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  • It's worth keeping everything archived somewhere in FLAC if you care about it, because that's lossless and you can convert it to newer cooler formats in the future. Opus is currently the best lossy audio codec - if you need space on your phone, convert an additional ~128kbps Opus copy of your library for transparent quality and super small filesize.

    Don't believe anyone trying to sell you on the idea that FLAC sounds better than an appropriately compressed (read: transparent) lossy format: Opus 128-160kbps, MP3 'V0' (215kbps), MP3 320kbps, AAC ~150kbps.

    Check the "Music encoding quality" table on this page for more info on Opus bitrates and how they relate to transparency.

    • Thanks for the information and table of contents to look at. I will maybe switch the content of my personal audio library for my Phone to Opus. Will just take some time for ffmpeg to convert it.

    • While it depends on a number of variables; such as your own personal preferences and quality of the audio hardware you're using; FLAC is indeed better. Given appropriate tuning and hardware, you don't need a trained ear to hear the difference.

      It is however possible to prefer compressed music. In fact, I myself tend to be fine with anything down to 128kbps MP3 or comparable compression. That doesn't mean I do not notice it; but it's "tolerable" in quality. I grew up around the late stages of Analog FM radio; so anything that can manage to sound better than THAT is actually good! For reference you were lucky to pick up what is equivalent to a 96kbps MP3 if you had optimal signal strength and things very quickly devolved to a staticky 8kbps experience if you had very minimal signal.

      For storing music on-the-go; I actually recommend considering 192kbps MP3 if you don't mind the "Lossy" sound and just wanna cram as much music as possible onto storage without it sounding absolutely terrible.

      If "Lossy" is just not an acceptable option for your tender ears; I recommend Ogg Vorbis (Android & all of it's variants) at standard bitrates or AAC (Apple) depending on your mobile device OS.

      If you're willing to carry around a limited library/playlist and want to emphasize quality; I can't recommend FLAC enough.

    • Don’t believe anyone trying to sell you on the idea that FLAC sounds better than an appropriately compressed (read: transparent) lossy format: Opus 128-160kbps, MP3 ‘V0’ (215kbps), MP3 320kbps, AAC 150kbps.

      Only partly true. If the rest of the chain is of decent quality (hi-res sound card, proper cables, quality headphones/speakers/monitors), then the difference between lossless and lossy is apparent to a trained ear. Especially the lack of dynamics and space is typical of lossy formats.

      Personally, I never understood why I would want to listen to anything but lossless in the first place. I never really had to worry about storage space too much for my music to consider converting it to a lossy format. I am more of a user who likes to archive stuff; therefore, lossless and FLAC are the only future-proof ways if you want to listen to your files in the next 25 years or so.

      • Can you post an ABX test of you detecting lossless and lossy files? It's all fun and games to talk about how $400 cables and "trained ears" are required to tell the difference, but when it comes time to do ABX testing people seem to vanish.

      • Only if you happen to be sending over bluetooth and it's being re-conpressed. Even then you would need good headphones and ears to ABX that.

        Don't talk "space" and dynamics if you don't know what they mean. "Space" is an audiophile weasel word that boils down to noise in the 10k band

      • I'm archiving my music but listening to them on my Phone with like 100€ Bluetooth headphones (which use ACC 128kbit). Doesn't really help the quality even when it is Flac.

  • CD Audio came way earlier than mp3.... It is CDDA, Compact Disc Digital Audio. For its spec, please give wiki a read. FLAC is a good lossless alternative to WAV. I have most of my collection in FLAC too.

    • Thanks I will give it a read. Never really knew were to look for it really much.

  • CD audio is its own standard with a bitrate of 1411kbps and is considered "uncompressed". Professionally mastered CDs are not just a bunch of mp3s on a disc. FLAC is definitely worth it if you have the space.

    • I mean I went from 60GB wav to 60GB Flac but now with more Music. With now 60GB more to use.

  • Just go with FLAC, music doesn't take "too much" place so I don't feel like sacrificing the quality for it.

  • All my old collection is on mp3, the bitrate vary between 320kbps & VBR V0, but in last years I usually prefer download in FLAC, so when It comes to save space I convert into mp3 320kbps.

  • Many people I talked to said that CD's just use mp3 codecs in the first place.

    That may be partly true for non-original CDs made out of MP3 files via CD burner, but original CDs should not be "crippled" like that.

    I think this debate is kind of late, at least a decade late. FLAC has clearly won; it is available everywhere and shall stay that way thanks to its open-source nature. With increasingly cheaper physical storage (SSD, HDD) and more affordable cloud storage, I think FLAC's longevity aspect just beats everything, even though there may be other codecs such as Opus which may provide a better compression/quality ratio.

    But if you only care about lossless, just go with FLAC and enjoy your tunes. ;-)

  • There seems to be a lot of misconceptions in the music community regarding the differences between 320kbps mp3 and FLAC format. It is true that 320kbps is technically as good as FLAC, but there are other reasons to get music in a lossless format.

    Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA – it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

    I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.

    • Unfortunately, it seems you have a really bad misconception as well.

      Sorry, no, files (be it MP3 or FLAC or MP4 or whatever) do not degrade over time. Not one bit. Yes, storage devices do degrade and ultimately break down, but that does not result in MP3 files "losing 7 to 15 kbps per year". Digital files are like that—digital. They don't suffer the same degradation like vinyl where each playback damages the grooves and looses definition. Digital files are a bunch of zeros and ones (be it MP3 or FLAC or whatever) and it's either those bunch of numbers makes sense to the player (as in, it plays) or not (as in, the player shows an error saying it can't play the file).

      What you have experienced as "degradation" probably isn't the result of files degrading over the years. See, when MP3 was invented, the early encoders produced relatively bad sound quality for a given bitrate. They just can't pack that much information into 128kbps without affecting the sound quality. Over the years, many countless improvements were made to MP3 compression technology, and modern software like LAME can produce really good sound quality even at relatively low bitrates. That makes old files encoded using old encoders sound worse than new files encoded using new encoders at the same bitrate.

      MP3 doesn't even support 16kbps, so I can't imagine your storage device delicately removing bits from your MP3 files to reduce the bitrate without corrupting them, since storage devices can't even see the boundary between files—it only sees all the files as one huge string of numbers without any sense. Also, I can imagine your MP3 file shrinking in size every year if they do lose bits over time. Many filesystems also offer integrity checks on files, so your computer will alert you if something unintentional changes on your storage. Even some Linux filesystems will show an error if a single bit unexpectedly changes on one of your files.

      Wherever you read that misconception, please don't believe it. Digital files are not affected by quality degradation, and it's either they play, or they don't play.

      Hopefully you take this as a friendly message, and if this has been a joke and I've been whooshed, then you had me very well.

      • I can't tell if I'm being double-whooshed, but 'rotational velocidensity' is a very old meme. Your post is fully correct though, so good job!

    • Had me in the first... third.

    • Should have stored them in the freezer. That's what I did, and I can still enjoy my 128kbps weird al mp3s from before y2k. Had a backup on CD in my attic, and tried it recently just for kicks... got an earful of actual mud. Took me a couple hours to get it all out of there with windex and qtips, but at least I can hear again.

    • Sorry man, they're too young to get it

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