Please pardon my techical ignorance but I got into digital music kind of late in the game. What is the difference between the mp3 format and FLAC? Is there a great amount of difference in sound quality? Thanks to whoever cares to enlighten me!

Generally, Flac is higher resolution than mp3.

one might need to find a player (like vlc) to hear the FLAC files.

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dadrob
Generally, Flac is higher resolution than mp3.

one might need to find a player (like vlc) to hear the FLAC files.

Thanks. Here in the US everything seems to be mp3.

As a general reference -mp3 sounds bloody awful. It hurts your ear, and you will be deaf within a year. Flac sounds just as good as digital can get.

Mathijs

Let your own ear decide is my best advice. But technically speaking, mp3 files contain ALOT less information in it's attempt to reproduce the original music.

mp3's were created to make an audio file small enough to be attached to an mpeg video and not take a HUGE amount of space and/or bandwidth necessary for storing and downloading.

For some songs it's hard to tell the difference, some songs it is horribly evident that the mp3 is not quite up to par.

A typical 3 minute tune is about 30MB as a CD quality .wav file (44.1Khz , 16 bit) and only 3MB as an .mp3 so obviously they are not giving you the whole aural picture. mp3 encoding looks at the song file and finds frequencies that are not being used in each sample and eliminates them, amoung other tricks.

Neil Young says it best when he tells the story of going to his shrink and the guy used to play vinyl records and Neil used to pour his heart out. The guys switched to CD's one day and Neil just shut down, didn't feel a thing he says. The point being that there are emotional artifacts in high fidelity music that are not adequately reproduced by simple encoding schemes such as .mp3.

Now that large bandwith and huge storage (terrabyte drives) are getting cheaper and more mainstream, this whole mp3 thing was supposed to dissappear. But some kids will tell you they got used to the mp3 sound and prefer it? Go figure. peace.

I used this analogy to explain it to my eighty year old Father-In-Law and it seemed to work for him!
Imagine you want to send a beautifully printed fine art print to somebody through the post.
You could send it mounted in a frame but it would be very large and expensive to send. This equates to sending a wav file over the internet.
You could fold it in half and half again and send it in an envelope and this would be much smaller and cheaper to send. The recipient would then get the picture but, even when mounted, it would always have those folds in it which would somewhat spoil it. This equates to sending an MP3 over the internet.
On the other hand, you could roll it up very carefully and send it in a sturdy tube so that the recipient could then unroll it and mount it with no visible damage to the picture. This equates to sending a FLAC file over the internet.
As I said, it is only an analogy! Hope it helps!


"As we say in England, it can get a bit trainspottery"

My 8 year old stereo shelf system blinked out on me about 2 months ago. I needed to find a new shelf system, preferably another multi-disc changer. I was surprised to find that although there were many shelf systems still available the majority of them 1) were basically meant to connect your Ipod to it and 2) most were single disc players. I found a Sharp system, 5 disc changer...same brand as my old one. Thought why not go with it again? It's my only choice. Brought it home, sound was not great. I realized that these systems are built for mp3's to be played on them--not CDs. It sounded flat and just dull. No pre-set settings I could switch to...I could only switch up Bass and Treble. My last stereo had preset settings for different genres. I realized this would probably be my last shelf system I would ever get. When this blinks out in the future I will gladly graduate to a more sophisticated setup--financial limiations prevented from doing that this time.

But anyway...it made me sad that everything was moving towards accommodating Ipods and Mp3 files...

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stonesdan60
Here in the US everything seems to be mp3.

huh?

FLAC means you have a master copy.

You can dilute it to MP3 for use in anyway you desire here and there but when its all over...you still have an uncompromisable master copy in FLAC.

MP3's have all sorts of problems that pop up. Plus you can't trace whether its a twice compressed (or more) MP3 or a once compressed MP3.

For example.
I download an MP3 that says its 320K. I have no way of knowing if thats true.
I can now transfer that to 128K if I like. Or maybe to 256K.
Either way, I have just compressed an already compressed file and deteriorated the sound quality even more than before.

If I have FLAC, I can always decompress to wav, and compress to MP3 320K and know that is exactly what it is.

If you listen to true 320K...it is going to be the same as lossless to your ears. Only a small dog could hear the discrepancies in my opinion, although I still really only listen FLAC

But when you are D/Ling from some of the seedy sites I've been around...you have no idea what you are actually getting. Once an MP3 hits dual compression, which happens all the time, you are absolutely gonna hear the difference and wish you had a better source file to make your own MP3s with...

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Munichhilton
If you listen to true 320K...it is going to be the same as lossless to your ears. Only a small dog could hear the discrepancies in my opinion, although I still really only listen FLAC

only small dogs? i have a large one who swears she can detect the diffs. but she's been known to fib from time to time. told me just yesterday that she hadn't had her daily milkbone yet. yeah, right.

