QueenZone discussion #929986
flac and mp3
| andyhwood485 14.12.2006 12:45 |
I am aware that there have been several postings on here about flac and mp3 recordings in the past, probably more than the number of postings about what John is doing with his time right now, so apologies if this has been covered before. As i continue with my battle to get to grips with modern technology, and before uploading a number of files to the big bad internet for you Queenies to download, please can someone tell me, apart from playing flac files on a computer, what, if any, portable devices can they be played on?... i have a CD Player in my car which also allows me to hook my ipod up to, apart from converting flac to mp3, which some people find to be sacralidge, how do i get to listen to such flac concerts when i am on the road for many hours a day?..... please help this ludite! |
| FriedChicken 14.12.2006 12:55 |
And that, my friend, is why flac sucks. |
| brENsKi 14.12.2006 12:56 |
some cd burning software will burn flacs to cdaudio...but it's extra work the balance is the convenience and cross-platform versatility of a lossy format vs a rare-as-rocking-horse-shit usability of flac i prefer mp3s....and at 320kb they sounds really good...but then i am a philistine |
| FriedChicken 14.12.2006 13:01 |
You damn philistine! Stop the suicide carbomings! |
| FriedChicken 14.12.2006 13:01 |
:D |
| Adam Baboolal 14.12.2006 14:05 |
MP3 gets a really bad name round here doesn't it? Both formats are fine for whatever you want them. I have mp3's for everyday listening on the computer. Outside the house, I have my Hi-MD players that have their own atrac compression OR... more importantly, a flac-like lossless playback format as well!! Flac, eh? Flac's great for downloading quality stuff, and regardless what people say, is very easy to convert to wav with the included software or even just burning to a cd. And then from that (or the flac>wav conv.) it's just a case of taking that backup and turning them into mp3/atrac etc. etc. Anything you want, really. I've never seen the problem, either way. It's just that some people get lost in a kind of mac or pc argument in the forums. And this leads to confusion as evidenced. Adam. |
| thomasquinn 32989 14.12.2006 14:09 |
PC vs. Mac is so passé. It's Linux vs. Windows now. Long live Unix Systems! |
| teleman 14.12.2006 14:52 |
Go ahead and convert your flac files to MP3 and put them on your ipod. Just keep the MP3s for personal use and don't put them out in the community for trading purposes. MP3 is a lower quality(not that I hear such a noticeable difference) that purists get quite upset about. The best bet is to trade flac even if you use MP3 and don't convert MP3 to flac. |
| Jimmy Dean 14.12.2006 16:58 |
Explanation on why people hate traded mp3s This is what happens to an mp3 file when traded... mp3 uses a much higher compression meaning that it loses its purity at a rate of somewhere around 11:1 EACH time it's compressed in MP3 format...for some reason people recompress mp3s over and over again for whatever reason... you can hear these 3rd generation mp3s when you hear the watery noise background in songs, especially in the cymbals... this also happens for whatever reason when an mp3 is burned on to a CD, and then is ripped again to MP3 format. Therefore, each time the happens, MP3s lose more and more of their purity... at this point we'll end up with the old Real Audio files we only heard on Queen webpages. FLAC has a much lower compressions rate, sometimes as low as 2:1. So take everything from above, and translate this to 2:1... It would take a lot longer for this recoding to end up sound like a first generation mp3. Also, most people tend not to rip mp3 in to flac, and also CD to flac. So flac sort of has a genuine reliability. One other important difference is the noticeable gap found in MP3s. If you burn a live recording on CD from MP3s you'll notice a slight gap as small as a fraction of a second between each track. This is because druing an MP3 compression, a very small silence is added to the beginning and end of the track... this is where the MP3 information is located (id3 tags, etc...). This causes a huge annoyance to me, as well as others. FLAC does not have this gap at all. Therefore, FLAC always wins, for trading purposes. For private collections, as far as storing music on your pc for your own enjoyment, MP3 is defintely the better choice, as the difference in sound quality of a 1st generation 192kbit MP3, and a FLAC file is unnoticeable to the human ear. The MP3 is usally preferred because of its more efficient size. I'll also mention, if anyone wants to use an mp3-like compression with flac-like quality, go with OGG. They use variable bitrates and they have no silences before or at the end of the track. |
