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Topic: Looking for a FLAC web player (Read 73920 times) previous topic - next topic
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Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #25
mp3hd might be a good alternative. It is a lossless encoding format back compatible to mp3 decoding,

So, you will still have to shove the whole lossless stream to the end-user, but he might just be able to hear the lossy MP3 decode if his decoder can't handle mp3HD? That is the worst of both worlds. You could, of course, easily strip the lossless data from the stream (since it is stored in ID3v2 tags ) to get rid of it when you serve the files, but that only helps if your main shortcoming is storage space (so you cannot save both a FLAC and MP3 encode at the same time) and not bandwidth. And this only holds true if the mp3HD encoder is efficient enough to beat FLAC(CL)+LAME encodes at high compression rates. And, of course, remember that the codec is unable to handle large input streams.

As a sidenote, mp3HD has been discussed at HA some years ago.
It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #26
how about "Please install quicktime" and use ALAC? (i did not actually test, just a thought)
p.s. there is ALAC decoder/encoder also in ffmpeg.

edit: and add an alternative js web decoder, something to test:
http://badassjs.com/post/14463682242/intro...udio-decoder-in
Maybe somebody is up to the task to port flac decoder to js?

----------------

scenarios:
- user has ie and quicktime (everything ok)
- user has ie - offer download link + suggest a software that can decode alac and/or  suggest "Please install quicktime"
- user has chrome/firefox (if there is no quicktime then offer js decoder)

(this is all progressive download, not streaming)
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #27
Time for me to jump in.

I'm not here to say someone can't stream FLAC across the net, but I'll at least give my reasons why it shouldn't be done.

It's been proven, beyond any reasonable argument, that any modern lossy codec at a moderate bitrate (~200Kbps), and even mp3 at somewhat higher rates, is completely transparent to all of humanity in all but the most marginal cases.

Many people have touched on the fact that while your server may have unimaginable gobs of bandwidth at it's disposal, it's not a guarantee your user will.
FLAC files can range in bitrate from roughly 500Kbps to well over 1Mbps. For web based audio, that represents upwards of a potential 500% increase in bandwidth usage for demonstrably no benefit.

Now, try to remember that this isn't YOUR internet.. It's OUR internet.. That excess bandwidth needed to stream FLAC is essentially total waste, and it's wasting not just your bandwidth and the bandwidth of your user, but the bandwidth and capacity of every router, every fiber link, etc, that ferry's your data across the network.

Having said that, I LOVE FLAC.. Virtually every album I own is stored in FLAC format on my network. When I play them on my local workstations I play the FLAC directly over my network. But that's on MY network, using equipment that I wholly own. I'm not piping that through anyone else's network, essentially wasting their and everyone else's bandwidth.

FLAC is meant for storage and local area playback; not streaming over a shared resource like the internet.

I use subsonic (www.subsonic.org) to access and stream my library over the net. I have it configured to transcode FLAC files to 160Kbps mp3 for use in the flash player, or to quality 2 vorbis to stream to a local media player such as VLC.

To date nobody that uses it has complained about the sound quality.




Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #28
Not that 'everyone else is worse than me!' is a good argument, but ... what difference does the streaming of lossless audio count, compared to all the high-def porn movie content transfered world webwide?

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #29
Not that 'everyone else is worse than me!' is a good argument, but ... what difference does the streaming of lossless audio count, compared to all the high-def porn movie content transfered world webwide?

In defense of the porn, it's at least VERY compressed.

Uncompressed 1920x1080 24-bit color video at 30fps is roughly 1.5Gbps.. If over one intermediate hop it was crossing a not atypical 10Gbps fiber, you by yourself would consume 15% of the capacity of that link. If 6 people were streaming that feed, that link would be nearly saturated. if one other person tried to start watching, then we'd have contention, lag, etc, and pretty much anyone else trying to post a tweet or something would have a bad time doing it.

There are ways to mitigate the issue, but the point is those methods shouldn't be caused because 6 or 7 people have it in their head that lossy compression is unacceptable and therefore deem it acceptable to waste a finite resource (internet bandwidth) that we all share.

Just because some people waste bandwidth, doesn't excuse us for doing the same. Obviously, you are not compelled to conserve internet bandwidth, but if we all waste it pointlessly we'll all have to deal with the congestion that will occur.

Streaming FLAC for a one time listening session is a pointless waste.. Transferring a copy of a FLAC file for permanent storage and use on a client isn't. That's all I'm saying..



Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #30
I don't understand the need for people to repeatedly post in this thread complaining about OPs decision to stream in lossless. 
It's his money, let him do what he wants with it. Nobody is forcing other people to visit OPs site, either.

