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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

> How cheap does storage have to get before people stop bothering to use FLAC?

Having cheap storage is not a valid reason to not to use that space efficiently.

With today's, even last decade's processors, encoding FLAC at ripping speed is not even a CPU saturating task, and decoding is merely a blip on processor's queue. If I can store the same bitstream on a smaller space, why shouldn't I?

If we're not compressing anything, why not forego lossless compression completely? Let's not GZ/XZ our log files. These 20MB files will become 30-40GB, but heck, a 4TB drive is just $65.

Similarly, let's not compress gigabytes, even terabytes of genomic data, scientific outputs and other stuff. They're just ASCII or Unicode strings, a high-schooler can figure these out. Why invest time in lossless compression tools like XZ and ZStd? They just use CPU cycles needlessly.

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I’m not clear how you are jumping from “30% of a few hundred gigs is a bad complexity trade off” to “100000% of terabytes is worthless” :p

Thanks for at least arguing against the use case I argued for. Even if you were a bit hyperbolic.

I get that I’m being a cranky old engineer. As someone who has spent a couple decades optimizing and maintaining bespoke high performance file formats, the particular use case of FLAC as an archive format still seems like a bad complexity vs benefit trade.

I’d rather have something that’s trivial for any software to work with everywhere forever. I know FLAC feels like forever. But, so did a lot of dead formats I used to work with.

FLAC isn't an unmaintainable "engineering marvel", the algorithm is pretty simple and all the data is checksummed. That's enough to make it a better archival format than WAV.

Checksumming isn't enough to make something a good archival format. You need to go beyond being able to detect data corruption to being able to correct or cope with data corruption. For a FLAC file, if you flip a bit in the file, then the checksum will detect that the file has been corrupted, but that chunk of the file will be unrecoverable. If you flip a bit in PCM data, likely you won't even hear the difference. If you want to know whether corruption has occurred, you can always run md5sum on it. For FLAC, if you want to be able to cope with data corruption, you'll need to create something like par2 recovery data.

This.

My dad is very skeptical of compression, not understanding the concept of lossless and thinking it reduces quality to compress it. Even if you explain it in terms of "so instead of writing 1111111 it writes 7x1, look how much less space that takes! But it's the same information in the end." Even NTFS compression is a checkbox he insisted I disable. So it's wav all the way.

Recently had hard drive issues and I copied all data to a new drive at painstaking speeds (the hdd was barely limping). I now have no idea which files might have glitches from broken bits or sectors in them.

I guess a checksummed filesystem or keeping hash sums somewhere (the standard utilities make it pretty easy to verify many files with one simple command) is the solution for him. For me... just use a normal format and save half the space and money. Heck, go one step further and use opus: a healthy young individual can't hear the difference at a good bitrate let alone my "audiophile" "listens to too loud music" old man.

Some of the older generation have been convinced there's a difference with lossless compression, usually by British salesmen using words like "jitter" and "PRAT". It's sad that by the time you're old enough to afford being an audiophile, you probably don't have high-end hearing anymore.

Actually, from my experience, hi-fi audio is more about the complete sound rather than details itself.

I've played in orchestras and have a respectable system at home, and the biggest differentiator is not the details, but how these details interact and create a bigger, more immersive soundstage. Yes, you can hear subtle sounds of a bow or a cymbal, but the exciting part is how sounds mesh and play with each other.

So, as I age, the excitement of listening the same or new songs with that system doesn't fade away. I still get the same joy, and shiver when I hear that soundstage.

Actually, jitter is really something about audio CDs burned in CD Writers. I still have a Yamaha CRW-F1 CD recorder, and it has a feature to abuse Red Book standard to record audio with bigger pits to ease the CD player's job of tracking the disc. It reduces a 80 minute disc to 66 minutes, but with a higher quality CD like TDK, the sound was noticeably different on the system I aforementioned in this comment.

Currently, that set is fed by a much better CD player, and I'm sure that its tracking is leaps and bounds ahead of the older player, but it was really made a difference back then. I'm not sure with today's electronics, it'd make such a difference anymore.

> more about the complete sound rather than details itself

Agreed. My sound system isn't by any stretch audiophile; and I have the hearing of a 65-year-old. I can't point to things I can hear on a FLAC that I can't hear on an MP3; I hear the same notes, and the same instruments, with much the same tonality. But the former has a presence and vibrancy that is lacking in the latter; when I listen to MP3s, my involvement in the music rapidly tails off.

I suspect that you don't have to be able to hear higher harmonics in isolation, for those higher harmonics to affect what you do hear. That is, even if my hearing range cuts off at 12KHz, I can still tell the difference between an unfiltered sound, and a sound that is low-pass-filtered at 15KHz. The difference seems to be clearest with voices.

Try an ABX test: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ABX

There's a reason MP3 is obsolete, though. You probably can't pass an ABX test with high bitrate MP3, but you almost certainly can't with AAC or Opus without extremely critical listening.

What is a “much better” CD player? It’s a digital medium so that doesn’t make any sense. It either reads the disc and the data on it or it doesn’t.

If you’re referring to the DAC portion that does make a difference obviously but that doesn’t have to do with the CD itself or tracking.

No, I'm talking about tracking and digital signal generation for the DAC, not the DAC itself.

The two players have 20 years of development apart. First one was a lower cost Sony, and the latter one is an entry level, yet higher end one (Yamaha CD-S300).

On the tracking stability, first one skips if you knock it lightly, and Yamaha doesn't care if you bump into it accidentally. Also, newer electronics can switch much faster, and in turn, creating a clearer eye pattern for DAC to work on [0].

