Rant: FLAC sucks!

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smib said:
OK, I'm freakin finally ready to start digitizing all of my dad's vinyls, and I'd like to know what you guys suggest for software to handle the task. What I'd ideally like to do is have a 96khz/24 .flac of each one, as well as 320kb/s VBR mp3s that have been cleaned up to reduce static and popping. If I'm lucky, this plus album art will fit on the 320GB drive I just bought.
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Anyone wanna give me some sweet sweet input?
 
smib said:
Anyone wanna give me some sweet sweet input?
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I record the my records in Sony Soundforge as a 24bit/96khz .wav file. From there, you can compress it to whatever lossless or lossy format you want. I use dbpoweramp for conversion.
 
smib said:
Anyone wanna give me some sweet sweet input?
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I haven't been ripping vinyls myself but I have been downloading a lot of them. Start out just with 96/24 recordings and see how they sound. Some of the rips I've downloaded have no processing done to them.

I think there is a standard equalization curve you are supposed to apply to vinyl (EDIT: Yes, there is -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization) And most rips have some light de-popping/de-clicking applied.

Some rip authors tell you what they've done, so I'll keep an eye out for what software they are using and post back here. But in the mean time, have a look around and see what people have done with a few rips of your favorite vinyls. Demonoid is a great resource if you have an account there.

EDIT: This seems popular, Izotope RX. http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/rx/

ChaoZ said:
I'm not sure flac is worth doing if it's not a pristine source.
Then again, I'm no audiophile.
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Are you saying vinyl isn't a pristine source? I had a hard time accepting vinyl due to the background noise hissing and the pops/clicks. But the signal contained within it is analog and has a higher dynamic range than CD. (And on the mastering side, CD mixes are dynamic-range compressed to sound good on lousy speakers and the vinyl masters tend not to be).

Also, bear in mind that when you rip a CD to MP3 you are applying psycho-acoustic compression and degrading the quality even at the highest bitrates. If you want to have CD rips that are as good as the CDs, bit for bit, you need a lossless codec like FLAC or ALAC.
 
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Thanks, I'll start with soundforge since I already have it, and look into what Janstett(I never noticed that first 't' until right now) posted.
 
janstett said:
Are you saying vinyl isn't a pristine source? I had a hard time accepting vinyl due to the background noise hissing and the pops/clicks. But the signal contained within it is analog and has a higher dynamic range than CD. (And on the mastering side, CD mixes are dynamic-range compressed to sound good on lousy speakers and the vinyl masters tend not to be).
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I'm jumping in here. The pristine sound issue with vinyl is an issue. Realistically speaking it's very hard to get an absolutely pop or crackle free playing/recording from a vinyl record, but you can get very close. If you torrent up some rips that someone has ripped music from their parents old records, chances are there's going to be popping and crackling due to the age of the records (meaning since they're old, they'll have a buildup of dirt and dust) that they lack either the knowledge or skill to clean. You can very effectively clean an old record at home with a proper cleaner and brush set, but many people won't bother and will only go as far as dusting off the records which can just push dust into the grooves and make the distortions worse.

Ideally you find rips from someone who uses either fresh from the package vinyl, or thoroughly and properly cleaned and prepped vinyl. Once you've got clean vinyl through either of those means you have two more things to deal with, external interference through vibration or sound, and static buildup. Static buildup can be dealt with using a zerostat gun or similar, and proper grounding in combination with a static removal system on the turntable. I have a zerostat gun, although old it still works (don't be near or touching the needle tip when you pull that trigger, it's damn high voltage and you will feel it, I speak with experience) and the cartridge on my Luxman has a static collection brush before the needle to prevent static pops during play. Dampening the turntable from vibration is as easy and getting proper feet, and you can avoid sound interference by not ripping during a tornado or party.

Once you've got the cleanliness and other issues dealt with, the sound from your vinyl should be pristine, no hissing, no pops and crackling.

Now the sound equalization: the older vinyls were usually pressed from a master mold that was recorded directly from the master recording itself. (there's a How It's Made segment on vinyl records, it's a really neat thing to watch) So after running your vinyl through the RIAA filter (via a pre-amp usually) to compensate for the sound difference on vinyl you've essentially got the sound being played exactly as it was recorded. At that point the quality of what you hear is dependent on your audio system and speakers. This is one of the reasons audiophiles will spend exorbitant amounts of money on good equipment to play these older records, because in those cases it does matter. I can't speak about the new vinyl releases because honestly I don't know how they're mastered. I know the music industry does a lot of digital mastering now, and if they're pressing the new vinyl off digital masters then you may be looking at physical limitation from the get-go. If they're pressing it from analog masters or lossless digital masters you'll be better off.

Anyway, I guess what the main point of what I said was this: find someone who puts out high quality rips and stick with them. If you come across someone with poor quality rips, I'd say try one more different one from them to be sure it isn't a fluke, and if they remain poor, don't download from them in the future. Getting rips from someone who knows what they're doing will be worthwhile. Of course, take what I say with a grain of salt- I'm not any sort of uber-audiophile, but I'm not ignorant to the world of good music either.
 
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I'd like a bit of that too, although I have nothing to give in return. :(
 
janstett said:
Too much to list here... Here's a list on Rapidshare...
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Sorry, how do I find these?
 
Well read the thread and you will learn that it does not. You suck.
 
IceBone said:
I'd like a bit of that too, although I have nothing to give in return. :(
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That's still OK, share what you have even if it's nothing or next to nothing. If you join in even if you just download from other people, if you share it it makes everybody else's downloads faster.

the Interceptor said:
Sorry, how do I find these?
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"The Hub" is a closed peer to peer system. To join, post a message over here:

http://groups.google.com/group/SurroundSound?hl=en

Just introduce yourself and say you want to join The Hub. A guy named VF or RW or one of the other admins will contact you and ask for a short application -- why you're interested in high resolution and surround sound music, etc., to weed out the lightweights who aren't really that interested.
 
