#Flac

[sandybrett]

I have a strange question.

Lossy audio compression formats work by cutting out frequencies that are difficult for humans to hear. Most humans cannot easily hear the difference between a medium-quality mp3 and a lossless audio file. But cats can hear higher frequencies than we can, so to them, even a high quality lossy file could sound quite different from the original.

I do not currently have a cat, but I hope to have cats someday, and I want to play some songs from my music collection for them to see what they think. My music collection is rather large and I would prefer not to have too many FLAC files.

Does anyone have any idea which lossy audio format(s) would create the best potential listening experience for a cat?

[neververy4]

I have finally downloaded AND ORGANIZED all my current BandCamp music onto my PC.

.flac file format, as it's lossless and I can always compress it later myself if I have to

I have 160 different albums from 53 artists totaling 1,316 songs

[skeletonfumes]

bandcamp friday again, if you feel like supporting bandcamp has waived all their fees for the day. Could us anything atm, kind of desperately lol.

[penniesinthealley]

Car Seat Headrest - Impossible Soul (cover)

[shihlun]

Alan Silva

- Inner Song - Pieces For Bass And Voice

1974

[arctic-hands]

This doesn't have any relevancy to my life rn because my mp3 player only supports, well, mp3s (allegedly it can support audible's proprietary .aax files but not without problems), but exactly is FLAC and how does it compare/contrast to mp3?

[flachighend-flash]

uptown.

[sonicmusic]

CD Title: Vandalize - Mini album About: Contains the song “Vandalize” by “ONE OK ROCK”. This mini album contains 3 different versions of the song: An explicit version, the Japanese version and the regular version.  Track list: pastebin Mediainfo: pastebin Download: OneDrive Password hint: The blog’s creation date in the following format: dd/mm/yy You will need to look at the blog page for this. Size: 189 MB for the FLACs.  Source: These songs were given to me by Windii (Thank you so much). 

[33bowls]

An open letter to Tidal Streaming

I am both an artist ( 33 Bowls ) with material on Tidal and a satisfied, so far, customer. I know what my music sounded like and sounds like, and can state unequivocally that MQA is closer to the real thing than even hi-res HD PCM; the nuances, the textures, the relaxed ease of listening, the details, the space, the timing, the soul of the music are present with MQA in ways that, as good as HD PCM can sound, are simply not quite there with HD PCM (erroneously referred to as HD FLAC, more on that later). Compared to MQA, PCM (including “HD” high bit rate PCM) also has a glare, zing, edge that on some systems can sound brighter and therefore be mis-interpreted as better --- when in fact that is an artifact of PCM sampling that MQA uniquely ameliorates. When you listen to a good MQA demo at a salon, studio or show, you will understand why major players in the music biz have enthusiastically embraced MQA, with 20 Million tracks to date mastered in MQA.

It is understandable but not commendable for Tidal’s new management to hedge their bets on MQA. However, such a backtrack away from the customer base that Tidal built their reputation upon is not necessarily the brightest business strategy. Is Tidal management counting on very short term memory of the existing customer base when backtracking away from the millions of MQA mastered and remastered tracks described by Tidal as this?

“Master. Authenticated files from mastering process. Studio quality. Unrivaled clarity and depth.”

Going after a minority of customers from a smaller competitor while alienating existing customers will “bite you in the butt” eventually. Don’t alienate your existing customer base. All it will take is one streaming competitor, larger or smaller, hosting the millions of MQA tracks that already exist. It would behoove Tidal to pay attention to actual current long term Tidal customers who are the customer base and word of mouth that Tidal has built the business upon, and ignore haters and trolls who are not actually current Tidal customers.

Adding more customer choices, in this case, formats, is usually a good thing, however, excluding an existing customers’ preference as a default option is just plain short sighted.

See, if instead of being swayed by a small but shrill group of sock puppet trolls, haters, and shills, if you actually listen to a good MQA demo at a salon, studio or show, you will understand why major players in the music biz have enthusiastically embraced MQA as evidenced by 20 Million tracks to date mastered in MQA.

Unlike the hodge poge of so called “hi-res” HD PCM and DSD formats vying for attention as incremental improvement at an exponential cost of bandwidth and file size; with no standardized conjugate reconstruction filters, that all to varying degrees have inherent audible time smear aka temporal blur from gibbs phenomena pre and post ringing on transients; while providing no authentication --- no other format or process can do what MQA does: elegantly, efficiently and accurately reproducing all of the music end to end; being backwards compatible with existing equipment and infrastructure, and being able to clean up existing digital masters.

