The Future of FLAC
Reply #73 – 2012-11-22 11:06:39
But yes, I've found -8 -p to be more than satisfactory in most cases. That said, I have been surprised at the apparent complexity of some of my favorite tracks, as FLAC could only go to a .800 or so ratio on some of them, even with these settings. If you want to be completely and uncompromisingly lossless, that's something you'll have to accept if you like any pop or rock music made after the late 1990s. It's not uncommon to find lossless bitrates of around 1000 kbps in albums from the last few years which are 'competitive with their peers' in terms of loudness on shuffle play - i.e. they are victims of the Loudness War. If the volume is very high, distortion is introduced to make it so high, which is less predictable, causing lossless encoders to use more bits encoding the error between their prediction and the actual values. Also the bottom bits are full of much more random noise floor below the non-random music (what's not predictable is called the residual, which takes up most of the space of a lossless file) and a lossless encoder dutifully encodes every last bit of the noise floor too, which might be thought of as 10 to 13 bits per channel of essentially random data in some extreme Loudness War victims! As greynol says, TAK will probably perform a little better than FLAC on these, though don't expect miracles! There are some ways to overcome this needless bloat, which while not 100% lossless compared to what's on the CD, are effectively lossless according to the question "If this sound were mastered at a reasonable level that's still transparent, what would lossless look like? ". In other words it's as though you re-mastered to a normal volume (but kept the distortion) then encoded to lossless.Remaster at a sensible volume , e.g. 83 to 89 dB SPL like a classical or early 1990s CD Bitrate: 650-800kbps perhaps - Use ReplayGain Apply Album Gain (with clipping prevention) and dither e.g. in foobar2000 Converter. Changes original volume, but saves reaching for volume control in shuffle.Use lossyWAV to make filename.lossy.flac Bitrate: 440-550 kbps (standard, high or extreme settings) - never shown non-transparent at standard or above. Becomes fully lossless in quiet tracks or deep fades. No low pass filtering. CUEripper / CUETools includes early version (with no adaptive noise-shaping so slightly higher bitrates) but very easy to use when ripping or converting.WavPack Lossy mode Bitrate: 384, 448 or 512 kbps typically. Doesn't analyse noise floor like lossyWAV but very robust around 512. Becomes fully lossless in deep fades or very quiet tracks, no low pass filtering.