HydrogenAudio

Lossless Audio Compression => FLAC => Topic started by: Gregory.Opera on 2012-12-10 00:37:06

Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Gregory.Opera on 2012-12-10 00:37:06
Until recently, I have been ripping all of my CDs in MP3 format, however I’ve recently been ripping them into FLAC format so that I have the best quality, and also so that the CDs can be put into long-term storage…
The main reason I chose FLAC – aside from the fact that it’s a lossless format – is because Sony’s Media Go software can rip into FLAC, and convert from it (on a side note, if you haven’t tried Media Go, you’re missing out – it’s probably the best Windows-compatible alternative to Apple’s iTunes).


But before I get too carried away though – we have a LOT of CDs in our household and I’ve only just started re-ripping all of them – if FLAC really the best option?


With regards to the desktop, we use Microsoft Windows 8 (don’t believe the bad publicity – it’s fantastic!) and although unlikely, there’s a small possibility we may buy a single Apple computer in the future (the wife wants one, specifically for the kid’s schoolwork)… Windows will also be the primary operating system in the foreseeable future, however.

In terms of mobile devices, we’ll almost always buy Sony products, with Android being the most common mobile operating system – also in use is BlackBerry OS (which much to my surprise, natively supports FLAC!) and Windows Phone 8, with a small possibility of BlackBerry 10 being used upon release.

Going forwards, our mobile device use is likely to be a combination of Android and Windows Phone 8 OR BlackBerry 10 (the majority of the family is running Android, however I am currently trialling a number of alternatives as I am unhappy with the usage times and certain other aspects of Android)…

For gaming, we primarily use PlayStation products, though the wife and kids have been bugging me for an Xbox 360 for a while now, so it’s likely we’ll get one of these in the near future – going forwards, our gaming will most likely revolve around PlayStation and Xbox, as we don’t really use the Nintendo products we have very often.

Finally, I am a perfectionist when it comes to metadata – I’ve gotta have it all perfect, with album artwork – and I am very anti-Apple... I simply will not use Apple products unless there is no viable alternative (thus far I’ve always been able to work around the “iWorld” we live in with minimal effort and expense).


My biggest concern is the availability and support of a lossless codec in the long-term future.
FLAC and Apple Lossless are both Open Source, which means that in theory they should be supported for a long time to come… But certain other Open Source formats (the “OpenDocument” formats being the most obvious example) have not lasted the test of time, nor gained widespread adoption – FLAC is a good example of this, as there are very few devices that natively support the format.

Microsoft’s Windows Media formats have generally held-up well against the competition in terms of quality, and despite minimal adoption by the market, Microsoft has continued to support virtually all of the various Windows Media formats… But Microsoft have clearly lost at least some confidence in the formats, as they no longer actively promote any of these formats.

I actually went looking to try and identify the market share for all of the lossless codecs, but was unable to turn-up any positive results…


So, taking all of this into consideration, is FLAC really the best choice for the long-term preservation of my music collection? Or am I better off looking at something like Windows Media Lossless, Apple Lossless or something else?
What do major radio stations use to archive their vast music collections, and it is something that’s viable for a middle-class personal user?
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Apesbrain on 2012-12-10 01:56:43
I actually went looking to try and identify the market share for all of the lossless codecs, but was unable to turn-up any positive results…

Search the forum for "ripping/encoding poll"; latest was this year.  For various pros/cons, search on "lossless comparison".
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-12-10 02:32:42
My biggest concern is the availability and support of a lossless codec in the long-term future.
FLAC and Apple Lossless are both Open Source, which means that in theory they should be supported for a long time to come… But certain other Open Source formats (the “OpenDocument” formats being the most obvious example) have not lasted the test of time, nor gained widespread adoption – FLAC is a good example of this, as there are very few devices that natively support the format.

Microsoft’s Windows Media formats have generally held-up well against the competition in terms of quality, and despite minimal adoption by the market, Microsoft has continued to support virtually all of the various Windows Media formats… But Microsoft have clearly lost at least some confidence in the formats, as they no longer actively promote any of these formats.


