mp3 = Missing Music.. FLAC/LOSSLESS

[Simbalage21]

Hey just sharing some recent learned information. I upgraded my car system and found some focal test cds (6) and couldnt play them. Found out ther were in high quality apple lossless. While I hate anything to do with apple this interested me, I found flac is just as good and your music quality is untouched whearas mp3 actually disgards some of the notes ect, while smearing some of them together. I really thought I would mention it for people who are planning on backing up all there cds, because I did this long ago in mp3 and got rid of my cds. FLAC and Apple lossless means it is compressed (like a zip) but you loose 0 quality should you decide to burn onto cd later.. The only drawback is filesize (5mb to like 30) however with the price of hard drives this is fairly not much space in exchange for quality.. I look at it this way its always easier to convert a high quality file on the fly to throw on your mp3 player ect.. then to have an mp3 and its impossible to "upgrade" it back to the original. Think of it like resizing a picture. big can always go small, but not the other way around.. I'd like to see a filesharing network one day for these hi-quality files .. as they smoke mp3z.. and more players will have support for these lossless formats.. I am not advertising for anyone, just sharing my findings incase some dont know. When you've got an amp'ed car audio setup you definatly can hear the difference..

[ppia600]

Yes, Mp3 sucks and so does WMA. You should be able to hear the difference.

[Simbalage21]

Exactly! But with the way they push mp3 players ect.. and its actually a standard now its nuts.. I didnt know there was such thing as a format that is no quality loss.. If I pay 0.99 a song they should come like that.. Nothing against mp3, I mean I recally back in the day the controversy over midi files. I had a collection of these at one point and that was back when a 1.3gb hard drive was very large and expensive. But wow! My wife said she couldnt tell the difference between a flac and a 128kb mp3. I said "your ears are broke" even the dogs ears are going up noticing the difference LMAO

[ppia600]

Yeah, it sucks when I use my jump drives because there is a speed limit on the player and if I want good quality I get way less files on the drives. I don't like running cd's in the player often because of the worry of wearing it out, lol.

[Simbalage21]

Originally Posted by ppia600

Yeah, it sucks when I use my jump drives because there is a speed limit on the player and if I want good quality I get way less files on the drives. I don't like running cd's in the player often because of the worry of wearing it out, lol.

I hear ya about the lazers going. As far as thumb drives go, ipods, mp3 players where space is a concern, then by all means use the highest bitrate suitable for your device, or at least 192. But for archival (storing) and listing on pc use a lossless codec.. Once you got it on pc in lossless, then you can use a converter to convert the lossless to whatever suits your device(s) and still be confident that the original cd per-say is sitting in your pc in format like flac or apple lossless, with 100% quality. I belive winamp and possibly media player will sync and convert when you insert a thumb drive or player too. Are you sure its not the thumb drive? depending on the specs it should say what the max birtate it can play

[Simbalage21]

Here is a screen shot of my ludacriss album that was in m4a (Apple Lossless). Converted To Flac. Wonderful thing is when converting between lossless formats although the file size may change, The content is still 100% as the original
Flac uses a small (and I Mean Small) Difference over the apple lossless. One big problem with the apple lossless is its hard to tell if the m4a is actually lossless being the extension is also used by lossy file formats too.. bummer

[FairfaxStu]

Originally Posted by ppia600

Yes, Mp3 sucks and so does WMA. You should be able to hear the difference.

Actually, there is a lossless option for WMA. Most of the 94,000 songs in my archive are ripped to this format and they sound just as good as they do on the original CD's.

On a side note, I use J. River Media Center for playback because Windows Media Player cannot handle a library of this size. I am not sure that iTunes would either since I have never tried. I do have a mini version of my library (~3000 songs) in iTunes for playback on my iPod. I ripped these into the Apple lossless format directly from my WMA lossless files.

[ppia600]

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but when I use the wma format to get ~250 songs on one disc it sounds horrible, makes 192kbs mp3 even sound great in comparison.

Originally Posted by FairfaxStu

Actually, there is a lossless option for WMA. Most of the 94,000 songs in my archive are ripped to this format and they sound just as good as they do on the original CD's.

On a side note, I use J. River Media Center for playback because Windows Media Player cannot handle a library of this size. I am not sure that iTunes would either since I have never tried. I do have a mini version of my library (~3000 songs) in iTunes for playback on my iPod. I ripped these into the Apple lossless format directly from my WMA lossless files.

[FairfaxStu]

Originally Posted by ppia600

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but when I use the wma format to get ~250 songs on one disc it sounds horrible, makes 192kbs mp3 even sound great in comparison.

When you say one disc, are you referring to a CD or a DVD? A lossless WMA file should be ~28 MB for a 4 minute song. Hence, you should only be able to fit about 25 songs on a CD.

[Glowbug]

I'd like to see a filesharing network one day for these hi-quality files

Already there.

A lot of the good private torrent trackers have rigourously-enforced FLAC sharing...complete with log files and AccurateRip info from Exact Audio Copy