____twoism

Am I the only person here who appreciates the benefits of lossless audio?

I don't understand why the internet is so drenched in terrible 192kbps MP3 rips when someone could make the extra effort and encode to FLAC or, better yet (with a CD) simply post the uncompressed WAV files from the disk.

This also carries over to live music. Why bother posting a soundboard-sourced recording in 192? And yet, I see it all the time!.

[/rant]

Bandwidth baby.




In an awful lot of places, upload speeds are still terrible. Also, a lot of audio devices still don't support FLAC or even WAV.

I understand, and agree with the sentiment of your post, but those are the reasons.

Most MP3's are in 192kbit simply because most people, especially above a certain age, wouldn't hear the difference with lossless audio if their life depended on it.

Also, why would it desirable to have people post uncompressed wavs? FLAC is supposed to be completely lossless just like WAV, and in theory it should be possible to recreate the original WAV file from a FLAC file to the point of complete binary similarity, so unless you enjoy downloading huge files compared to files half that size (if I recall FLAC's average compression ratio correctly), or if the CPU overhead of decompressing a FLAC is undesirable for you, there really is no point in doing that.

File size, price, and limited use (most portable audio players cant play FLAC) all contribute to the low demand for lossless audio. Lossy music is a lot more convenient for most folks, so you're going to find a lot of it out there. Let's face it, your average Joe on the street can't tell the difference anyway, especially considering that they're probably using those shitty iPod earbuds and not the high-end headphones most of us Twoismers are so fond of.

I love a good FLAC myself. Even though my MP3 player can play them I only keep a small amount of it on there anyway- I've got lots of music and limited memory

I like flac.

I've got over 15,000 songs on my iPod. It'd have to be huge if they were all lossless.

I rip in flac. I don't use a portable media player though. That's why media is removable, guys. buy cds.

Cryabetes wrote:That's why media is removable, guys. buy cds.

Agreed

Not at all. Most of my music is in .flac on both my pmp and PC, and I agree that the internet's general lack of quality concern is horrible. Not saying that .flac is necessary for everyone, because most people don't even have adequate hardware to get the benefit, but 320 kbps mp3's are so much noticeably better than 192 and they don't take up much space at all. Would be nice if people would just transcode to 320 all the time.

All of the music on my iPod is in 320 kbps MP3. Anything lower than that is unacceptable to me. lossy is noticeable enough at 320. It's great for when I'm listening to it in the car or through my Sony-stereo speakers. But, when I'm listening to it through my professional monitors or through my headphones, I find myself digging out the CD.

Especially for when I do reviews for the blog..