Microsoft's audio work seems to be mostly dead, and WMA will probably start to fade way in the coming years.  However, virtually every lossless format in remotely widespread use has an open source implementation in ffmpeg or libav, so I don't really see that it matters.  If anyone ever drops support of format X in favor of format Y, you'll be able to load your collection into foobar2000/dbpoweramp/etc and just convert to whatever the new hotness is.
 
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: twostar on 2012-12-10 03:38:59
If you want the best quality and you've only started re-ripping with Media Go, I suggest you use a ripper with Accuraterip support instead.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: garym on 2012-12-10 12:42:31
If you want the best quality and you've only started re-ripping with Media Go, I suggest you use a ripper with Accuraterip support instead.


yes, for example, dbpoweramp and EAC are very popular rippers for high quality ripping with accuraterip support.  Do a bit of homework on this before you get to far into your ripping task.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Porcus on 2012-12-10 13:20:04
You will be able to decode and therefore convert losslessly as long as your format has a specification which is known and implemented without bugs. I would suggest to use one with a checksum to detect errors (my format of choice is FLAC, which does ... so does WavPack, but http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...less_comparison (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison) does not state whether ALAC does).


For ripping on MS-Windows: Secure ripper with AccurateRip, yes. That means dBp, EAC or CUETools (or Foobar2000, which does unfortunately not support C2 error pointers).
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Nessuno on 2012-12-10 14:55:00
My biggest concern is the availability and support of a lossless codec in the long-term future.

There's no such a thing as a data format that will be supported forever and no physical medium that will last forever. Long term archiving involves frequent testing for readability, both physical and logical and the ability to switch with little effort and no loss of information to another device or format when the first choice will approach the end of its life cycle.
In this respect, FLAC and ALAC are both nearly on par, maybe FLAC being more widespread will be easier to transcode to the next lossles format of choice, when time will come.

Edit: by the way, I use iDevices for listening, but keep safe my lossless rips in FLAC.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Dynamic on 2012-12-10 15:45:08
As you're enjoy ease-of-use and minimal configuration like iTunes or the Sony software, the rippers I'd recommend are
- CUEripper, which is part of CUEtools (free)
- dBpowerAmp (free trial of full functionality, reduced functions including mp3 encoding after 30 days unless license purchased)

Both will collect metadata, check your rips against an online database to confirm their accuracy and offer secure modes (which are slower) to repair a bad rip until it is accurate (for CDs that rip error free, you can otherwise benefit from the speed of burst mode). CUEripper will also be able to fix bad rips of whole discs using the CUETools Database, CTDB, while dBpowerAmp has PerfectMeta to cross-check and improve the accuracy of metadata (Titles, Artists etc). CTDB has more than one source of metadata also, but I'm not aware of it being quite so smart.

P.S. Some people suggest for future proofing to use an open source encoder and store the source code of the version you used in the same folder structure so you could recompile on a future platform. In reality, I think FLAC has the widest support outside Apple's iDevices and ALAC the greatest inside it and will be around for decades to come even if they become a minority player. Looking back, Optimfrog, Shorten etc are still decodable readily enough that you can re-encode to whatever your current devices support.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: andrewfg on 2012-12-10 16:18:57
But before I get too carried away though – ... – if FLAC really the best option?


You could always rip to WAV (or AIF)...

Both are lossless and not compressed (so you don't need a fancy algorithm to read them). AIF stores the pure sample bytes big-little and WAV stores them little-big, and that is basically the only difference.

Almost all control point softwares (and operating systems) can understand WAV (even iTunes can do it), and most can also understand AIF. And of course they can transcode them to whatever else format you could dream of.

You need to check which portable devices can support which formats. But if you drive the player via UPnP/DLNA then even this is not a limitation.

Both WAV and AIF, in addition to the regular music data boxes, can also contain metadata boxes for your tags.

The "big" issue with WAV or AIF used to be the price of hard disks. Bu frankly they are getting so cheap, that it seems hardly a big deal any more.

And for audio purists, the advantage of WAV or AIF are that they are "flat", so every sample is exactly the same size, there is minimal CPU processing involved (perhaps a byte order swap), and even that minimal processing runs smooth without peaks and troughs.