When you used CRW-F1's audio mode, it elongated the pits and lands, so the digital part had more time to switch properly. This created a clearer eye pattern.

A clearer eye pattern allows DAC to create more cleaner signal since it switches and understands the signal much better and allows it to create a more "correct" (or clearer if you pardon the term) analog signal, esp. on higher frequencies.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_pattern

Fair enough, I wasn't considering the actual mechanics of the signal generation.

That said I see no usage for a CD player anymore, really. I can rip a bit-perfect copy, store it in FLAC, and play it pretty much anywhere. The only place I still use CDs sometimes is my car, because it's more convenient than fiddling with my phone sometimes.

I also do my casual listening over FLACs or streaming services in daily life.

OTOH, Listening CDs and vinyls is more of a ritual for me. A good coffee, some good reading material (or nothing), an album I especially like and an hour for myself. That Hi-Fi set also has USB/iPod connectivity over the CD player (and its DAC is a treat for both MP3s and over the iOS streaming) and it has bluetooth connectivity for very lazy times.

So a vintage set with some modern connectivity, and some older formats for enjoying the music for the sake of music.

I'm sorry but this is nonsense.

Digital data on a Red Book CD is encoded with CIRC error correction, which provides an extra parity byte for every 3 data bytes. In normal operation, the recovery of the digital data is 100%. The DAC receives a stream of 1s and 0s, there is no "clearer eye pattern" for it to "interpret". The data is read or it is not. If it is not, the error is corrected. If it is uncorrectable, for example if there is a particularly large scratch, then - and only then - an attempt will be made to "guess" the signal.

Unless the CD is scratched, a 20$ computer optical drive with digital SPDIF output will be completely indistinguishable to a DAC than a drive costing 100x as much.

The "tracking stability" you mention in the newer model is simply a larger buffer, so that it has time to recover the read.

FLAC is about future-proofing.

Opus and MP3 are lossy formats. You can’t transcode them to anything else without losing data.

With how cheap storage is these days there’s really no argument against FLAC because you can also transcode it to whatever. Players like Navidrome use ffmpeg to transcode on the fly.

If I put all this effort into ripping CDs and maintaining backups, it’s not going to be in a lossy format that I can’t convert to anything else.

Use ZFS to prevent bit rot.

> Even if you were a bit hyperbolic.

It was an intentional dramatization to showcase some slippery slope, tbh. Genuinely sorry if that sounded too harsh, or rude. That wasn't the intention.

> I’d rather have something that’s trivial for any software to work with everywhere forever. I know FLAC feels like forever. But, so did a lot of dead formats I used to work with.

I understand the fear and pain of obsolescence in the world of file formats. VQF is the first notable example in my mind, but we need to keep in mind that FLAC is proper FOSS, and it'll live on in one way or another. People still keep Commodore64 kernals, emulators alive. Similarly MiniDisc has a cult following. On the worst case, I can install an old distro to a VM, and convert my music via that VM to something more modern.

I personally don't think FLAC as an "Archival Format". It's more of a bona fide storage format for me. I'm a serious music listener, and I tag my archives ambitiously, and besides being lossless and provides space advantages, it supports proper tagging via ID3 tools and allows me to store a truckload of metadata with my music.

To prevent corruption in my archives, I'd rather store recovery data and take regular backups. There's no other way in my book to keep data safe.

"bad complexity vs benefit trade"

that makes me think of "C compiler" (actually C89 with benign bits of c99/c11) vs "c++ compiler", or "javascript web browser" vs "noscript/basic (x)html browser".

that said, aren't the 30TB hard drives around the corner?

Exactly. We are currently debating $10 vs. $6 to store 1000 hours of music.

The only answer to my actual question so far indicates that when it gets down to $1 vs 60c, they’ll just say “Whatever. Leave it uncompressed.”

Thus 90% of the discussion has instead been about 4G streaming lossless real time voice and podcasts to mobile devices with price-gouged storage to be listened to through very lossy Bluetooth compression :p

And, 9% has been about how FLAC as a container format did a good job standardizing metadata. But, that has nothing to do with audio encoding within the container :P

Who says your filesystem isn't compressing data under you? Actually, who says the disk itself isn't?

(Sometimes they both are.)

> Who says your filesystem isn't compressing data under you?

Me, because we don't use transparent compression anywhere.

> Actually, who says the disk itself isn't?

I'm not very sure about that, to be honest. SSDs do that to prolong their life, but the saved space doesn't return as more space on FS level. It just returns as endurance, which is more important in my case.

So, disk's transparent compression doesn't mean very much from a sysadmin/OS operations perspective.

> Me, because we don't use transparent compression anywhere.

Since Fedora 34, a clean install will result in btrfs with zstd compression turned on. (An update of an older install will of course not change the filesystem from underneath the files.)

I generally don't reinstall my OS unless it breaks. My current Debian installation is around 8 years old at this point (it's updated, of course), reinstalled to migrate it to amd64.

Other systems we install are configured on many levels, so even if the defaults are BTRFS w/zstd, it might be either known or changed to suit our needs better.

That's why i use Slackware - does not try to be smart.

What other lossless open source codec is "better" than FLAC? I'm not aware of any.

I don't know about "better", it depends on how you measure that, but wavpack[1] is a worthy competitor and has some features that FLAC doesn't.

1. https://www.wavpack.com/

> Let's not GZ/XZ our log files. These 20MB files will become 30-40GB, but heck, a 4TB drive is just $65.

But when you tar.gz your log files you do not loss information.

When you encode your audio files with the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), you do not lose any information either.

Yes, it is my bad, I had misread the original comment.

When you FLAC audio file you do not lose information either.

Yes, it is my bad, I had misread the original comment.

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