[OT]Software patents end? ??:) light at the end of tunnel

Sean McNeil sean at mcneil.com
Fri Nov 28 12:06:08 CET 2008


Dale Maggee wrote:
> Denis Johnson wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Dale Maggee <antisol at internode.on.net> wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> * It's my Hard drive that doesn't support FLAC! If I used flac, my music
>>> library (I guess "mp3 collection" will soon become a misnomer!) would be
>>> *enormous*! Yes, I realise it's lossless etc etc, but 320kpbs mp3s are
>>> close enough for me.
>>>     
>>>       
>> I understand and agree that from a quality pov MP3 @ 320kpbs is
>> sufficient for most, and the amount of space required for your library
>> matters, but I was under the impression that FLAC is also a compressed
>> format. However I must admit I'm not sure how it compares to MP3 @
>> 320kpbs
>>
>> cheers Denis
>>   
>>     
> FLAC *is* compressed, but it's lossless compression, meaning that there 
> is no change to the sound when you encode it to FLAC, Whereas when you 
> encode to MP3 or ogg, you're losing audio information.

I'd like to point out also that the CD source is already lossy in that 
it is a digital representation of analog signals. Recording companies, 
however, compensate for this and work to make the sound output from a CD 
player as ideal as possible,

>  Usually it's not 
> noticable, and the higher bitrate you choose the less you lose, but 
> there is a difference. Personally, I can't hear the difference between 
> an audio CD and a 320kbps mp3 on my equipment, but ymmv.
>
> In terms of file size, FLAC is bigger than 320kbps (not sure exactly how 
> much bigger, as I don't have much experience with flac, but It's 
> substantially bigger). If you have unlimited HDD space and really care 
> about audio quality, FLAC is the way to go. If you want some free HDD 
> space and decent sounding stuff, 320kbps mp3s (or, more precisely, since 
> abandoning mp3 is the whole point of the discussion, the ogg equivalent 
> of a 320kbps mp3 - I haven't figured out how ogg's quality scale thing 
> works yet) are a very reasonable compromise, and if you can hear the 
> difference it pretty much means you're a) using expensive equipment and 
> b) a freak of nature. ;)
>
> But really it all comes down to personal taste. If you have a nice big 
> HDD, you might even want to encode everything in FLAC and then re-encode 
> it at 256kb for burning CDs for use in your car / mp3 player / clock 
> radio / fridge / whatever...
>
> -Dale
>
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