Just my 2c...
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: BFG on 2012-12-10 16:35:49
I asked a similar question a couple weeks ago when I started reripping my entire collection.  I ended up deciding to go with FLAC for several reasons:


My personal recommendation is to use EAC with AccurateRip enabled, and just get going.  Even if FLAC turns out to be less than the optimal choice 10 years from now, once you have your collection ripped losslessly it's easy to convert.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: DonP on 2012-12-10 16:39:49
Both WAV and AIF, in addition to the regular music data boxes, can also contain metadata boxes for your tags.

The "big" issue with WAV or AIF used to be the price of hard disks. Bu frankly they are getting so cheap, that it seems hardly a big deal any more.


I generally don't see tags on wav, and didn't think standard wav supported them.

Speaking of which, while lossless is transcodable from one to another without changing the music, not all transcoding programs will transfer the tags.  Just something to check before translating your whole collection to a new format.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: yourlord on 2012-12-10 16:47:48
There's no such a thing as a data format that will be supported forever


As long as my brain still functions then FLAC and ALAC can be supported for as long as I need it to be. There is a reason I use open formats.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: andrewfg on 2012-12-10 19:20:33
I generally don't see tags on wav, and didn't think standard wav supported them.


You can tag WAV files. The original (so called "canonical") WAV specification only specified the basic structure with an audio format "box" and a media stream data "box" but it was open ended and it does allow additional meta data "boxes" to be added too...
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Nessuno on 2012-12-10 19:54:14
As long as my brain still functions then FLAC and ALAC can be supported for as long as I need it to be. There is a reason I use open formats.

Fine, so everything the OP needs to have at hand for years to come is your address...
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: yourlord on 2012-12-10 20:52:34
You'll note the "I" in my post 
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: zima on 2012-12-10 21:58:09
certain other Open Source formats (the “OpenDocument” formats being the most obvious example) have not lasted the test of time, nor gained widespread adoption – FLAC is a good example of this, as there are very few devices that natively support the format.
[...]
What do major radio stations use to archive their vast music collections, and it is something that’s viable for a middle-class personal user?

FLAC and dBpowerAMP seem to be good enough at least for some usage scenarios of the European Broadcasting Union... http://www.ebu.ch/en/radio/ops_rdo/faq/index.php (http://www.ebu.ch/en/radio/ops_rdo/faq/index.php)

BTW, Open/Libre Office (hence influencing OpenDocument) adoption seems to be quite varied geographically - you might not see it much around you, but there are places standardising on it, and/or where OpenOffice has quite a bit of adoption among end-users. (http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-openoffice-market-shares.html) It's likely here to stay.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-12-11 00:14:40
Almost all control point softwares (and operating systems) can understand WAV (even iTunes can do it),

...

Both WAV and AIF, in addition to the regular music data boxes, can also contain metadata boxes for your tags.


Careful.  WAV and AIFF are widely supported.  And they can be tagged.  But tagging them is not widely supported.  Worse, I've seen decoders that play untagged files fine, but give non-lossless output if fed tagged files.  From a compatibility standpoint, tagged PCM formats are probably much less compatible then FLAC, ALAC, or even WMA Lossless simply because metadata is not as well standardized and you have to carefully check that your decoder is able to handle tags written by your encoder without altering the data. 

If you really need a lossless archive with tagging, I strongly recommend sticking to safer formats.

And for audio purists, the advantage of WAV or AIF are that they are "flat", so every sample is exactly the same size,


I've implemented or optimized lots of codecs on slow embedded CPUs.  This is no advantage at all.

there is minimal CPU processing involved (perhaps a byte order swap), and even that minimal processing runs smooth without peaks and troughs.


FLAC takes about 10 MHz to decode on a simple embedded processors, and takes less time to read, so I would not assume that PCM requires less processing.  Lossless compression is generally very simple (ignoring APE), so it tends to be about as minimal as you could ever want.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: zima on 2012-12-13 17:42:32
My biggest concern is the availability and support of a lossless codec in the long-term future.
[...] FLAC is a good example of this, as there are very few devices that natively support the format.

