
FLAC 1.3.0 Released - Tsiolkovsky
https://xiph.org/flac/changelog.html
======
bbx
Flac is a great format.

I've been making music for years and I often work with samples. Luckily,
Ableton Live accepts .flac files. It's important to have high quality samples
considering manipulating the sound (especially time-stretching) can easily
alter its quality.

Unfortunately, it's still hard to obtain music in Flac format. Few online
music stores offer tracks in that format. [1] It's maybe a marketing issue.
Everybody knows what an Mp3 is. It also took me some time to learn that such a
format as Flac existed. But it's also a size issue. Although the compressing
algorithm is incredible, people prefer to download (legally or illegally) a 80
MB album rather than a 500 MB one, regardless of its quality, because they
either won't hear the difference or just don't care. And considering iTunes
doesn't support Flac (only their own Alac format that is even less known),
Flac isn't meant to be widely adopted yet.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_stor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_stores)

~~~
mpyne
I'm in the camp of people who literally can't perceive the difference, so why
would I download the much larger audio?

In fact I can't even tell the difference between 128kbps MP3 and the CD it's
encoded from, let alone superior formats like Opus or AAC or higher-bitrate
MP3.

~~~
dmm
Flac is future proof. You can always take losslessly compressed audio and
convert it to another lossless or lossy format.

You can convert lossy formats but there is no way to tell how the artifacts
will interact.

~~~
mpyne
And yet we save movies to h.264 or WebM and save photographic images to JPEG.

Lossless formats _do_ have their place but it's not as if lossy formats
literally sustain bit rot; they lose information one time and that's it.
Unless, of course, you convert lossy formats, but you should know not to do
that.

If you do have to convert between lossy formats or absolutely need every bit
of data (e.g. RAW photography) then that's one of the places you might find
lossless archival storage useful. But _most_ uses don't need it at all.

~~~
dmm
Lossy formats are useful, no doubt about that. I was just pointing out an
advantage of a lossless format.

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darylfritz
I love FLAC, I just wish it had more mainstream support: I'm looking at _you_
iTunes Player & 160GB iPod Classic.

~~~
unsignedint
Agreed... It was an interesting discovery that Google Music allows you to
upload FLAC, though. While I'm pretty sure actual playback is something lossy,
at least it prevents them transcoding lossy format into another lossy format
for streaming... (or so I heard...)

~~~
dcg
The Google Music Manager program just transcodes FLAC to 320kbps MP3 before
uploading.

[https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1100462?hl=en](https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1100462?hl=en)

~~~
unsignedint
The one thing I know, though, they require FLAC upload for their commercial
music distribution service.

It's actually better than some place, which actually requires a physical CDDA
ROM...

------
bdz
"libFLAC encoder was defaulting to level 0 compression instead of 5"

Level 5 is better imho, as I guess most of us want smaller files not faster
encoding. Computers today are fast enough to do this without a significant
wait.

Also this: Created: 2007-10-19 Closed-fixed: 2009-01-02 Released: 2013-05-26

~~~
Jgrubb
Yeah, any idea why development slowed on this so much? Did they get the codec
so perfect that there was nothing left to do? It's kind of interesting that
something that has seen so little development over the past several years
still dominates this market, or whatever you call it.

~~~
sunseb
Level 0 uses less CPU (and improves battery life).

~~~
Freaky
Only (significantly) on the compression side. Decompressing is about the same
whether you used 0 or 9.

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macalicious
Besides having a lossless compressed audio file, I often wonder, if one can
actually hear the difference between a well compressed mp3 (say, converted
from a flac) and the actual original flac? Is there a real benefit for the
average consumer? The problem I see is the quite large file size.

~~~
mitchi
I have invested a lot of money into good headphones and good speakers and I
can't tell the difference between good lame mp3s and flac...

~~~
pja
Blind test? HydrogenAudio forums will tell you that if it's not a blind A/B
test you can fool yourself very easily.

You might also like to try AAC (or ogg) at a similar bitrate: MP3 has a couple
of encoding peculiarities that are an unavoidable function of the format & if
you know what to listen out for they're fairly obvious even at higher
bitrates. (I'd still be surprised if you could tell the difference between
flac and 320kps mp3 in a blind test though.)

~~~
macalicious
I think you misread "can't" and "can".

~~~
pja
oops: Mea culpa.

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bdz
The official announcement [http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-
dev/2013-June/004223.ht...](http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-
dev/2013-June/004223.html)

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leeoniya
if anyone wants different compiles for windows of a whole lot of various
encoders, including FLAC 1.3.0, check out
[http://www.rarewares.org](http://www.rarewares.org) been using it for years

