no need for actual lossless files and are leaving the other 15% of the population in the dust.

I see human hearing accuracy as a bell curve - on one extreme you have the poor blokes that can't tell a 128bit mp3 from the original CD, while at the other extreme you have the equally poor blokes who can't listen to 320bit mp3's because they can readily hear the compression artifacts. The vast majority of people lie in between, but the point of a lossless format is to preserve perfect fidelity period, not perfect fidelity for the average listener.

P.S. Sorry, didn't mean to pick on you

It's just this illustrated my point, which I would have made anyway.

Cheers,
Cat

 

[boead]

Lossless compressors have been around for a long time and were used in archiving data (primarily images). I believe they use a type of fractal algorithm. With slower CPU’s of the past it took a long time to archive and then unarchive a file. Certainly it would have been impossible to do this in real time with a full quality WAV.

Today, these algorithms can be applied to files where the processing (unarchive) can be done in real time. As with all things this takes more power and will inevitably reduce battery time.

We still use fractal image compressors to both store HiRes photos and to also res-up images. In some instances it works nicely, in others not at all. They certainly compress very large HiRes images to smaller sizes.

So the same with audio, the file is compressed for storage then decompressed to its identical format before it’s played. In nearly all cases this end result is either WAV or AIFF. All this is done on the fly by the player if it supports the codec.

There is NO lost data due to compression, the compression is, again, for storage and is reversible.

 

[Chri5peed]

Are WAV files actually 'lossless files' in a true technical sense? I thought WAVs are just the file-type computers have to use to play CD tracks, not off the CD as you'd normally play a CD!

I mean actual lossless codecs like FLAC, ALAC, WAVPACK, etc are compressed versions of WAVs.