PS. Checking out the most straightforward place, FLAC Wiki art, I stumbled on a List of hardware and software that supports FLAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hardware_and_software_that_supports_FLAC) - it's not so bad, it seems (notably, native support in Android 3.1+, the guerilla in the room of mobile OS)
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: BFG on 2012-12-13 18:27:30
PS. Checking out the most straightforward place, FLAC Wiki art, I stumbled on a List of hardware and software that supports FLAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hardware_and_software_that_supports_FLAC) - it's not so bad, it seems (notably, native support in Android 3.1+, the guerilla in the room of mobile OS)

I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that Blackberry OS 7.1 supports FLAC out of the box.  I really wouldn't have expected it to.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: probedb on 2012-12-14 11:01:00
And for audio purists, the advantage of WAV or AIF are that they are "flat", so every sample is exactly the same size, there is minimal CPU processing involved (perhaps a byte order swap), and even that minimal processing runs smooth without peaks and troughs.


Erm, which decade of computing are you in that you think decoding FLAC even remotely taxes even an embedded CPU?
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Nessuno on 2012-12-14 15:04:58
And for audio purists, the advantage of WAV or AIF are that they are "flat", so every sample is exactly the same size, there is minimal CPU processing involved (perhaps a byte order swap), and even that minimal processing runs smooth without peaks and troughs.


Erm, which decade of computing are you in that you think decoding FLAC even remotely taxes even an embedded CPU?

And, to say it all, is often more time and energy consuming (and less "smooth") for a decoding system as a whole to fetch data from mass storage, expecially if not solid state and shared between lots of other processes...
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: andrewfg on 2012-12-14 15:42:30
Erm, which decade of computing are you in that you think decoding FLAC even remotely taxes even an embedded CPU?


Two answers:

1) note that I prefaced my post with the words "and for audio purists" -- there are many of those out there who still believe they can hear the difference...
2) and to give you a concrete example: the Squeezebox Radio (for example) is not able to decode flac at 192kbps, 24bit, 2ch

Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: andrewfg on 2012-12-14 15:51:36
Checking out the most straightforward place, FLAC Wiki art, I stumbled on a List of hardware and software that supports FLAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hardware_and_software_that_supports_FLAC) - it's not so bad, it seems (notably, native support in Android 3.1+, the guerilla in the room of mobile OS)


Erm, its a nice list, but IMHO conspicuous by their absence are the following names (to name a few): Sony, Philips, Technics, Panasonic, Toshiba, Hitachi, Microsoft, Apple, LG, Sharp, ...
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: leo-bogert on 2012-12-14 16:03:12
I am planning long-term archiving of my audio files as well.

I wanted to be dead-sure that the encoding process is flawless and that decoding the files in the future will work.
For being more sure about this than with just using the naked flac encoder, I developed perfect-flac-encode (https://github.com/leo-bogert/perfect-flac-encode), a completely paranoid flac encoding script.
It does a lot more than encoding:
Code: [Select]
1. It checks the EAC LOG to make sure that AccurateRip reported a flawless rip.
2. It uses shntool len to check for any of the following problems with the input WAV:
    * Data is not CD quality
    * Data is not cut on a sector boundary
    * Data is too short to be burned
    * Header is not canonical
    * Contains extra RIFF chunks
    * Contains an ID3v2 header
    * Audio data is not block‐aligned
    * Header is inconsistent about data size and/or file size
    * File is truncated
    * File has junk appended to it
3. It checks whether the Test and Copy CRC in the EAC LOG match.
4. It computes the EAC CRC of the input WAV image and checks whether it matches the Copy CRC in the EAC LOG.
5. It computes the AccurateRip checksums of the splitfiles which it has created and compares them with the ones from the EAC LOG.
6. It re-joins the singletrack files to an image and compares the checksum with the checksum of the original image from EAC to make sure that it would be possible to burn an identical CD again.
7. It encodes the singletracks to FLAC with very carefully chosen settings. The full manpage of FLAC was read by me when chosing the settings.
8. It runs flac --test on each singletrack which makes FLAC test the integrity of the file.
9. It decodes each singletrack to WAV again and compares the checksums with the checksums of the original WAV splitfiles.

Notice that everything which would be needed to restore the original input WAV image is tested by actually doing it in temporary directories. Decompressing the FLACs, joining the singletracks to an image, etc.

Further notice that it is still in the beta phase and shall not be used for production yet.
But I work on it every second day and plan to finish it within the next month.
I have over 40 commits in the pipeline for the next beta version.