As to the misnomer of “specialized decoder” --- not needed. As MQA is backwards compatible, MQA files can play back with improved fidelity on legacy 1fs 44.1/48 DACs and decoders with no USB driver issues. So called hi-res HD PCM “FLAC” files are not plug and play, and do actually need specialized drivers, hardware and software. For instance, Tidal Desktop with MQA software decoding, aka first unfold enabled, feeding an R2R DAC can sound quite nice. Such an option as default needs to remain in future updates of Tidal Desktop, Android and Apple apps.

It’s ludicrous that this needs to be explained again: FLAC is a container, not the contents. When streaming bit perfect PCM material, whether CD quality 44.1/16, or so called hi-res HD PCM, or authenticated MQA, bit perfect lossless bit packing that FLAC uses was invented by the same Bob Stuart who also happens to be a co-developer of MQA. So, he wrote the book on that. He knows what he is doing. More here:

https://www.tumblr.com/33bowls/714450718525947904/mqa-faq

https://www.aes.org/journal/online/JAES_V67/5/

In summary: the internet is full of obnoxious sock puppets, trolls, haters, shills. You should know better than to listen to or be swayed by them. There are good reasons why top recording engineers, producers, mastering engineers prefer MQA as closer to the source than other formats and processes. Take good care of MQA, as MQA has taken good care of you, and will continue to do so, if you are up for it.

Update: 

It appears that at least some of the tracks that Tidal is now claiming are HD PCM “Tidal max” are likely up-sampled MQA 44.1k or 48k folded tracks. One label states that their streamed tracks, directly or via aggregator, are all MQA, and that none have been resubmitted as 96k or 192k HD PCM. Unlike MQA’s inclusion of embedded proof of provenance coded and buried in the dither, to indicate that the bitstream is bit for bit perfect from the studio, the flac container has no such provision for authentication. So, HD PCM “Tidal max” files could be upsampled versions of folded MQA sources, and there is no way to prove or disprove that assertion, except to perform real time FFTs of the files. And, there is more to MQA than just sample rate: correct conjugate filtering with minimal time smear or dispersion on transients also known as de-blurring is a perceptually significant feature of MQA, which is ruined when an MQA file is up-sampled rather than unfolded. Max, as HD or high bit rate PCM delivered via FLAC container as a “preferred” default is a step backwards compared to the excellent sonics of MQA, also delivered via FLAC container.

What say, Tidal?

What are the sources of your streamed files?

[netscapenavigator-official]

I spent the last three days converting my music library from Apple Music to a 700+ file FLAC collection. It was miserable. But on the bright side, I’ve rediscovered music that I haven’t listen to in years.

[composingliger]

“What the...?”

Want to download that album you purchased from Bandcamp, but don’t know which one of the eight different audio formats to pick? Here’s a short flowchart!

(If you want to know why these specific choices, go here!)

[lebrickster]

Is Lossless Music Really Worth It?

DISCLAIMER: The following is a repost of the one and only thing I posted about on my shortlived Blogspot page. I never really had the motivation to use the page at the time, and considering how I am using Tumblr now, I have even less reason to use it again. Never the less, I think this writeup may interest some of the folk who know me, and follow me. - Lossless music is something that many folk (including myself) cherish, and seek out, whenever they can, but is it really something to recommend to just about anyone?

Before the advent of compression algorithms, like MP3, Vorbis, Opus, and all those other ones, all you would do is put a CD into your CD Player, and just listen to the songs on the Disc, without much thought. But then, there eventually came a desire to have those songs as digital files on folk's own computers. However, due to the nature of CD Audio, the files ended up being huge, meaning if you wanted to digitize your CD collection in full quality, it would take up a decent chunk of hard drive space that, for most folk, was just considered too dang much. Enter compression tech like MP3, which was able to take those massive WAV files, and compress them to a much smaller size, that made keeping the songs on your hard drive, much more reasonable. For many folk, back then, and even now, they either couldn't notice the difference, or found it not to be a big deal, so many folk started ripping their music to these compressed formats, and even saving their original works in compressed formats, since the space saved was just too appealing to pass up on.

