# Off-Topic Discussion > The Lounge > Tech Talk >  >  Why FLAC Is Better - Public Service Announcement

## no-Name

Hearing the difference now isnt the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses near 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 12kbps 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 2006, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps 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. It's ridiculous. 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.

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## Kiza

I agree completely!

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## Noogah

....of course, you could jsut use .wav

Much more popular. Much nicer sounding.

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## Dannon Oneironaut

Which media player do you use for FLACKs?

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## Catbus

> ....of course, you could jsut use .wav
> 
> Much more popular. Much nicer sounding.



Nicer sounding than what? Certainly not FLAC.

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## khh

> 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 12kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity.



That doesn't sound right. And I have never heard anyone claim anything like that before. Do you have any sources backing this up?

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## ninja9578

I don't know anyone outside of embedded that still use MP3.  AAC has been the standard for 10 years.  FLAC is nothing new, it's been around for a long time, it's basically just a DEFLATE wrapper around a CDA.  It's good, but takes more space than AAC and for all practical purposes, there is no difference in quality.  Multi-hundred dollar headphones might give you a difference, but most of use the buds that came with our iPod.

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## Grod

> but most of use the buds that came with our iPod.



Are you serious? Ipod earbuds are terrible.

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## Replicon

> 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



...what are you talking about?


Lossy compression just means that when you take the raw, uncompressed file, and compress it, you throw out a lot of data as part of the compression. JPEG is also lossy. And you know, my JPG images haven't bleached over the years while sitting on my hard drive.

Also, if you're saying that you're losing part of a file as it sits on your hard drive, which assumes you're saying bits are being randomly flipped (cause what the heck else could you be saying), then how does this not affect any other file format?

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## LRT

I think his post is a joke...

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## Replicon

Possibly, though it's like 2 weeks early.  :tongue2:  And sillier things have been said seriously.

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## slayer

I think I'll stick with my mp3 format that sounds just fine.

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## LRT

It's a stupid meme.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...hp/t77913.html

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## Marvo

> I think I'll stick with my mp3 format that sounds just fine.



Indeed, MP3 doesn't have to sound bad, but you can easily hear the difference between 320kbps and 128 kbps.

Some of the 1000+kbps FLAC stuff I have is just overkill  :tongue2:

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## no-Name

bump

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## Invader

I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite store on the Citadel.

This thread has my endorsement, it speaks truth. FLAC beats out over the other formats.

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## Trevorm7

With mp3 anything below 192kbps has a noticeable loss in detail/high frequencies. If you're old, have damaged hearing or have crappy speakers/headphones then you won't notice the difference but you also won't know what you're missing out on.

Might as well have everything in FLAC if it's possible, if necessary you can convert it to whatever other format you need. Storage is cheap.

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## Keresztanya

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

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## Lseadragon

> 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



A common mistake in academia. While this has been held as true for years, I recently got my hands on a cutting-edge report from the Digital Music Department at the University of Melbourne. They've shown that this files are actually cubes; the bits are stored in three dimensions. Since digital dust only accrues on the outside, FLAC files will have more dust, since they are thicker; but the internal bits are kept safe from decay, and the ratio of decay-to-bits is much lower even if the numbers of decay are higher. Mp3 stacking methods are effective, yes, but the files then cannot be easily retrieved.

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## Marvo

> A common mistake in academia. While this has been held as true for years, I recently got my hands on a cutting-edge report from the Digital Music Department at the University of Melbourne. They've shown that this files are actually cubes; the bits are stored in three dimensions. Since digital dust only accrues on the outside, FLAC files will have more dust, since they are thicker; but the internal bits are kept safe from decay, and the ratio of decay-to-bits is much lower even if the numbers of decay are higher. Mp3 stacking methods are effective, yes, but the files then cannot be easily retrieved.



This is why FLAC files are not fit for professional sound systems. The outer layer of the cubes get dusty, which causes a very very low noise effect. However, some people actually think that the noise is a special touch which proves you have a good collection of music, kind of like how a 100 years old wine is better than a 1 year old one. The world of digital music is very peculiar.

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## Xei

Anybody who is not a total aural amateur knows that it's an extremely easy and inexpensive procedure to remove digital dust. All you need is a bar magnet, two paper clips, some tissue paper, and a cheap plastic comb.

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## Marvo

> Anybody who is not a total aural amateur knows that it's an extremely easy and inexpensive procedure to remove digital dust. All you need is a bar magnet, two paper clips, some tissue paper, and a cheap plastic comb.



Anybody remotely knowledgeable in the field of audiology knows that this method will end up scrambling the vectors that your computer uses for quantizing the matrixes which regulate acoustic harmony. 5 minutes of research would've told you that :/

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## ninja9578

> bump



 ::nono::

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## Man of Steel

I use the newest standard in audio quality, SHIT. It's twice as good as FLAC or AAC, and takes up only slightly more space. What's more, I can easily use the already-encoded algorithms to make a larger dump file that contains each audio channel.

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## Marvo

> I use the newest standard in audio quality, SHIT. It's twice as good as FLAC or AAC, and takes up only slightly more space. What's more, I can easily use the already-encoded algorithms to make a larger dump file that contains each audio channel.



Oh yeah. I'm kinda split between using the TOILET or BUTT player. They are both pretty good, but the BUTT player can't play certain files without a PLUG-in.

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