It's not about audio quality alone, it's about collecting a flawless source.
If you want or need your library in another format at some point you really should not transcode from a lossy source. You may say that won't ever happen, but storage is cheap it's very short sighted to risk being locked into one format. It's not something you could easily fix later.
I see it as one reason why lossy won't go away: reencoding losses are the tape-to-tape copy of the digital age, the very big M, very small V MVP of DRM: if you can't keep consumers from copying, the least you can do is keeping the master copy to yourself.
> ...the least you can do is keeping the master copy to yourself.
Except that lossless audio is far from hidden and widely available as soon as you look past the iTunes store. I buy my music in a lossless digital format exclusively and frequently - from multiple stores, without any DRM and with no problems at all finding it.
If the music industry tried to lock the lossless source away, I'd say it does a very bad job.
There are others like HDTracks, but they always seem to be selling snake oil to audiophiles. Just my impression. I don't see any point in paying extra for more than CD-quality. I draw the line at 16 Bit / 44.1 KHz.
HDTracks is an example site that often has lossless for sale.
Most importantly, audio CDs still use uncompressed WAV. Buying and ripping the audio CD for a popular album is a pretty surefire method for getting a lossless copy, even if it's not always the easiest.
But you can covert to whatever lossless format you need without worry. Lossless to lossless conversion is possible an infinite number of times (theoretically), vs lossy to lossy you get maybe a couple for free.
As long as you keep the MP3s around, converting to any format for the 100th time is no lossier than the first time. What you need to avoid are chains of lossy formats.
It likely won't, that's true. My point remains though: With storage that cheap and lossless audio sources widely available, why would you not use the lossless option?
MP3 is more widely supported than any lossless audio codec. Lossless compression enables the collector to keep an original.
Not everyone is a collector though - for them, MP3 is probably fine, and if they need a different format later they'll probably just stream, re-encode, or re-purchase, in order of likelihood.
You are unless you're fine with decreasing the quality of your files. While you can convert lossless to lossless as often as you want without any degradation, each time you convert a lossy source to another lossy format it'll decrease audio quality, similar to repeated JPEG conversion.
So long as it's high bitrate (like 320k), then most likely.
If I play only 128k mp3s on a modern hi-fi system, I can tell the difference. I prefer FLAC myself. It's a little more space, but at least I know I have a real archive of a CD.
I have rips of some good bands bands that never made it past the bar scene and who abandoned their MySpace pages long ago, so it's nice to know I have a preserved copy I can share with other audio-nerds.
I rip all my files to flac, mostly because I don't know which lossy formats will be popular in 4 years.
Anyway, anecdote time:
I was actually part of a double blind test.
On a really really good setup with very little background noise I can tell that there is a difference at 320kbit (encoded using LAME) with about 65% reliablity for short pieces of music, which was the second best in the group.
I could not, however, say which sample was better.
You really don't need blind testing to tell that 128kbps MP3s are awful. Certain common instruments will produce blatant artifacting all over the place.
128 is just barely good enough to be tolerable for a lot of people, but nobody would claim it's transparent. AAC does a lot better at that bitrate.
128 is just barely good enough to be tolerable for a lot of people
As someone who grew up loving music while listing to Nth generation tape copies on a really shitty walkman I just don't understand this line of reasoning.
Same here. Also, I now have tinnitus and partial hearing loss, so the audio snobbery makes me incredibly envious of those people that could always hear so much better than I can, such that they just have to complain about hearing the little extra things (or notice the missing bits) that annoy them.
It's great that audiophiles can hear so well, but when they start talking about tubes and premium cables and vinyl records and gold-plated contacts, I just want to give them an otitis media infection that cuts them down to my level. You just don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. I know that's wrong to wish such ill upon others, but it's so much harder to suppress my envy when I'm being inundated by what appears from my perspective to be superstitious nonsense.
As someone who can still somehow enjoy music when it's encoded as a 64k/s MP3 file, I am baffled as to how someone can say the very same music can be bad at 128k/s. I'm just glad that I can still hear it at all!
Depends. If the system more modern than actually hi-fi then chances are high that there is so much hidden DSP signal mangling that all the occlusions and illusions so carefully balanced by the encoder don't work half as good as expected.
Absolutely this. mp3s wreak havoc with Pro Logic II decoders (stereo->surround processors), regardless of the bitrate, by stripping phase information which the DSP uses for sound steering. Also, the extra speakers allow you to spatially isolate sounds that would normally be masked - this can actually be a richer listening experience, but with lossy encoding it's a mess.
More generally, this applies to any scenario where the sound is distorted or altered by something. A crappy speaker might have a perverse frequency response. A room reflection might manifest as a comb filter. Both will destroy the careful masking assumptions of any psychoacoustic model.
Lossy compression should be avoided as an archival format whenever possible, even if you think you know better, because you never know when you might need the information you thoughtlessly threw away.
MP3 isn't transparent. The pre-echo artifact is inherent and unavoidable no matter how high a bitrate you use.
And even if it were, that doesn't make it worthwhile. Gzip compresses plain text by a factor of 4 or 8 and is lossless in the absolute sense, but most of us don't keep our text files in .gz form.
Transparency is relative to the user. In the 192/224kbps range (with a good encoder), only a very small part of the population is able to detect artifacts in a blind test.
Text files are not a good analogy, as they have a different workflow compared to musical files.
There are filesystems that transparently compress large text files. They're not in common use because CPU/disk IO is more expensive than disk space, and filesystem compression has fairly low yield on a standard desktop.
Compression also means less disk I/O, not just space.
I use ZFS and NTFS compression on all the things. For example, ~/.android on my desktop: "Size 1.49 GB, Size on disk 293 MB". Not everything compresses as nicely but in general you can save a lot of space on a desktop.
Yeah I don't know how to check that on ZFS. That result was from NTFS on Windows, I thought the phrase "Size on disk" was enough for everyone to tell it's Windows :D
It's gaining popularity in modern file systems as CPUs paired with fast compression algorithms like lz4 or lzo are generally fast enough nowadays to easily outperform most common storage devices. Saving space also means you need to read or write less form/to the often "slow" medium which makes things faster.
Well, not the first listen. But after MP3s aren't supported anymore and you have to convert it to another lossy format you might start hearing the difference. The point of lossless formats are that you actually own an original. That you have a copy you should be able to convert to anything else no matter what the market trends.
Y2k. I get what you're saying, MP3 is going to be around for a long time, but I really don't this whole craze of leaving future-proofing for the future is a good idea.
Modern Linux machines still ship with FS drivers for Amiga filesystems, and have software to play MOD-files from the early 90s, despite nobody creating new music in that sequencer-format any more.
I think MP3 and us are going to be fine for quite a while. This is after, all not a bug that needs to be fixed.
Basically I don't think about this is a "problem" and this I don't agree about the "pushing it ahead of us" metaphor.
I'm not sure that I care all that much when my original lossless source is some poor quality master tapes or vinyl that somebody has digitized from the 60s or 70s.