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StonesTod

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Munichhilton
If you listen to true 320K...it is going to be the same as lossless to your ears. Only a small dog could hear the discrepancies in my opinion, although I still really only listen FLAC

only small dogs? i have a large one who swears she can detect the diffs. but she's been known to fib from time to time. told me just yesterday that she hadn't had her daily milkbone yet. yeah, right.

Science proves bigger dogs just really don't give a flip.
We can only then go by what the more honest small dogs yap about

Take your infos from the man!

[neilyoungnews.thrasherswheat.org]

"MP3 audio is the new radio. It should be free like radio" = it's so crappy it should be given away for free, not sold.
Well said Neil!

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Naturalust
Let your own ear decide is my best advice. But technically speaking, mp3 files contain ALOT less information in it's attempt to reproduce the original music.

mp3's were created to make an audio file small enough to be attached to an mpeg video and not take a HUGE amount of space and/or bandwidth necessary for storing and downloading.

For some songs it's hard to tell the difference, some songs it is horribly evident that the mp3 is not quite up to par.

A typical 3 minute tune is about 30MB as a CD quality .wav file (44.1Khz , 16 bit) and only 3MB as an .mp3 so obviously they are not giving you the whole aural picture. mp3 encoding looks at the song file and finds frequencies that are not being used in each sample and eliminates them, amoung other tricks.

Neil Young says it best when he tells the story of going to his shrink and the guy used to play vinyl records and Neil used to pour his heart out. The guys switched to CD's one day and Neil just shut down, didn't feel a thing he says. The point being that there are emotional artifacts in high fidelity music that are not adequately reproduced by simple encoding schemes such as .mp3.

Now that large bandwith and huge storage (terrabyte drives) are getting cheaper and more mainstream, this whole mp3 thing was supposed to dissappear. But some kids will tell you they got used to the mp3 sound and prefer it? Go figure. peace.

Good explaination, you're a good man Naturalust.

Even CD is not lossless, it's a series of discrete samples of the original analogue sound.

With MP3 a lot depends on the bitrate used.

Double blind testing has been done, with mp3's in different bitrates vs. "uncompressed". At and beyond 256kbit MP3 nobody was able to tell the difference with uncompressed/CD. The only exeption oddly being some people with hearing damage. The 'psycho acoustical' MP3 algorithm wasn't able to fool them...

Possibly some double compressed or badly encoded MP3's are worse, but I expect they are not sold through the offical retailers.

I always choose FLAC though, I like the thought of an 'uncompressed' file.

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Alef


Double blind testing has been done

Was this the 4 out of 5 dentist test?
They need triple blind testing those cheaters

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Alef
Even CD is not lossless, it's a series of discrete samples of the original analogue sound.

With MP3 a lot depends on the bitrate used.

Double blind testing has been done, with mp3's in different bitrates vs. "uncompressed". At and beyond 256kbit MP3 nobody was able to tell the difference with uncompressed/CD. The only exeption oddly being some people with hearing damage. The 'psycho acoustical' MP3 algorithm wasn't able to fool them...

Possibly some double compressed or badly encoded MP3's are worse, but I expect they are not sold through the offical retailers.

I always choose FLAC though, I like the thought of an 'uncompressed' file.

there are those on this site who swear they can hear the differences, but they have never released the lab results that would offer the proof i seek. i agree with the premise that human ears cannot detect diffs of mp3s beyond 256...certainly not 320....

You have a sore tooth Munich?

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StonesTod

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Alef
Even CD is not lossless, it's a series of discrete samples of the original analogue sound.

With MP3 a lot depends on the bitrate used.

Double blind testing has been done, with mp3's in different bitrates vs. "uncompressed". At and beyond 256kbit MP3 nobody was able to tell the difference with uncompressed/CD. The only exeption oddly being some people with hearing damage. The 'psycho acoustical' MP3 algorithm wasn't able to fool them...

Possibly some double compressed or badly encoded MP3's are worse, but I expect they are not sold through the offical retailers.

I always choose FLAC though, I like the thought of an 'uncompressed' file.

there are those on this site who swear they can hear the differences, but they have never released the lab results that would offer the proof i seek. i agree with the premise that human ears cannot detect diffs of mp3s beyond 256...certainly not 320....

There are those who claim to hear differences between cables. And those who claim to hear the dead talking to them. In most cases a little testing is able to factor out the subjectivity of humans.

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Alef
You have a sore tooth Munich?

I've just taken it out Alef and all is well. Thank you

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Alef

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StonesTod

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Alef
Even CD is not lossless, it's a series of discrete samples of the original analogue sound.

With MP3 a lot depends on the bitrate used.

Double blind testing has been done, with mp3's in different bitrates vs. "uncompressed". At and beyond 256kbit MP3 nobody was able to tell the difference with uncompressed/CD. The only exeption oddly being some people with hearing damage. The 'psycho acoustical' MP3 algorithm wasn't able to fool them...

Possibly some double compressed or badly encoded MP3's are worse, but I expect they are not sold through the offical retailers.