And if some unknown site streaming a few files at ~700kb is a significant problem for the internet as a whole, then we should perhaps approach this from another angle.. if there was a "danger" that some other (big) websites would begin streaming in lossless it would perhaps be worth discussing. But I don't see this happening any time soon, for obvious reasons.
Although I would definitely like to see cheap bandwidth being so widespread that it would actually allow that to happen. Eventually demand for high bitrate content can also push towards improvements in the internet infrastructure..

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #31
I don't understand the need for people to repeatedly post in this thread complaining about OPs decision to stream in lossless. 
It's his money, let him do what he wants with it. Nobody is forcing other people to visit OPs site, either.


I'm not complaining. I'm just giving reasons why doing so is suboptimal from the perspective of internet resources.

Yes, it's his money, but he's using a shared resource when he sends that across the internet. One guy doing this isn't going to be a problem. A large number of people doing it will be.

I'm coming from the point of view that all he's doing is streaming the audio to whoever to be listened to while it's being transferred, for a one time use. If he's transferring the file to them to keep and reuse, then it's not a waste since there is a reason for them to store and reuse a lossless copy. But sending a FLAC for Jimmy down the block to listen to on his $10 computer speakers one time and forget it is a complete waste of resources.

You'll also note that I gave a solution in my 1st response in that I use Subsonic as my web based media streaming system. It will allow him to store FLAC files on the server and Subsonic will transcode them to whatever he likes, on the fly, when someone requests to listen to it. It solves his issue in that he doesn't have to waste his time transcoding everything manually.. He can drop his FLAC files in his repository and then when someone selects to listen to it, Subsonic will transcode it for them while they stream it. It even gives them a download link so if they decide they want a copy they can download the original FLAC version.

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #32
(for me) INTRAnet is very interesting as well and serving/storing just one file on a server is just easy (and easy browser based solution for playback is also very interesting), also no on-the-fly transcoding means that the server can use less electricity and our rain forest will live longer.

p.s. also in case of intranet: it is interesting to be able to preview the file and download it, so if it is the same file then it is already cached and download will just do a local disk copy - which is very fast btw.

p.s.2. Nothing beats porn of course.
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #33
There are other reasons for wanting to use Lossless. For example one is what I am currently working on:

I've written a web-based music player to let me listen to my music collection to wherever I am. Sure, if I'm not at home then I'll need to transcode the audio track I want to listen to to something more bandwidth friendly (it converts the file on the fly to OGG or AAC, whichever the browser supports) but if I'm at home on the same network then having to wait for the track to transcode (admittedly only ~3 seconds, but that's still more than 0 seconds) and losing quality in doing so is a waste as I'm certainly not going to run into any bandwidth issues on my own network.

Just thought I'd throw a real world situation in as an example.

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #34
I'm looking for a web player (flash ?) I can embbed in my html pages in order to allow site visitors to play FLAC audio file.
(juste need a start/stop/pause button and a progression bar).

I've found several tool on the web. Either as Java or as Flash but only for mp3 files ..... nothing for FLAC files 


https://github.com/ofmlabs/flac.js 

..there ya' go. Perhaps all the useless people commenting will go away now.

edit: Demo: http://labs.official.fm/codecs/flac/

 

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #35
I'm looking for a web player (flash ?) I can embbed in my html pages in order to allow site visitors to play FLAC audio file.
(juste need a start/stop/pause button and a progression bar).

I've found several tool on the web. Either as Java or as Flash but only for mp3 files ..... nothing for FLAC files 


https://github.com/ofmlabs/flac.js 

..there ya' go. Perhaps all the useless people commenting will go away now.

edit: Demo: http://labs.official.fm/codecs/flac/


That'll work in a very custom setup, but it's a shame that when browsers support OGG natively, that they don't also support FLAC. If they did, you could just throw the track at a HTML5 audio element and it would work. Far less hassle.

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #36
Not that 'everyone else is worse than me!' is a good argument, but ... what difference does the streaming of lossless audio count, compared to all the high-def porn movie content transfered world webwide?

In defense of the porn, it's at least VERY compressed.

Uncompressed 1920x1080 24-bit color video at 30fps is roughly 1.5Gbps.. If over one intermediate hop it was crossing a not atypical 10Gbps fiber, you by yourself would consume 15% of the capacity of that link. If 6 people were streaming that feed, that link would be nearly saturated. if one other person tried to start watching, then we'd have contention, lag, etc, and pretty much anyone else trying to post a tweet or something would have a bad time doing it.