Once it is finished, I will run my existing collection of >200 WAV images through it for testing (and migrating from WavPack to FLAC).

Here (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=97643) is the thread of perfect-flac-encode, subscribe to it for being updated about the development.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: DonP on 2012-12-14 16:39:48
1) note that I prefaced my post with the words "and for audio purists" -- there are many of those out there who still believe they can hear the difference...
2) and to give you a concrete example: the Squeezebox Radio (for example) is not able to decode flac at 192kbps, 24bit, 2ch


Must be an unusual piece if it can be compressed lossless  to 192 kbps.. or did you us flac level 16  ?  .

On point 1, I'd think the usual tos 8 applies when you justify with what one thinks they might hear.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: yourlord on 2012-12-14 17:19:53
and to give you a concrete example: the Squeezebox Radio (for example) is not able to decode flac at 192kbps, 24bit, 2ch


I would suspect this is more a limitation of their firmware decoder than a problem with the processing overhead..

It can decode mp3, Vorbis, and AAC, all of which require a LOT more computational power to decode than FLAC, even at absurdly high resolution and sample rates.


Also, as far as support.. A great number of mid-to-high end A/V receiver brands support FLAC natively including Pioneer, Denon, Onkyo, etc.

Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: polemon on 2012-12-14 17:33:04
I realize I'm chiming in pretty late into this conversation, so you might ignore this post completely.

FLAC has somewhat found it's place in the plethora of codecs available. From my perspective, it is the most common, almost a de-facto industry standard, maybe. The only other lossless codec I'm quite accustomed to, is ALAC. Now personally, I think ALAC is just a waste of time bothering with, since it's virtually equal to FLAC, but I digress...

I'd advice to use FLAC with the highest compression ("--best"), and then simply archive them. Even if the codec becomes old and something new (better?) pops up, you can easily convert from FLAC, since it's lossless, so you won't lose any quality. For casual listening at home, where you might want to stream the audio to different destinations, or putting it on another portable media, for listening in your car or putting it on a mobile device, you could easily make lossy versions from the lossless files.

I strongly advice on making the FLACs from the original sources, even if it takes time. That being said, you don' /really/ need to make those files, if you can just use the original source to make a lossy copy when needed. If it's about making those copies in case the original source breaks, it's still FLACs I'd advice.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-12-14 18:05:34
1) note that I prefaced my post with the words "and for audio purists" -- there are many of those out there who still believe they can hear the difference...


What?  Are you trying to say that FLAC isn't lossless?  It is . . .

2) and to give you a concrete example: the Squeezebox Radio (for example) is not able to decode flac at 192kbps, 24bit, 2ch


Example of what?  Lots of devices don't support all possible sample rates in FLAC.  I added 192 khz (which I assume is what you mean) to rockbox relatively recently.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: polemon on 2012-12-25 22:59:01
Lots of devices don't support all possible sample rates in FLAC.
[...]

Hmm, I don't see the point in using higher sampling rates, than the hardware can provide (for most people that tops at 48kHz). Professional audio equipment is a different story. With that in mind, It's nice if audio equipment can decode those high sampling rates, but I don't think it's an requirement. I think those DJ controller things, that also work as external sound device, can go up to 96kHz.

Just sayin', I think support for >96kHz is really not a requirement.

FLAC supports up to 655.35kHz and up to eight channels. Supporting the whole spectrum, 1Hz - 655.35kHz, doesn't seem reasonable, but all eight channels and all sample widths (8, 16, 20, 24, 32), makes sense.

I mean, some codecs got really carried away with one or two settings. True Audio supports 0Hz - 4GHz, and 655350 channels. It kinda reminds me of sampling rates of very expensive oscilloscopes, I don't think it has much usage in multimedia, other than proof of concept.

What I'm saying is, just because the full spectrum of a codec is not supported, it doesn't mean something has been forgotten or overlooked. Leaving the extreme ends of the spectrum out, makes perfect sense in multimedia.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Porcus on 2012-12-26 02:42:32
Recording has exceeded eight channels for decades, and already in 2005 there was a movie in the 10.2 format (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462026/trivia) ... which hasn't really caught on, though.