| Penetration_Guru 14.12.2006 17:32 |
teleman wrote: Go ahead and convert your flac files to MP3 and put them on your ipod. Just keep the MP3s for personal use and don't put them out in the community for trading purposes. MP3 is a lower quality(not that I hear such a noticeable difference) that purists get quite upset about. The best bet is to trade flac even if you use MP3 and don't convert MP3 to flac.This is the best answer to the original question. The second best answer is that any mp3 player that is supported by Rockbox (link will play flac files directly, including ipods. |
| Serry... 15.12.2006 00:31 |
teleman wrote: Just keep the MP3s for personal use and don't put them out in the community for trading purposes.I'm really not sure if everyone put shows on QZ for someone's trading purposes... That's the one important thing that a lot of FLAC fans still can't understand - a lot of Queen fans uploads and downloads shows for listening, not for trading. If traders want to use QZ as an instrument in their trading business - that's okay, but don't suppose everyone to play by their rules for their own purposes... IMHO. |
| andyhwood485 15.12.2006 03:36 |
Many thanks for taking the time to consider my question. I can see the 'purist' argument about loss of quality when converting from flac to mp3, but at the end of the day, the vast majority of concert recordings are audience recordings, and the quality of the production whislt good in some cases, on the most part is poor compared to professional recordings, hence i dont get thier argument about the loss of quality being very valid. Santa is bringing me some new software for Christmas, once i have this, i will get busy with the recordings i still have on tape and vinyl if anyone is interested. Some may already be availiable, but i have never seen the 1980 Wembley show i have on tape, which is a VG+ recording and a couple of The Cross shows from the '80s. |
| Adam Baboolal 15.12.2006 07:36 |
andyhwood485 wrote: but at the end of the day, the vast majority of concert recordings are audience recordings, and the quality of the production whislt good in some cases, on the most part is poor compared to professional recordings, hence i dont get thier argument about the loss of quality being very valid.That's a real shame that. See, I don't get that view because it says, it's degraded so why not degrade it even more. Not just that, but because it (a bootleg) will actually encode worse than a standard album song because, it's an audience recording. This is why something like Flac is important with bootlegs. Not because someone prefers it over something else, but because it will preserve the sound without something like MP3 robbing it of some of its liveliness. With MP3, the less in the sound it has to work with, the less it will return. For standard album tracks, I'll use it. But for audience recordings or other things of this nature, I would never touch it. Adam. |
| thomasquinn 32989 15.12.2006 08:47 |
Jimmy Dean wrote: FLAC has a much lower compressions rate, sometimes as low as 2:1. So take everything from above, and translate this to 2:1... It would take a lot longer for this recoding to end up sound like a first generation mp3. Also, most people tend not to rip mp3 in to flac, and also CD to flac. So flac sort of has a genuine reliability.You are missing a serious point in your entire elucidation, namely that MP3 compresses LOSSY, vs. Non-Lossy known as LOSSLESS in the case of such filetypes as FLAC, SHN, APE, Lossless-WMA (NOT normal WMA) and the likes. In the case of lossy compression, a digital audio file is encoded to make it smaller in size, using a technique not unlike the fractal-compression of GIF images. This means quality is lost forever. Lossless compression, however, uses a system similar to ZIP-files, in which no data is discarded: it is only stored more efficiently to make the amount of data smaller. |
| andyhwood485 15.12.2006 10:32 |
I resepct eveyone's views on flac, mp3, or whatever format they prefer. The big problem for me is wanting to play the concerts i download in my car when i am on long work journies, what better way to spend 2 hours on a road trip than listening to a Queen concert?.....as i said from the outset, i am not overly IT literate, although i am trying to learn, i can play the flac concerts via foobar on my PC and Laptop, but when i want them most (when stuck in my car), i cant play these flac files. |
| Hank H. 15.12.2006 12:26 |
andyhwood485 wrote: As i continue with my battle to get to grips with modern technology, and before uploading a number of files to the big bad internet for you Queenies to download, please can someone tell me, apart from playing flac files on a computer, what, if any, portable devices can they be played on?link |