IceBone said:
Are the Beatles mono or stereo?
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There is even an official 5.1 mix of "Love". And lots of people making their own 5.1 mixes.

There is an officially sanctioned Beatles: Rock Band coming out soon, which means they've gone to efforts to isolate the instruments. I wouldn't be surprised to see surround mixes coming in the next few years.
 
Random sidebar: my cousin is an animator and worked on some of the background videos in the Beatles rock game.
 
What program do I need to extract .ape files? This time I have the .cue files, but when I extract it using PowerISO all I get is static. I hate these damn lossless releases, but it's the only release that I can find, and I can't buy this album. If anyone can convert it to separate .mp3 files please PM me, I'll send you the .ape file. Please help. Thanks.
 
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awdrifter said:
What program do I need to extract .ape files? This time I have the .cue files, but when I extract it using PowerISO all I get is static. I hate these damn lossless releases, but it's the only release that I can find, and I can't buy this album. If anyone can convert it to separate .mp3 files please PM me, I'll send you the .ape file. Please help. Thanks.
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Just use Foobar2000, with the APE plugin.
 
Really long reply to the "FLAC sucks" thread

Really long reply to the "FLAC sucks" thread

This is my first post here, but I want to post a really longwinded reply to that thread:

awdrifter said:
Why would anyone use FLAC? What's wrong with separate MP3s? I just spent more than an hour manually separating the tracks back to individual MP3s. (btw, is there any program that can automatically detect the end of a song and separate it for you automatically?) I thought release groups are all about efficiency, why are they adopting this gay ass format? It's still 3 times the size of 320k/s MP3s, and the sound difference are negligible on most people's systems, it's not playable on portable mmusic players. Unless you have few grand invested into your audio, you won't be able to tell the difference, and if someone is willing to spend a few grand on audio, they'd probably bought the real CD anyways.
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Because MP3 has some rather serious design problems that make it bad even for a lossy codec. If you encode to MP3, the encoder permenantly throws away at least 75% of the audio stream and replaces it with a "rough approximation" which becomes the MP3. This may be fine if you don't want true CD quality because you have a really god awful sound system or a little portable MP3 player and no need for faithful reproduction of the sound stream.

MP3 is NEVER suitable for archiving or transcoding to other formats. (Nor are other lossy codecs), this means that in 5 years from now, if hardware players have a gazillion gigabytes of storage space and lossless is now a given, and all I have are MP3s, I can never take advantage of that. :)

I can very easily tell the difference between any MP3 at any bitrate/quality level and a lossless file, even on a $40 speaker system and an integrated sound card, MP3 and WMA "Standard" always cut off high and low frequencies, it can't be avoided because there's no way they can efficiently encode them.

If you have to use a lossy codec, you should use Ogg Vorbis or AAC because they can at least more or less faithfully reproduce the entire frequency range. MP3 can't and never will.

Release groups are using FLAC because hard disk space is incredibly cheap and the lossless files with perfect quality are only about 20-25 megs per track, a 1 Terabyte hard disk will run you maybe $150, thats about 15 cents per gigabyte, and a FLAC or Wavpack album takes about 400 megs, so you're paying about 6 cents worth of storage space for an entire CD quality album. Only the most scrooge-like user is going to bitch about 6 cents per CD vs 2 cents to store it as MP3 files. :)

MP3 was the right choice for internet distribution in 1995, lossless is clearly the future of digital audio. FLAC is supported by Sandisk's latest audio players, and that will eventually make its way into hard drive players too.

MP3 is a dead horse, and idiots using Limewire are what is beating the horse.

As for your question about why you got a single file with the entire album on it, many rippers create a single FLAC file with a CUE sheet so you can easily burn the FLAC to a normal audio CD, though the single file is mainly there so that the file compression algorithm has more data redundancies to exploit (the entire album's worth instead of per track) which will give you slightly better overall compression. Most ripping programs (Foobar2000/dbpoweramp) default to splitting and tagging the individual files as they are being ripped.

If you happen across an entire album as one FLAC and a CUE file, just open the CUE file with Foobar2000 and use the built in converter to "convert" them to individual files. Easy. (For the record, I hate people that do that too)

Another option you overlooked is that if you use anything other than an iPod, you can rip all your CDs to WMA Lossless and Windows Media Player will automatically transcode them to whatever you want when you sync your player (such as WMA VBR), even if your player doesn't support it (Zune supports WMA Lossless, iPod supports Apple Lossless, FLAC is catching on in all the other players).

Lossless began as a novelty for archival, but really with 160 gig hard drives in a portable player, it's not like you're going to overrun them with shitty low quality MP3s, some people prefer quality rather than loading 100,000 crap songs in low bitrate MP3.

If shitty no talent assclowns like the Black Eyed Peas would stop making 4 minute tracks with such immortal lyrics as "Yeah...a chick-a-doom, chick-a-doom chick-a-doom", what would you people fill your iPods with?

I think the reason MP3 is acceptable is because the music that people tend to buy all sounds like crap anyway and they wouldn't recognize talent if it came up and bit them in the ass.

Thank you, thank you very much! (Now please stop Swift Boating people that like music that does not give them brain hemorrhages) :mrgreen:

PS: Even if you did unload $1,000 on a sound system, that represents about what? 80 CDs? These little plastic discs cost so much that even if you only bought one per week, you could have one hell of a sound system with that pile of cash in a year or so. My CD collection goes back about 20 years, so the cost of a system to play them on really pales. :p
 
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