Still no object for my two-channel recordings.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: EddievV on 2012-12-26 15:11:35
What?  Are you trying to say that FLAC isn't lossless?  It is . . .


Hello all,

I cannot check wether or not FLAC is lossless, but I recently downloaded a hi-rez demo. It was a 24 bit, 96 kHz recording, coded as FLAC. It was an orchestral piece and the violins were recorded at close to maximum level. When I played the FLAC with a Squeezebox Touch and an Audiolab MDAC the violins sounded really terrible, there was substatial distortion. Just for the test I downloaded a converter and made a WAV from this demo. When I played back the WAV there was no distortion in the sound of the violins!

My conclusion: on-line conversion of FLAC is not lossless! Further I see no need for compression with present-day, terabyte harddisks. Storage of one CD (costing 10-15 Euro) costs about 6 cents when you do it as WAV and 3 cents when you do it as FLAC, in both cases a negligible amount, I would say.


Kind regards,
Eddie
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: maikmerten on 2012-12-26 15:37:19
I cannot check wether or not FLAC is lossless, but I recently downloaded a hi-rez demo. It was a 24 bit, 96 kHz recording, coded as FLAC. It was an orchestral piece and the violins were recorded at close to maximum level. When I played the FLAC with a Squeezebox Touch and an Audiolab MDAC the violins sounded really terrible, there was substatial distortion. Just for the test I downloaded a converter and made a WAV from this demo. When I played back the WAV there was no distortion in the sound of the violins!

My conclusion: on-line conversion of FLAC is not lossless!


There is no algorithmic difference between "on-line" FLAC decompression and offline FLAC decompression. Whatever caused the problems you experienced must have been in your setup, e.g., a firmware bug in the Squeezebox.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: garym on 2012-12-26 16:06:48
I cannot check wether or not FLAC is lossless, but I recently downloaded a hi-rez demo. It was a 24 bit, 96 kHz recording, coded as FLAC. It was an orchestral piece and the violins were recorded at close to maximum level. When I played the FLAC with a Squeezebox Touch and an Audiolab MDAC the violins sounded really terrible, there was substatial distortion. Just for the test I downloaded a converter and made a WAV from this demo. When I played back the WAV there was no distortion in the sound of the violins!

My conclusion: on-line conversion of FLAC is not lossless!


There is no algorithmic difference between "on-line" FLAC decompression and offline FLAC decompression. Whatever caused the problems you experienced must have been in your setup, e.g., a firmware bug in the Squeezebox.


Not a widespread bug in squeezebox as I have several without this issue. And many use for 24/96 flac playback. Does sound like something is broken however in either the SB or the DAC or in LMS feeding SB.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: pawelq on 2012-12-26 18:54:45
Careful.  WAV and AIFF are widely supported.  And they can be tagged.  But tagging them is not widely supported.  Worse, I've seen decoders that play untagged files fine, but give non-lossless output if fed tagged files.  From a compatibility standpoint, tagged PCM formats are probably much less compatible then FLAC, ALAC, or even WMA Lossless simply because metadata is not as well standardized and you have to carefully check that your decoder is able to handle tags written by your encoder without altering the data.

The advantage of WAV/AIFF is that audio is stored there in the most direct form - simple PCM. Which means that even if in the future you have no "codec"/input filter to open these files, you can still open them as raw PCM, and after fiddling a bit with guessing parameters (sampling frequency, bit depth, endianness, channel order) you will have your audio. Headers and tags will be read as bursts of noise, likely in he beginning and/or in the end of the audio. Which you can just cut off. A few years ago I was able to salvage audio from files written by an obscure audio program in their native format whose structure was unknown to me. If you try to do this with any compressed fromat, you out of luck.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-12-26 19:09:53
All modern lossless formats are supported by ffmpeg so you will never have to worry about that.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: pawelq on 2012-12-26 19:27:00
All modern lossless formats are supported by ffmpeg so you will never have to worry about that.


Only if you are sure that ffmpeg will be around forever, and will never drop support of "obsolete" formats.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-12-26 19:42:39
All modern lossless formats are supported by ffmpeg so you will never have to worry about that.


