[Audity]

I heard that 320kbps is totally indistinguishable by the human ear. But then FLACs came out. There has to be some point to FLAC then, right? Perhaps with a really ear-worthy human and some extremely audiophilic headphones, someone could pick out some differences between the two. Anyone have any idea at all? I know WAVs are 1411kbps or something like that, and heard that's way overkill, and is only used as a standard for .CDA because it fits on a standard CD fully, without having tons of songs on a CD by one artist (I just made that very last part up, maybe. Wait, the whole sentence might not make sense. asoifjoiwfja).

(Please read forward in the thread a bit before coming to any conclusions)

[TCK]

The point of FLAC is to be completely indistinguishable from a source wave file, while decreasing the storage space required. This comes at a cost of processing power required to decode the format though. It's also open source, if you're into that sort of thing.

Any mp3 encoded file will not strictly be as good as a FLAC encoded file. There are people who will be able to distinguish between a 320kbps mp3 file and a lossless file. However, those people are few and far between, and even then they'd likely need decent equipment to detect differences.

Ultimately, it depends on what you want the file for. During production, I would never recommend saving in a lossless format, and 320kbps is no exception. If you're releasing a file on the other hand, I'd be very surprised if 320kbps wasn't sufficient for anyone.

[Yoozer]

FLAC is very handy for archiving and taking along source files for wave-editing, recording etc. Why waste space when it's not necessary?

Even 320kbps will mean a loss in fidelity. It's like working with JPGs in Photoshop; a BMP or TGA is simply clean and completely free from artifacts, no matter how indistinguishable.

[Audity]

Reason being is I'm thinking of starting a site (probably with torrents for each song) where people submit their OCRemixes at either 320kbps or using FLAC. I'm sure the public would appreciate the hard disk space being saved on their computers if I went with 320kbps, but then in the future (possibly quite a bit in the future) I might as well have just started doing FLAC. 100 terabyte hard drives anyone? Even then, there are those who won't be able to buy those even WAY FARTHER in the future. So it's more leaning toward 320kbps right now.

It's not only headphones, but speakers. Even crappy speakers seem to get a nice range of treble and bass sounds, so with a decent to awesome speakers, I wonder if the difference would be more noticable in the bass and treble. I think I myself would be better at picking out discrepancies in bass than in treble. I'd imagine your body could even tell differences better than your ears, but these are just my wonderings.

[consonance]

If you want to use torrents to distribute high resolution songs, so be it, but let me tell you that there is no reason why this would even be desirable. First, FLACs are big. Yes, they are maybe half the size of WAVs, but it's not economic to store that many, except for archival purposes. No one wants to have a music library filled with FLAC files. You can't tell the difference between a 320 kbps MP3 and a FLAC, so why bother? FLACs are only good for live recordings, such as the ones at dimeadozen.org, where you can find bootlegs of concerts (legality disputed & distributed via BitTorrent).

I really doubt that people will listen to songs to find points where the sounds are slightly muddled by compression. If people do, then they're missing the point of music altogether.

If you want perfect sound quality, listen to your record player.

[andyjayne]

Originally Posted by TCK

During production, I would never recommend saving in a lossless format

Surely you mean always?

[TCK]

Originally Posted by andyjayne

Surely you mean always?

Actually I meant lossy :P

A site like this might be useful, not necessarily for downloading lossless files to play, but for downloading lossless files to convert into something that's more suitable than the default format (most likely for those files that are 6 minutes plus in length which tend to be encoded in 128kbps less).

[OverCoat]

Originally Posted by Audity

I heard that 320kbps is totally indistinguishable by the human ear.

indistinguishable to what? CD quality? Quality doesn't stop at CDs :) That's why we have DVD-A and Hi-Def CDs and SCDs and all that.

That said, I think a partial mirror site of sorts that hosts FLAC and/or other lossless formats would be a good idea. I know a few people [not a lot, though] that prefer flac encoding over mp3 because hard drive space isn't so limiting anymore.

[Zoola]

Originally Posted by OverCoat

indistinguishable to what? CD quality? Quality doesn't stop at CDs :) That's why we have DVD-A and Hi-Def CDs and SCDs and all that.

That said, I think a partial mirror site of sorts that hosts FLAC and/or other lossless formats would be a good idea. I know a few people [not a lot, though] that prefer flac encoding over mp3 because hard drive space isn't so limiting anymore.

True, but even on cable it takes some time to download a 16 meg file vs 3 meg.

[Compyfox]

It might be a deja vu, but I'm pretty sure I heard this discussion before...

OMG I'M IN THE FUCKING MATRIX!!! o_O