I always choose FLAC though, I like the thought of an 'uncompressed' file.

there are those on this site who swear they can hear the differences, but they have never released the lab results that would offer the proof i seek. i agree with the premise that human ears cannot detect diffs of mp3s beyond 256...certainly not 320....

There are those who claim to hear differences between cables. And those who claim to hear the dead talking to them. In most cases a little testing is able to factor out the subjectivity of humans.

some of these people are reputable types with a past history that suggests veracity. of course others are just blatant liars whose claims are dismissed out of hand.

Don't disagree with the statement that flac is better than MP3 but I think there are a number of other factors. How good is your hearing (so so if like me you are getting on a bit and have listened to too much loud music). How good is the kit that you listen to music on? (lo-fi kit probably won't show the best of any format). How good is your source? (some of my mp3s aound great others, especially from older less well mastered CDs, sound poor).

I listen to most of my music on an Ipod with mostly 320kbps MP3s and a few apple lossless. I certainly notice the difference when I play a 128kbps MP3 and usually upgrade the file and I like to think that Sticky Fingers sounds better now I have ripped at apple lossless. But then it sounded good to me before.

I'm sure if my hearing was tip top and I could afford really good hifi I'd notice the difference but listening to a good quality track on my Ipod using my Bose QC15 headphones most things sound better than they did when I was playing vinyl on a crap stereo. I certainly hear the acoustic guitar on Brown Sugar clearly which is more than I used to.

Also the statement 'A typical 3 minute tune is abut 30MB as a CD quality .wav file (44.1Khz , 16 bit) and only 3MB as an .mp3' is true of a 128 kbps mp3 but I looked at my Itunes and a 3.48 track is 3.5mb at 128kbps,8.8mb at 320kbps and 26.6mb with apple lossless (968kbps).

I am not saying these people are liars. Maybe they even hear a difference. But the question is, if there feally *is* a difference. Even the nicest and most trutful persons can be subjective.

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Alef
I am not saying these people are liars. Maybe they even hear a difference. But the question is, if there feally *is* a difference. Even the nicest and most trutful persons can be subjective.

you're nice. i'm not. they are liars.

I can hear the difference between a low sampled mp3 and a full flac rip of an lp.....I did hearing tests with some friends and all the musicians (I play music) could hearth difference quickly. If the sample rates are higher I MIGHT not have I suppose. I use mp3 for mobile and FLACs at home.

FLAC is just a way to compress music files wihtout any loss in information when compared to the source.
If you compress a track acquired from a CD in FLAC you'll get exactly the same amount of information.
Which means listening to the same track on a CD or in FLAC format is exactly the same.

MP3 is a way to compress music files with loss of informations. How much lossy is a MP3 file depends on the "bitrate". The higher is the bitrate, the closer to original source is the MP3 file. These lost informations can be more or less perceptible according to the way the MP3 file was encoded.


Now FLAC doesn't necessarily mean you get a "master copy". It all depends on FLAC file resolution and on source resolution.
For example to get an almost perfect copy of a vinyl source you need to have FLAC files encoded in 24-bit / 192000 Herz to recreate all the richness of the vinyl. The same goes for an analogue recording.

When Stones Archive sells us FLAC files encoded in 16-bit / 44100 Herz (actually equivalent to CD quality) it's probably not a master copy as these shows were most likely recorded on tapes.

OK. The easiest way to describe the differences between flac and mp3 is to present frequency paterns of the files. I just rip We Had It All from Some Girls Deluxe and play a bit. Below are spectrograms for

wav file


flac file


mp3 320kb/sec


mp3 192kb/sec


As you see there is cut-off frequensy for mp3 files. All information above cut-off is lost. Also you can see distortions in low frequency range. If you'll sample below 192kb/sec the cut-off will move even more.

Now the question is how deaf are you, how good your acoustic system is and if you could hear the differences.

Guess it is very problematic to distinguish flac from mp3 while you are listening music in headphones on a plane or in subway

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ironbelly
OK. The easiest way to describe the differences between flac and mp3 is to present frequency paterns of the files. I just rip We Had It All from Some Girls Deluxe and play a bit. Below are spectrograms for

wav file


flac file


mp3 320kb/sec


mp3 192kb/sec


As you see there is cut-off frequensy for mp3 files. All information above cut-off is lost. Also you can see distortions in low frequency range. If you'll sample below 192kb/sec the cut-off will move even more.

Now the question is how deaf are you, how good your acoustic system is and if you could hear the differences.

Guess it is very problematic to distinguish flac from mp3 while you are listening music in headphones on a plane or in subway

my large dog is reviewing these graphs now and will report back her findings after her next nap.

StonesTod
Hope after nap your dog will continue to bark in wav or flac, but not in mp3

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ironbelly
StonesTod
Hope after nap your dog will continue to bark in wav or flac, but not in mp3

oh, she's a lossless barker. well, 50% that and 50% german shepherd....

some of you people are out of your flacin' mind.