FLAC 1.3.0 Released
xiph.org
xiph.org
I've been making music for years and I often work with samples. Luckily, Ableton Live accepts .flac files. It's important to have high quality samples considering manipulating the sound (especially time-stretching) can easily alter its quality.
Unfortunately, it's still hard to obtain music in Flac format. Few online music stores offer tracks in that format. [1] It's maybe a marketing issue. Everybody knows what an Mp3 is. It also took me some time to learn that such a format as Flac existed. But it's also a size issue. Although the compressing algorithm is incredible, people prefer to download (legally or illegally) a 80 MB album rather than a 500 MB one, regardless of its quality, because they either won't hear the difference or just don't care. And considering iTunes doesn't support Flac (only their own Alac format that is even less known), Flac isn't meant to be widely adopted yet.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_stor...
I pretty much find everything I need, including rather obscure music.
In fact I can't even tell the difference between 128kbps MP3 and the CD it's encoded from, let alone superior formats like Opus or AAC or higher-bitrate MP3.
Who knows, maybe any differences I think I hear are just placebo effects :-)
You can convert lossy formats but there is no way to tell how the artifacts will interact.
Lossless formats do have their place but it's not as if lossy formats literally sustain bit rot; they lose information one time and that's it. Unless, of course, you convert lossy formats, but you should know not to do that.
If you do have to convert between lossy formats or absolutely need every bit of data (e.g. RAW photography) then that's one of the places you might find lossless archival storage useful. But most uses don't need it at all.
Currently at the end of the line all audio is going to be squished, at best, to 44k 16bit sampling. Most audio production and engineering is going to be taking place at quality levels than what the final CD master is, however. /During/ production working with higher quality sources such as a higher sample rate, higher bit rate FLAC sample means that you can 'do more' with it before you start running into the walls of unintended artifacts and distortions. Think of all audio processing as a destructive process - the more you have to begin with the more you can do before the destruction becomes noticeable.
Intentionally ignoring all debates on aesthetics, obviously in many artistic circumstances the artifacts and distortions are desired - but when they are you can easily achieve them in an /intentional/ way. Avoiding them is the challenge.
And there are certain contexts in which it is more noticeable: high quality club sound-systems, custom home and car audio systems, etc. My vehicle's sound system has a very easily audible difference between a 128KBS MP3 and an uncompressed 44k 16bit CD for most music, and in that context you are damn sure I want the uncompressed experience. So having an /option/ for high quality lossless formats such as FLAC available universally helps to serve such niche markets.
tldr; if you are in camp that can't tell the difference, you shouldn't download the higher quality larger files. They aren't for you. Other camps do exist, however.
edit edit: And this all ignores the annoying 'loudness war' trend in modern audio engineering to use compressors to flatten out all dynamic range anyway. Le sigh
It's actually better than some place, which actually requires a physical CDDA ROM...
Level 5 is better imho, as I guess most of us want smaller files not faster encoding. Computers today are fast enough to do this without a significant wait.
Also this: Created: 2007-10-19 Closed-fixed: 2009-01-02 Released: 2013-05-26
The LAME encoder was the x264 of its day, and there's forums where people who care test competing audio codec implementations and newer encoder revisions to see how progress is going just like they do for video.
I'm not saying it really matters to end users in a big bang wow sense that you can hang a blog post news item on, but codecs gradually getting better benefits everyone and is continually happening in the background.
For most lossy encoding formats, there are many ways to compress a single file, and in general, we do not know how to pick the best size/encoding quality encoding of all possible encodings. You can get better compression/better quality at the same compression by searching harder or by searching smarter.
Typically, compression settings deal with the 'searching harder' approach.
Searching smarter is what the successive generations of encoders do, but sometimes, this also is controlled by the compression setting because an alternative approach may be better in compression quality, but so much slower that an quality-wise inferior but faster algorithm is kept as an option.
(There are probably still compression technologies waiting to be invented; but applying them within the constraints of an existing format is hard or impossible, and creating a new format means you need a /massive/ improvement to make switching attractive for the consumer)
You might also like to try AAC (or ogg) at a similar bitrate: MP3 has a couple of encoding peculiarities that are an unavoidable function of the format & if you know what to listen out for they're fairly obvious even at higher bitrates. (I'd still be surprised if you could tell the difference between flac and 320kps mp3 in a blind test though.)
Riding my bike or walking down the street, I'm not going to notice tiny artifacts in an mp3...