CAN YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LOSSY AND LOSSLESS?

BUMP! Take the test to prove yourself.

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.

>>71606278
EVERYONE STOP!

Before you reply, ask yourself: is this pasta?

protip: of course it fucking is

>>71606297
no it isn't I painstakingly typed this out to let everyone know why lossless is better

stop trying to turn my legitimate argument into pasta chef mario

>>71606297
someone puts all that work into trying to warn people about rotational velocidensity and you just dismiss it as pasta? that's just rude.

thank you anon for typing all of that up just now, it was very informative.

>>71606313
>>71606393
Just stop bumping. You're not fooling anyone.

>>71606401
they fooled me

>>71606297
actually, the man knows what he's talking about, albeit, petty or nonsense to most people. when i've gone back to some really old mp3's from way back 'in-the-day' (90's, Napster, 56k modem) most of my mp3 library sounds like crap, mostly due to the technologies available at the time. i notice an unusually large amount of "pops" in a lot of songs and a 128k rip sounds more flat than a new 128k rip (both sound terrible regardless). anybody who knows how data is written to a disc would know that bits do get lost over time.

i'm an arrogant, elitist, analog snob with 2 vintage hifi systems (1 solid state/1 tube based) that can expose every imperfection in an mp3 file. it absolutely cracks me up when people think their crappy OEM soundcard, crappy best buy cables, and crappy desktop speakers are suitable benchmarks for judging sound quality.

it's pathetic how nowadays people have allowed themselves to compromise quality over convenience and cost. i'm only 34 but just as bitter and scornful as someone twice my age. just wait until i get my FLAC vinyl rip blog up and running!

>>71606437
Listen, dude: I'm almost 49 years old. I've been using computers since the original Apple 1 was in stores. In high school I used a multi-user BASIC system running on a Data General Nova minicomputer connected to 3 schools via 300bps modems over leased phone lines. The first computer I built was based on a 1976 Popular Electronics article and used an old Teletype ASR-33 as a terminal. The next three computers were S-100 bus systems running CP/M v2.2. Depending on your age, I may have been writing code in C under CP/M before you were even *born*. I've owned no-name Taiwaneese knock-off XT clone motherboard-based systems I built on the cheap, with monochrome (yes, the ugly-ass green-screen) graphics. I remember the original Mac looking like someone's idea of a joke to me. I thought Windows v2.x was the most useless thing on the planet. I actually ran IBM's OS/2 for a couple *years* and thought it was awesome. The only reason I changed from Win95 was because the USB support was virtually non-existent. The only reason I changed from Win98SE to Win2k when it wasn't stable on a CPU running over ~800MHz. I had an entire WinNT4 domain, complete with PDC, running in my apartment, while I was getting an MCSE.

You still want to call me "new", friend?

Check your flac privilege. Not all of us are using it, and your overweening arrogance indicates to *me* that you're rather young, and perhaps aren't being totally honest about making your living the way you do.

Just download V0 and shut the fuck up

I bet all of you are listening on shit headphones anyway

>>71606297
Are you stupid? He's not wrong, why do you think you have to pay monthly to services like spotify, apple music, tidal etc?
Well they have to buy the albums again after a while because it will lose quality after many listens in their servers. That's why it took so long for neil young to appear in spotify, he wanted his music to have the quality it originally had and knowing what lossy does to music I don't hate him for being mad about it.
After a while spotify apparently agreed to replace his songs each month to achieve almost perfect quality