There are ways to mitigate the issue, but the point is those methods shouldn't be caused because 6 or 7 people have it in their head that lossy compression is unacceptable and therefore deem it acceptable to waste a finite resource (internet bandwidth) that we all share.

Just because some people waste bandwidth, doesn't excuse us for doing the same. Obviously, you are not compelled to conserve internet bandwidth, but if we all waste it pointlessly we'll all have to deal with the congestion that will occur.

Streaming FLAC for a one time listening session is a pointless waste.. Transferring a copy of a FLAC file for permanent storage and use on a client isn't. That's all I'm saying..

I woudn't argee with that. Imagine you have a 4 min song in FLAC. That's 30 Mb if the bitrate is around 1 Mbps. The visitor of the OP's website is a musician, so he really needs that track in FLAC (he might later save it from the browser cache).

Now compare with the online video poscast (or broadcast) from any TV channel website (not porn, well). That's about 1 Mbps on maximum quality, even if the content is not in HD resolution (1080p). And people watch this for 1-2 hours a day sometimes! So, man, what are you talking about? =) We are alive, and the bandwidth is sufficient by now for that, as I can see. Moreover - I somewhere heard, that more than 80 percent of data transferred via the internet is mail spam. Cannot believe in that, but if it's true, we should probably be fighting this - and not FLAC streaming =)

P.S. I tried FLAC yesterday and it's really awesome)) Significantly better than 320 kbps MP3 even on my integrated soundcard and not very expensive headphones. It's not a blind test - but I can see more high frequencies even on Winamp visualiser. I suppose if I'd tried it on some more serious acoustic system, it would be really CD quality (and I've never listened to CDs on high end acoustics, but what I hear now in 937 kbps FLAC is great even with headphones).

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #37
... I tried FLAC yesterday and it's really awesome)) Significantly better than 320 kbps MP3 even on my integrated soundcard and not very expensive headphones. It's not a blind test - but I can see more high frequencies even on Winamp visualiser. I suppose if I'd tried it on some more serious acoustic system, it would be really CD quality (and I've never listened to CDs on high end acoustics, but what I hear now in 937 kbps FLAC is great even with headphones).

Have you read this

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #38
For what it's worth, sites that I've downloaded FLAC files from often also have lossy available, and it wouldn't be hard to automate making them.

You could just put it on your users to set up their browser to send flac streams to a capable player, and have the built in flash player as a fallback position.

IMO, embedded flash players are a royal pain since it's not supported on a lot of tablets etc and it looks like Adobe will have no more Linux releases.  So, please have a stream URL available for when your web page player doesn't work.


Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #39
... I tried FLAC yesterday and it's really awesome)) Significantly better than 320 kbps MP3 even on my integrated soundcard and not very expensive headphones. It's not a blind test - but I can see more high frequencies even on Winamp visualiser. I suppose if I'd tried it on some more serious acoustic system, it would be really CD quality (and I've never listened to CDs on high end acoustics, but what I hear now in 937 kbps FLAC is great even with headphones).

Have you read this


I admit, I sometimes visit these forums just to find the next victim falling into this trap!

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #40
... I tried FLAC yesterday and it's really awesome)) Significantly better than 320 kbps MP3 even on my integrated soundcard and not very expensive headphones. It's not a blind test - but I can see more high frequencies even on Winamp visualiser. I suppose if I'd tried it on some more serious acoustic system, it would be really CD quality (and I've never listened to CDs on high end acoustics, but what I hear now in 937 kbps FLAC is great even with headphones).

Have you read this


No, sorry, now I have read. But I think it is not the case, really.

Visualizer in Winamp proves my feelings. When I listen to MP3, even on 320 Kbps, high frequences are cut and sound badly. And it is shown on the visualizer panel.

I also saw some interesting research of one russian enthusiast, made several years ago. He compared the most popular audio codecs, both lossy and lossless. He encoded the same track with different bitrates and in different modes (where available), and built the spectrums. He used 2 sources - the third-party audio editor and his own utility (the reason was in fact not to check if the result is correct, but the built-in visualizer produced obviously incorrect spectrums with one or two formats - as I remember, the low frequencies were totally missed). So here we can't say it is "the product of imagination". It is clear from the output that MP3 is not the best choice, mp3PRO and AAC are much better. Also it is obvious from that comparison that lossless codecs give the very similar result, and lossy are far away from them in terms of "similarity" to the original spectrum (of PCM WAV). By the way, the images can be compared not only by eye, but also in some graphic editor.

