Lossless and MP3's

[noni]

Hi Folks,

About 3/4 years ago decided to stop buying cd's and get digital downloads instead. Reason is, my eyes are getting too old to read the fine print on these small covers inside these cd cases and secondly the cost of shipping with postage is too expensive, specially with the amount I purchase each year.

Getting back to the subject matter, mp3's and compression leave me confused?. I own a Mac with various of their products, including an iPod & iPad... I thought mp3's and 4ma were identical. A 320 kbps size vs a 128 kbps would convert easily over without losing information. Personally thought it was like a zip file Smile...

However I was wrong, any size of file will lose information, regardless of these software claims of transferring information.

Firstly, if you decide to get buy downloads, always get lossless music and not mp3's. Reason being, sound quality is far superior and conversions much simpler. Average size of music with lossless is around 200 - 300 mb in size. Portable hard drives cost around $ 110 for a 3TB WB and is very small indeed. The fact that you need a computer with all this is minor concidering all the cd's I once owned, specially with all the clutter of owning around 2000 plus cd's!..

4ma (apples own equivalent to mp3's at 128 kbps) is not the same as 320kbps. Since apple have dropped the ipod classic now and having portable means of carrying music appears to have moved to cell phones now which I'm quite disappointed at..

Though 4ma music files at 128 and 320 mp3 files sound the same, they will not convert over, without losing some data in the transfer process.

[Zeuhlmate]

wav is lossless, FLAC is almost lossless, the rest is with losses, but whether you can hear it depends on your ears and the equipment.
In any case its not real HiFi, and on good top-gear it will be obvious.

You cant convert low-fi to HiFi, only the other way round.

[Steve F.]

wav is lossless, FLAC is almost lossless....

“FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.”

Every claim for FLAC I have EVER seen says lossless

[mike_hunt]

FLAC is almost lossless

Explain please?

It's not very hard to prove to yourself that FLAC is lossless. Take WAV file, convert to FLAC, then convert back to WAV. The resulting WAV file will be an exact copy of the original.

[Grimjack]

wav is lossless, FLAC is almost lossless, the rest is with losses, but whether you can hear it depends on your ears and the equipment.
In any case its not real HiFi, and on good top-gear it will be obvious.

You cant convert low-fi to HiFi, only the other way round.

FLAC is essentially a “zipped .wav”. It is full-on lossless and identical to .wav (which should be identical to the source it came from). FLAC is also capable of higher resolution than 16/44 CD bit rates, all the way up to 24 bit/192kHz. Playing a CD, .wav or FLAC through a high end system *SHOULD* sound identical (can’t account for things DACs or a CD player that may be higher end that may account for sonic differences). Apple has a lossless format that—confusingly—also ends in an .M4A suffix. The Apple lossless format and FLAC should be sonically identical but depending on what your playback system is will behave differently and have different options for metadata tagging and artwork embedding, as well as different efficiencies in file compression.

[Dave (in MA)]

Explain please?

It's not very hard to prove to yourself that FLAC is lossless. Take WAV file, convert to FLAC, then convert back to WAV. The resulting WAV file will be an exact copy of the original.

Give or take a few bytes for the difference in filenames.

[Jerjo]

Noni, how are you listening to these files? Is the audio from your Mac feeding into headphones or a stereo system?

[noni]

Noni, how are you listening to these files? Is the audio from your Mac feeding into headphones or a stereo system?

Both

[Jerjo]

If that's the case you should go lossless rather than MP3. If it were for a phone or tablet, you likely wouldn't notice the difference but a good pair of headphones or a decent stereo will catch it (depending on the recording quality). You might want to consider getting a DAC at some point.

[progmatist]

With lossy formats, AAC+ (m4a) is superior to MP3 because it's newer, just like Firefox version 61.0.1 is far superior to the old Netscape Navigator upon which it's based. MP3 is based on the audio layer of the Mpeg-1 video codec, which is roughly VHS quality. Even then, Fraunhofer had to make some major tweaks to make it sound decent. AAC+ is part of the Mpeg-4 codec, which is capable of compressing 1080i HD video to a size equal to or smaller than the Mpeg-2 used on DVDs, and it still looks great.

And no, AAC+ is not an Apple technology. That just happens to be company most associated with the format. AAC+ was developed and is owned by a consortium of 4 companies, one of which is Fraunhofer, who still owns the MP3 codec. Yes, MP3 is still a proprietary technology, despite its ubiquitousness. I even remember about a decade or so ago when Fraunhofer released an improved version of MP3 called MP3Pro. It never caught on, so it went the way of Rambus computer memory, and the "Floptical" disc drive.

[3RDegree_Robert]

If you're an Apple user and want a compromise between sound and fill size, definitely-when possible (like at Bandcamp)-buy the Apple Lossless (ALAC) files. Good thing about Bandcamp is you can go back and download the ALAC again if earlier you downloaded an inferior file like mp3 or iTunes format (AAC).

[progmatist]

^^ Another good thing about lossless formats like ALAC and FLAC is files can be trans-coded between them, or to and from the raw WAV or AIFF with little or no perceptible loss in sound quality. In lossy formats, the losses occur in different areas for each codec, so they accumulate when trans-coding. In the past, I've trans-coded from Apple m4a to mp3 to work with my car's mp3 player. The sound quality was noticeably deficient, but with road noise, it didn't really matter.