Overtime, however, folk slowly began to realize just how poor MP3 could sound, especially on lower compression settings. With bigger hard drives becoming cheaper with time, demand then began to rise for having music in it's original quality, without the audio quality being severely affected, as codecs like MP3 could do. This demand gave birth to codes like FLAC and APE, which could compress those large WAV files, while still keeping all of the relevant data intact, with no quality loss, unlike MP3. FLAC in particular continues to be a popular choice for ripping and distributing songs, since the space saved is undeniable, and there's little to no loss in audio quality, using it. (why else would it be called a Free LOSSLESS Audio Codec?)

With the background set, we now get back to the original question I asked, which is, can I really recommend Lossless music to just about anyone? This was something I was unsure of myself for a while, in truth. While I had long since been into Lossless music, and strongly urged all of my friends to also jump the same ship, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that may not be the best move for folk. Sure, someone like me can hear the difference between compressed audio, and a Lossless source, but will most other folk know the difference? Most folk usually cannot tell the difference between a compressed and Lossless source, either due to not having the ear to hear that kind of thing, their audio equipment not really making the difference apparent, or just simply not caring, if they can hear the difference. As a result, no, I can't really recommend Lossless audio to just anyone.

Unless you can hear beyond the general frequencies that compressed codecs are at, or can hear things like how compressed codecs can mess up how drums sound, recommending Lossless music to just about anyone is not something I suggest. Even with innovations like the FLAC format, Lossless music still takes up more space than compressed formats, which can be hard to justify, especially if for some of those songs, you only listen to them, once in a blue moon. To hear the full spectrum that Lossless audio can offer, you need to be able to even hear the differences between Lossless and compressed, and have the listening equipment to do so. Getting headphones that can properly illustrate that difference is not cheap in the slightest, and unless you use headphones 24/7 (like I do), it's not exactly a purchase I could push someone to make, as what if they end up not liking the headphones, or rarely using them?

While I struggle to recommend Lossless audio to that of normal users, I can, however, still recommend it to folk who make and edit videos. One thing I HATE hearing in YouTube videos is music for a game that just sounds awful, due to a really bad compressed YouTube source being used for the music in question. Due to the nature of videos, they get compressed, including the audio, so if you use a compressed audio source in the video, it will get compressed again by your video editor, and then AGAIN when it's uploaded to YouTube, which is awful. To try and avoid that sort of quality loss, using Lossless audio sources in your project (when possible) is something I strongly recommend, so those with an ear for that kind of thing, won't be going insane when a song comes on, due to how bad the compression on it is.

That was a lot of words, perhaps too much, but in summary, no I can't exactly recommend Lossless music to just about anyone. The space it takes up can only be justified if you can actually hear the difference, as if you can't, you're wasting precious hard disk space that could be used for other things. Though if you can hear the difference, and have the money to splurge on good headphones, go for it.

[blogstory]

Tym razem polecam coś co znalazłem dosłownie potykając się o telefon z włączonym Tidal'em, cover "Nothing compares 2 U", który popełnia Nikka Costa. Nie wiem czy wiecie drogie dzieci, że oryginalnie to utwór artysty znanego jako Prince, który to stał się wielkim hitem po tym jak swoją wersję zaprezentowała światu szalona i przeważnie łysa Shuhada' Sadaqat znana jako Sinéad O'Connor.

Tym sposobem artyści znani z barwnych osobowości jak i z faktu iż nagrywali pod kilkoma różnymi pseudonimami, rozpropagowali kawałek rozkręcając modę na nagrywanie coverów cudzych piosenek.

Sugeruje odsłuch z pomocą przyzwoitych głośników, jak np JBL 52 Classic lub przy ELAC Debut 2.0 B5.2, albo monitorów CANTONa (ale z tych produkowanych jeszcze w RFN...)

High fidelity lossless audio, from 16-bit 44.1 kHZ FLAC up to max: 24-bit, 192 kHz HiRes FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) available on Tidal, link:

https://tidal.com/track/75873826

& Lo quality mp4/mp3 on You Tube:

Screen from my device:

[pavlo812]

Download “ Jungle Cakes Presents: We Need Jungle (Mixed by Saxxon) ” FLAC + MP3

[shihlun]

Sabu Toyozumi / Mototeru Takagi

– If Ocean Is Broken (Rec.1971)

2009