Some commentors wrote "it is a waste of time to write about spectrums without taking into account the psycho-acoustic model and without real listening". But OK, I listen to MP3 and FLAC and I see the difference. Why? Because MP3s are cut about 18 kHz even on 320 kbps, and FLACS have 20 kHz and even more (which is shown in that pictures). Any MP3 encoder does it. And it doesn't only cut, it does some kind of "smoothing" on the top, which is probably necessary, but sounds awful. So, maybe my integrated card is very good compared to others integrated cards, maybe headphones are not as bad too. But the fact is what I mentioned.

By the way, there are a lot of factors that change our subjective feelings. Equalizer settings, the player (yes, Winamp has some options changing the sound, one is even enabled by default), even the volume level.
Now I open the FLAC, and my equalizer is set to increase the high frequencies a little. In case of MP3 (the same track of course), unfortunately, some high freq data is lost, and the other is a bit, well, distrorted. Of course FLAC is better


Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #42
Quote
It is clear from the output that MP3 is not the best choice, mp3PRO and AAC are much better

Are you saying that SBR butchered mp3PRO music sounds better than normal MP3?

Quote
And it doesn't only cut, it does some kind of "smoothing" on the top, which is probably necessary, but sounds awful

Prove the 'sounds awful'. I don't believe you


Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #43
Because MP3s are cut about 18 kHz even on 320 kbps, and FLACS have 20 kHz and even more (which is shown in that pictures).

Yeah, but most people above 20 years of age don't hear anything above 18kHz anyway, very few can hear up to 20kHz. You really shouldn't be judging graphs, because we don't listen with our eyes.
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #44
Because MP3s are cut about 18 kHz even on 320 kbps, and FLACS have 20 kHz and even more (which is shown in that pictures).

Yeah, but most people above 20 years of age don't hear anything above 18kHz anyway, very few can hear up to 20kHz. You really shouldn't be judging graphs, because we don't listen with our eyes.

And, which is the reason why MP3 as well as other perceptual codecs cut very high frequency contents still retaining transparency, even if a young individual with very good ears could hear a single 20 kHz tone, he/she surely couldn't be able to perceive it when masked by lower tones, an in any real musical track.
... I live by long distance.

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #45
Sorry to jump on an old topic but this is something i had been wondering and arguments of it being pointless are lost on me i have read all the posts had a laugh (especially the age ones, i am 43yo and often prove to friends in blind tests .mp3 is noticeable, that is just me however, each to their own)

I don't want to stream .flac to the web but i do want to stream it to a browser, i use a media solution that has a built in WebUI (awesome for today's portable devices) unfortunately it transcodes the .flacs coming from my server to .mp3 i am trying to find a way a browser can handle .flac so as i can possibly make a plug-in that allows for the .flac to stream and not transcode.

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #46
I know of a javascript implementation called FLAC.js or Audiocogs. Looks like that is what you need. http://audiocogs.org/
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #47
Hi all!
my first post here, after finding precisely this thread about Flac file players. An interesting read, and I personally side with those who hear a difference in the quality of flac files compared to lossless files. Also, considering the amount of bandwidth used to watch videos, I don't see why posting Flac files should even be an issue.

Personally, for my own website (linuxaudio.com) I have decided to not utilize any embedded player, but rather to put in the html page both the flac and ogg files. This way, depending on the visitor's browser, the file played will either be flac or high-quality ogg. (or neither, perhaps, if you're a Mac user!)

On the Midori browser, the flac file is available. On Firefox and Chromium, ogg. (I haven't tested other browsers yet.)


So this is one solution one might consider, at least till all browsers finally recognize flac files.


brian


Re: Looking for a FLAC web player

Reply #49
I'm sorry but the point is not mp3, bucketsound or whatever. The point is : looking for a streaming tool for flac file.

It's also the reason why I've had post under the flac section ... and not elsewhere !

But ok : bye !

If you are creating FLAC files from raw PCM or whatever you record in, there is no reason you can't encode to MP3 at the same time. Streaming FLAC is retarded: why can't you understand this?

I have a relatively fast connection yet my FLAC library sometimes stutters even with an 8 second buffer when I'm on my client computer.

The time it takes to encode to MP3 is probably a fraction of the time it takes to upload FLAC to your host anyway. Actually, I give up, this is so incredibly stupid I don't think I'll be able to convince a nut.



I come to you from the futuristic year of... gasp.... 2017!

Here in 2017 we've kinda given up the illusion that mp3 files are acceptable, and have developed tools for better compressing lossless music online. Just wait another 10 years, and everyone will be streaming lossless audio. It just makes more sense.