Be Excellent To Each Other

Ok.

So I have made a decision to abandon FLAC for Apple Lossless in an M4A container. Apple has done this to me as getting an iPorn has tied me to iTunes and formats they will play.

In terms of file size I am split about 50:50 lossless and lossy. Of course the lossy makes up the majority of my actual music. Mostly MP3 with the odd AAC. Almost all my lossless was FLAC, but I had some APE too and some M4A-ALAC I must have got from the Doc. On closer inspection, 147Gb music, 77Gb lossless, 70Gb lossy. Who knew Boston, Chicago, Foreigner and Cheap Trick made so much music.....

This got me thinking, I wonder what others use. I don't know how to make a voting doobrey, so if someone wants to do that for me and populate it with some sensible formats and the traditional stupid one carry on.

Mp3 because I have a library dating back to 1999 and it keeps everything simple and compatible.

MP3.

I use MP3 but at 192 (i think) bit rate (correct term?).

MP3 on VBR.

I use MP3 but annoyingly because of my new phone, I have to keep all my WMA's from Nokia Music seperate.

Yes, correct term. Better quality than what used to be "normal" of 128. MP3 I have created is Lame VBR --extreme. MP3 I have acquired seems to be usually CBR for some reason, and I have a personal rule that it should be at least 192 as a minimum, although I prefer 320. Old Napster/Audiogalaxy era MP3 presents a problem, as it is generally 128 and generally odd tracks rather than albums.

256k and above for my mp3's unless there were some exceptional circumstances.

MP3, everything classical is lossless, everything else is high-quality. I've also copied old 1920's-40's jazz and pop and some classical into .ogg files for my Silent Hunter 3 gramophone mod.

I use MP3s at whichever bitrate, because I honestly can rarely tell the difference. Useless.

I have a friend like this. Seriously, he's copied me CD's in the past and the amount of "swish" on there is unbearable!!

He can't tell at all.

Urg... cymbal noises in low-bitrate files make my teeth hurt.

I use whatever the uploader use..... er I mean MP3 VBR. Ahem.

*whistles*

iPhones don't do FLAC??!?!!???!?!?

They sound worse every time I hear about them

Anyway, MP3 of decent bitrate, I suppose. It's the VHS of the early twenty-first century music world.

No they don't. I started using FLAC around 2003/2004 when I decided disk space wasn't a huge issue. My experiences with FLAC were generally awkward with what you might term mainstream media players. But I tolerated it as I wanted a lossless format. I like your VHS metaphor!

Using the M4A container makes the ALAC play in far more things as I understand it. We shall see. Batch converting from one lossless format to another is fairly painless and loses me nothing. So if something better comes along I can convert on to that.

MP3 for me.

They do do ALAC, though.

I used to use 192kbps MP3, but now i've given in to iTunes Store it's 256kbps AAC. I've not got audiophile ears - to me it does sound better but on my equipment no different from CD. Unfortunately, this change does mean I can't fit my entire collection in the nearly-16GB any more, and I've not even re-ripped any of my CDs yet.

I hear they also do CLAG.

Speaking of iTunes, my fucknutty Touch screwed up downloading one of the Them Crooked Vultures tracks and no number of 'tap to retry' was enough, so in the end I had to connect it to my laptop anyway. It's better than every single thing, but only bloody just.

Yes. But only if you don't wipe properly...

I, err, use the standard file format used by iTunes (the software application, not the online retailer of the same name). Although, as of three years ago, I was advised to stick to a higher 'bit rate' (320) to maintain higher sound quality.

If you installed now, it'd be "iTunes Plus" by default, the same 256kbps AAC as the Store (I believe). 320kbps is still available as a custom setting.

Indeed it is too.

Is AAC really meant to be that much better than MP3s, or is that reality distortion field time?

Probably got some stuff in WMA too that was ripped when I used to use Media Player. I don't tend to have my music on particularly loud and I've got cheap speakers so it all sounds much the same to me.

A guitar-playing guy I knew gave me several gigabytes worth of MP3s this time last year. They were 'ripped' from his pristine vinyl collection, at 190Kps or something. Depressingly, the files sounded awful. Then again, that added to the charm of the Dukes of Stratosphear MP3s, in an odd way.

Whatever it is that Spotify uses.

Quarter inch magnetic tape at 16ips

Nah, mp3 and I hate to say I have them mostly ripped at 128k but then I've never owned a decent stereo - well, not decent in the way that my brother's £20k stereo was so I never bothered.

MP3@256Kb/s.

Anything above that and I can't hear the difference.

I'm sorry, I felt sure you said £20K stereo for a second....

Yes, at the same bitrate (say 256k), AAC sounds better than mp3. However, so do Ogg and WMA. There's not much to pick between the three newer codecs that I can hear, so my standing advice for encoding lossy rips is to avoid mp3 and pick whichever of the three newer ones works with your stuff.

Also note that AAC is just some tech Apple licence and is actually owned by Yamaha. You sometimes see AAC support on non-Apple kit, but not often because Yamaha charge a lot for the licences.

Something to do with much better representation of higher frequencies, I think.

Pretty much that, really. I couldn't tell the difference between the free and paid-for version of Spotify, for example (yes, I did flick the option in the menu.)

My brother was a serious hi-fi nerd between the ages of 17 and say 34. I blame my father, who though not into hi-fi in the sense of playing music, had a lot of expensive hi-fi equipment - he used to collect old radio shows like Hancock's Half Hour - I grew up with 8 reel to reel machines, several esoteric cassette decks, tuners and amps. My brother started small when he was 17 or 18 with a series of separates he bought and then continuously upgraded on a year by year basis to the point where he had a seriously fucking expensive hi-fi comprising Nakamichi tape deck, Linn turntable some ridiculous valve power amp monobloc system (six valve amps driving each cone on the two speakers which were like a sentry box Doccy G could fit in and a power amp that was huge and had two big grab handles on the front and one dial. And yes, he did have a worrying period where he fell for the ludicrously expensive cable world of hi-fi nerds. He sold most of it in his late 30s and though he has a decent stereo now I think he had an epiphany that owning a stereo that could loosen the foundations of the surrounding buildings and living in a room in a shared house was a bit overkill

The story goes that Apple evaluated FLAC when they were adding lossless support to iTunes and the iPods, but rejected it. The decoding stage requires fairly heavy floating point maths, and the cheap CPUs in the iPods are integer-only units; so they were literally incapable of decoding it in realtime. They could have changed the CPUs, but that would not only be more expensive but would reduce battery life. So they bought/invented (I'm not sure which; invented, I think) a similar codec that had been designed to target low-power processors.

Now that's interesting. See cynical me thought it was just about being awkward and in control of things like Apple seem to be for most other things.

Although if there's a sound technical reason I suppose that's ok.

I wholeheartedly approve of iTunes being able to read my lossless stuff now though. And like I said before FLAC could be a pain in the arse at times.

MP3 at 192kbs, as my collection dates back to about 1997.

I spent 69p on a legal download of Rhett Atkin's 'That ain't my truck' which means I now have it at 256kbps, which is somewhat excessive for country.

Most of my stuff is at MP3 - non-classical at 128kbps, classical at 192 kbps. I don't think I could hear the difference, though.