Lossless - meh, can't decide if I love it, or hate it.

[whatnow]

What do you think of Lossless Audio?

I often see great albums which are pretty big in file size and I often wonder if they're worth downloading to then either keep or re-encode. I've also thought about just blocking the group on newzbin just so I can forget they exist. 600mb for a album seems rough when it should be about 80mb.

am I digitally uptight??!

Better still, do people here encode their own stuff all in Lossless and have an additional 400MB or so of additional data for each album? and if so, is it really worth it?

[marcode]

ive havent encoded mp3s for about 5 years...

and ive never downloaded lossless audio. saying that i only have a few mp3's that are encoded at less than 192kbps, most being 320 or above. anything above 192 is pretty much cd equivalent anyway... give or take

half a gig for an album is pointless. if i cant hear the difference, who cares.

[Freddy]

Yeah I go for 320 if about or 192 will do fine. I guess if you were to pump sounds out on a fuckoff system then you would hear distortion on 192(?). But for ipods/home it just fine.

[DJAd]

Yeah I go for 320 if about or 192 will do fine. I guess if you were to pump sounds out on a fuckoff system then you would hear distortion on 192(?)

Big time, if you play a 320kbps mp3 file over a decent PA system you can notice the difference from a CD / vinyl source, never heard lossless. What the fuck is it? I've heard the name. Just another compression method?

[marcode]

mp3 removes the sound that humans cant hear..

shit like .flac and ogg vorbis dont as far as im aware

[Over Carl]

I used to have an enormous amp hooked up to my pc, could hear distortion with most tracks less than 192.

Since then, I won't d/l anything less than 192 unless I'm really desperate, but if I (very rarely) am ripping myself, I always choose lossless. Reason being, that old amp was made in 1984 and obviously analogue. With advances in technology - I wouldn't be surprised if in 10-20 years, I have an setup that shits all over any I've ever had before. Finding 20 year old tracks then will probably be a lot harder.

[marcode]

Finding 20 year old tracks then will probably be a lot harder.

doubt it.. i think its trending the opposite way m8.

[whatnow]

Lossless is exactly as you should expect;

Lossless data compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. This can be contrasted to lossy data compression, which does not allow the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data.

Sadly my encoding settings for cd ripping at a pretty skanky 128kbps and i'll download anything in whatever format is available. I am increasingly buying all the CD's i love, or vinyls anyway, so I can always change in the future.

I only download via ng's so when I see a album i've not seen for ages and it's lossless, or it's completely rare (live set, rare recording) i'll grab it in lossless. Setting up WMP for Flac/Ogg is no issue, just install VLC seems to do the job. It's when I see albums and albums of the stuff and I just think i'm working on a 5-10:1 ratio of downloadable music it makes me evaluate the music I want to download.

Perhaps I just think about it too much

[Over Carl]

Big time, if you play a 320kbps mp3 file over a decent PA system you can notice the difference from a CD / vinyl source, never heard lossless. What the fuck is it? I've heard the name. Just another compression method?

Most pa systems I've seen are f***in loud, but not amazing quality. Also just wondering, was it a pc with a decent soundcard and decent cable? Reason being that I wouldn't expect distortion to be noticeable at 320, but could easily be explained by a cheap/onboard soundcard.

[QfanatiQ]

I always look for flac or similare with either a .cue sheet or incoded withing the file (then play in Foobar).

This woudl be mainly for mixed albums though so i dont get the break.

I much prefer this but hard to find for a majority of stuff.

Cheers.....Q

[Fusen]

VBR > 320 tbh, I'm not fussed about lossless, I'm not a audiophile who claims they can hear the difference

as long as it's above 192 it's all good and VBR is the best for size to quality ratio.

if I had a £3000 audio setup than I may whine about the quality of the music I'm playing but with the majority of standard headphones/speakers, it's quite hard to tell the difference with anything above 320

[DJ OD]

If I download stuff I generally will only listen to it on an Ipod or home setup. It does have to be at least 192 though, otherwise you can hear errors in the sound. If played in a club, you, or more to the point, they won't notice much TBH.

If I record anything live at home, then I will sometimes enocde lossless, mainly because track marks can be heard with MP3 and your mix will sound like a cd skip.


DJ OD

[{{909}}]

ive had a few albums in flac and i can hear the difference, especially if the source of the music is vinyl but overall I just cant be bothered with the larger file sizes. If i were to encode my 5 favourite albums of all time id probably use flac or another lossless format, but for my general mucis 192k mp3 is fine.

[MsDG]

Can someone explain to me what is the fecking point?

An normal audio CD is 600 meg anyway... why fuck about with large MP3 ripping when they are the same size as the Raw CD anyway? You are never going to get better quality than the originally CD (unless the rip was from a better source... which is unlikely). The large kbps mp3's only restrict the amount of playback devices you can use and quite frankly it kind of negates the whole point of MP3 anyway (small filesize).

You would be much better off just burning the Raw CD... and that would play on everything then!

[hxbro]

Lossless files shouldn't be that big (a bit more than mp3), it sounds like they are just uploading wavs instead of a lossless format.

Ignore me, I was getting confused with ogg format

[pheonixsingh]

if you have lossless audio you need a way of actually outputting lossless audio that is also lossless, its a bit confusing, but the only lossless way i know of is HDMI, as spdif doesnt have enough bandwidth for it, theres an analogue way which is pretty close to hdmi i think but i dont know exactly.

[blaggard]

Of course lossless is better, a lifetime spent in studios means I CAN hear the difference, if you can't? it shouldn't matter.
If you do go for compressed then you're better off encoding WMA as you get twice the compression for the same perceived audio quality.
I'm an old fart and I still prefer analogue to digital when it comes to audio, lossy compression is chucking out the baby with the bathwater.
The best example is recording an orchestra, compression deletes anything which does not fit the parameters as "music" therefore all the ambient noise and "air" around the instruments is lost resulting in a very sterile sound and loss of "warmth".
Having said all of that I write and demo digitally but if I go into a studio on MY time it's analogue.

[hxbro]

if you have lossless audio you need a way of actually outputting lossless audio that is also lossless, its a bit confusing, but the only lossless way i know of is HDMI, as spdif doesnt have enough bandwidth for it, theres an analogue way which is pretty close to hdmi i think but i dont know exactly.

lossless compression - imagine it like zip compression, the data is still there it just needs decompressing before listening to it

[hxbro]

Here are some example file sizes:

Original Wav : 72960K
Flac (8:1) : 31992K
AAC lossless (.m4a) : 37447K
MP3 (320Kbits high - trying not to lose too much) : 16547K

[braymond]

Of course lossless is better, a lifetime spent in studios means I CAN hear the difference, if you can't? it shouldn't matter.
If you do go for compressed then you're better off encoding WMV as you get twice the compression for the same perceived audio quality.
I'm an old fart and I still prefer analogue to digital when it comes to audio, lossy compression is chucking out the baby with the bathwater.
The best example is recording an orchestra, compression deletes anything which does not fit the parameters as "music" therefore all the ambient noise and "air" around the instruments is lost resulting in a very sterile sound and loss of "warmth".
Having said all of that I write and demo digitally but if I go into a studio on MY time it's analogue.

well said mate :-)
having worked in pro audio nearly all of my life i cant fecking stand mp3 apart from on my ipod . in terms of music reproduction its no better than a cassette, just doesnt have the hiss.
fact is you cannot throw away information and not have a loss in quality
not just air and warmth compression kills but the bass ends up very ill defined and one-note.
i would make music compression illegal if i had my way ! :-)