Only if you are sure that ffmpeg will be around forever, and will never drop support of "obsolete" formats.


You're planning to be around "forever"?  Doubtful. 

Lossless decoders are simple programs written in a few hundred lines of a language that is already 40 years old.  They'l still exist in twice again as many years.  You'll die long before you can't find a decoder.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: pawelq on 2012-12-26 20:43:11
All modern lossless formats are supported by ffmpeg so you will never have to worry about that.


Only if you are sure that ffmpeg will be around forever, and will never drop support of "obsolete" formats.


You're planning to be around "forever"?  Doubtful. 

Lossless decoders are simple programs written in a few hundred lines of a language that is already 40 years old.  They'l still exist in twice again as many years.  You'll die long before you can't find a decoder.


OK. I just had this experience which I described above. If that obsolete program used proprietary lossless compression, I would never get to the audio. With proprietary PCM format it was quite easy. But you are probably right that decoders of formats that exceeded certain threshold of popularity will be probably available for a long time.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: yourlord on 2012-12-26 21:07:11
And again one of my main reasons for using FLAC. It's free and open source. The reference software to encode and decode is available in source form under an acceptable free software license.

You can download the source code for it from:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/flac/files/flac-src/ (http://sourceforge.net/projects/flac/files/flac-src/)

I have a copy of the source code stored locally on my machine. Even if the internet ended tomorrow I'd be able to decode my files as long as I live and my brain works. When YOU have the source code you never have to worry about your format becoming obsolete. You have the power over your media. You're not subject to the whims of some proprietary group with their own agenda. Even if everyone drops support for FLAC (not going to happen anytime soon AFAIK) I can still losslessly recover my music and transcode to whatever newfangled codec that comes down the pipe.. I have the code!
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Porcus on 2012-12-27 01:39:58
A few years ago I was able to salvage audio from files written by an obscure audio program in their native format whose structure was unknown to me. If you try to do this with any compressed fromat, you out of luck.


Well ... depends on who this 'you' will be. The ffmpeg team just reverse-engineered TAK, for example.

Now before you go 'will you want to do that job?': no - and somebody has done it. And released source code. It isn't fool-proof (... not even character sets can be expected to work universally!), but it is as close as you get.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Mach-X on 2012-12-27 09:23:19
As long as rockbox exists NO format will die! Thanks to gracious open source coders your format of choice will always have support no matter how obscure. But to echo others stick with FLAC. Native android (and sansa and cowon) support of this and Vorbis have made those my codecs of choice.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: EddievV on 2012-12-27 15:48:55
.... My conclusion: on-line conversion of FLAC is not lossless!


There is no algorithmic difference between "on-line" FLAC decompression and offline FLAC decompression. Whatever caused the problems you experienced must have been in your setup, e.g., a firmware bug in the Squeezebox.


Not a widespread bug in squeezebox as I have several without this issue. And many use for 24/96 flac playback. Does sound like something is broken however in either the SB or the DAC or in LMS feeding SB.

I find it difficult to believe that something is wrong with my SB or MDAC. I am not going to waste time in trying to find out since I never use FLAC and I estimate the chance that I will find the cause zero.

I downloaded a FLAC a few times to compare a 44/16 recording with a 96/24. Up to now I have not heard a significant difference. There could be two reasons: I think that these demos were not very suitable (dull orchestral pieces) and my ears detect nothing anymore beyond 14 kHz. This is, however, still good enough to hear big differences between the best equipment I ever heard and a good acoustic live concert.

So WAV remains the only format for me and I am very happy with it.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Wombat on 2012-12-27 16:01:01
I find it difficult to believe that something is wrong with my SB or MDAC. I am not going to waste time in trying to find out since I never use FLAC and I estimate the chance that I will find the cause zero.

I find it much more difficult to believe that FLAC does not decode lossless on the Logitech Touch/Mediaserver. Since you did that claim here please try to dig deeper.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: [JAZ] on 2012-12-27 16:52:17
So WAV remains the only format for me and I am very happy with it.


Just to put it clear:

- You are allowed to have any oppinion and preference that you want.
- You are not allowed to say that your preference is caused by something that goes against the knowledge of this forum, without a clear proof that our knowledge is wrong.

