Are there really people who download FLAC files to listen to

I download wav files for a cheap headphone set.

Are there really people who watch anime?

me

>>1572185
Well actually OP it doesn't matter if they have shitty equipment or not in the long run.

That's because 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.

File: 1488369116952.jpg (97KB, 520x600px)

97KB, 520x600px

>>1572569
Get out of my thread.

>>1572570
Homey please listen to this valuable advice

>>1572569

This pasta itself is old enough to have suffered rotational velocidensity.

I have FLAC but it's all from private music torrents and convert to v0 when putting it on an ipod.

>>1572185

>>1572185

>>1577065
I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.

So over the past months there's been some discussion about the merits of lossy compression and the rotational velocidensity issue. I'm an audiophile myself and posses a vast collection of uncompressed audio files, but I do want to assure the casual low-bitrate users that their music library is quite safe.

Being an audio engineer for over 21 years, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. While rotational velocidensity is indeed responsible for some deterioration of an unanchored file, there's a simple way of preventing this. Better still, there have been some reported cases of damaged files repairing themselves, although marginally so (about 1.7 percent for the .ogg format).

>>1572569
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!

>>1578024
>>1578030
based