FLAC is the literally the dumbest thing ever

"Oh, hey, I'm a FLAC file, I sound virtually identical to a vorbis file 1/16th my size, the only point in having me around is if you want to archive your CDs in digital form or you want to encode to another format"

Irony, much?

Hi. Your avatar is a bad quality jpeg and adding an extra "the" before "literally" makes your statement ironical.
(just had to)
I keep FLACs around because I have tons of space and I just encode them to my mp3 player when I need to. Sound is a hard battle because in the end its only going to be relative to the user listening to it. Even if there is no real difference at all the placebo effect makes the user believe it sounds better which isn't really a bad thing. If you have space get FLACs, if not get a mp3.

Hi. Actually the quality isn't from the JPEG compression, it's from the nearest-neighbor scaling. I used and the extra "the" isn't redundant, it's just a dialect from the part of the country I am from.

Ok, so pretty much what you're saying is "I keep FLAC around for all the valid reasons listed above, but I also believe that self-imposed ignorance is cool." lol

You obviously do not have good enough speakers/headphones if you think flac sounds like vorbis.

FLAC is lossless, not noticing the change and there not being one are two different things.

This topic also slightly annoys me, it almost belongs in incoherent babbling more than computers & tech..

I keep my limited hard drive space for more important things than humongous music files, like hentai, porn, anime, manga, and games. I've already hit the limit with my TB, my 75, 150, and 320GB hard drives and have a little more than 10 GBs on my 250GB laptop. The slight upgrade in sound quality isn't terribly noticeable unless you're listening at a high volume level, so I don't bother with FLAC.

Not only is it not terribly noticeable, there is no difference! Try it, take your favorite song in FLAC, encode it with LAME at anything above at or above V5 (~130kbps), compare the two using an ABX Comparator and you will be surprised at the quality you hear.

And, no, I don't have shitty headphones. My current pair are Grado SR-80s, but I've listened up to $2000+ headphone systems and there is no discernible difference between lossless and lossy audio. And it's not shitty ears, I've tried this test with "audiophiles" (or at least those who are willing enough to apply scientific method to their hobby) and never ONCE have I seen one pass an ABX at V5.

Because expensive must mean good.

Right?

Nickelback avatar gave it away. 0/10

The fact that you knew it was Nickleback makes me so ashamed.

Gave my love for you a 0/10 for that comment.

When you're a hobbyist who is willing to spend that much money, I'm pretty sure you have an idea what "good" is.

Don't believe me? Do the ABX test. Post results here, including a sample of the audio you used. I will stand corrected if you can pass.

And yes, I know my avatar is Nickelback and I hate Nickelback just as much as the next guy, but I really don't have anything eles I can change it to.

Why do you have a picture of Nickleback on your computer? Do you not have google?

That's retarded. GOOGLE!

Well, actually Google has blocked my IP due to abuse, but I see your point and really I can't honestly find a better avatar.

Good job at deflecting the topic.

I'm sorry, Nickleback avatar destroys any opinion in general that you might ever have.

Some part of me thinks this guy is just trolling, but whatever...

I can quite audibly here a difference between even 128k and 320k MP3s (it's massive). In the 128k versions, details are either missing or muddled and the overall audible range of the song is reduced, and that's not even touching on distortions. Of course, the extremeness of this effect depend a lot on the music you're listening to... for example, most techno isn't going to sound very different at low qualities simply because there aren't all that many details to lose. For something like classical rock (as in rock backed by a full orchestra), however, the difference is staggering.

Now if you really want a difference that's difficult to discern, try to tell the difference between 320k and lossless. Most of the time, I can't really tell the difference and if I do I have to really concentrate.

Either way, I like to keep lossless whenever possible, and even when it's not I don't let anything below 256k into my library. Here's the way I look at it: if you can have the original and disk space is no problem, why not? It's especially handy when you want to encode again for a different purpose (for example, trying to cram as much as possible into a cheapass flash player) since you have a clean, flawless master to encode from instead of a lossy file that will lose even more when re-encoded.

I love people claiming a "massive" difference between a V5 encode and its lossless counterpart either they must be using an ancient encoder (of which most had a bad policy with a lowpass filter) or are experiencing massive amounts of placebo. The truth is, even at V5, very few artifacts are audible and it only pertains to certain parts of a song, not giving the entire piece a "muddy" sound. lol

But, hey, maybe I'm wrong! Grab the latest version of LAME, grab an ABX Comparator, take a test, post a log and samples from which you chose and prove me wrong. Nobody has stepped up to do it yet.

Acceptable Reasons To Use FLAC:
1. Making a backup of your CD collection.
2. Planning on encoding it to another format.
3. You listen to so little music you have enough HDD space to store it all without resorting to external drives.

LOL

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. If you can not hear the difference between 136 bitrate files at 1000 bitrate FLAC files it is because...

You have a shit audio setup

or

You're death and need to see a doctor.

PS, will post evidence later as i have work soon.

If you can find a similar comparing program that doesn't require foobar (or Windows), I'll go ahead and take the test. Otherwise, I'll have to run ABX Comparator inside of Virtual PC (I'm using an ancient PowerPC Mac at the moment, so no dual boot) which could skew the results.

As for the library size argument, what do you mean by "so small"? I personally never saw the attraction of having thousands of songs that never get listened to... my library consists of what I really like a lot, and even then there are a number of neglected songs.