You were given a few reasons why your experience might be wrong. You don't need to change your preference, but are not allowed to maintain your point in this forum without further evidence.

So, please, respecte the forum rules.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: julf on 2012-12-27 16:54:01
My conclusion: on-line conversion of FLAC is not lossless!


Somewhat unlikely. More likely either LMS settings for FLAC are wrong, or the SB Touch + MDAC combo has some issue with FLAC. How is your MDAC connected to your SB Touch?
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Porcus on 2012-12-27 22:42:48
I find it difficult to believe that something is wrong with my SB or MDAC. I am not going to waste time in trying to find out since I never use FLAC and I estimate the chance that I will find the cause zero.

I find it much more difficult to believe that FLAC does not decode lossless on the Logitech Touch/Mediaserver. Since you did that claim here please try to dig deeper.


There have been lots of issues reported with certain Squeezebox devices. First and best hit: http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Squeezebox-P...-85/td-p/543966 (http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Squeezebox-Players/Popping-noises-with-Transporter-firmware-81-and-85/td-p/543966)

Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Wombat on 2012-12-27 23:04:27
There have been lots of issues reported with certain Squeezebox devices. First and best hit: http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Squeezebox-P...-85/td-p/543966 (http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Squeezebox-Players/Popping-noises-with-Transporter-firmware-81-and-85/td-p/543966)

So we change this thread to solve the problem of a member that doesn´t even want to find a solution himself but does some strange reasoning? For playback issues with Squeezedevices you´ll also find tons of problem threads related to playing wav instead of flac after some people trying to adopt audiophile recommendations.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: Porcus on 2012-12-28 00:02:38
Not sure if I get your point, but I am not sure if I solve the poster's problem by merely pointing out that it is likely not the format per se.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-12-28 00:42:41
OK. I just had this experience which I described above.


I'm not saying you did not have that experience, just that the conclusions you are drawing from it cannot be generalized to the situation in this thread for the reasons I stated above.  Being uncompressed is not an advantage over a documented format with decoder source available. 

If that obsolete program used proprietary lossless compression, I would never get to the audio. With proprietary PCM format it was quite easy. But you are probably right that decoders of formats that exceeded certain threshold of popularity will be probably available for a long time.


Lots of proprietary lossless formats are supported by ffmpeg.  Did you check to see if yours was?  And I don't think popularity really has much to do with this.  Countless obscure 1980s audio formats are well supported in modern decoder libraries.  Once source code is available it is seldom forgotten, particularly for simple things like lossless decoders.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: pawelq on 2012-12-28 03:20:04
Did you check to see if yours was?


No I did not, It was 7 years ago and I wasn't aware that anything like ffmpeg existed. It was proprietary format used by early (DOS - yes!!!) versions of this software http://www.engdes.com/sigwin/products/sigwin/sig5.html (http://www.engdes.com/sigwin/products/sigwin/sig5.html). Haha, it looks like they still list us as users (http://www.engdes.com/sigwin/company/user_lst.html) even though we dropped this program years ago.
Title: Best Audio Format for Archiving Music Long-Term?
Post by: garym on 2012-12-28 11:53:26
I find it difficult to believe that something is wrong with my SB or MDAC. I am not going to waste time in trying to find out since I never use FLAC and I estimate the chance that I will find the cause zero.

I find it much more difficult to believe that FLAC does not decode lossless on the Logitech Touch/Mediaserver. Since you did that claim here please try to dig deeper.


There have been lots of issues reported with certain Squeezebox devices. First and best hit: http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Squeezebox-P...-85/td-p/543966 (http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Squeezebox-Players/Popping-noises-with-Transporter-firmware-81-and-85/td-p/543966)


A bit off topic, but since mentioned: This was a temporary problem for the TRANSPORTER only related to hires flac files created with max compression. -5 hires flac files were fine. And even this was solved with a firmware update for the TRANSPORTER.  In general flac files are actually the best format to use on squeezebox devices. I have many and have zero issues streaming flac, including 24/96 or 24/192.

And yes, creating odd settings for the squeezeboxes that don't use standard flac playback settings (as suggested elsewhere by certain "audiophools" can create issues. So can driving my car on the highway in 2nd gear with handbrake on.  ;-)