The joys of FLAC
Lets imagine that you have some music in MP3 format, and you’ve never heard the original source. This could be because you downloaded it from the internet, or bought it at an online music store like iTunes. You imagine that you’re getting the full musical experience with your 192kbps MP3, because you can listen to it perfectly well with no distortion or anything, and if the music really needs it, just bump it up to 320kbps to make it absolutely indistinguishable from CD quality.
For the most part, that’s true, to the point that standard MP3s cover most peoples’ listening needs. I’ve happily built up a 40+GB MP3 library for several years because of this. But only to a point. My opinion changed when I discovered FLAC.
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio[...]
MP3 is a lossy format. That means that in order to reduce the size of the music file, an MP3 encoder will actually chop off parts of the sound. Like a JPEG, it gets away with this, because the parts that it cuts off are the ones that you are least expected to miss, such as frequencies that aren’t audible by the human ear. Depending on the bitrate of the file, it can be more or less zealous in cropping down the sounds.
FLAC is lossless, which means that it keeps everything, exactly as in the original. When ripped from your standard Red Book CD, that’s a mighty 1411.2 kbps of pure, unadulterated sound.
MP3-FLAC comparison
An easy demonstration of just how much of a difference that is, is simply to listen to it. I took the above image from a MP3/FLAC comparison, made by someone that knows more about this than me, that shows what you get if you subtract the sound of an MP3 recording from the original source. I was quite astonished when I heard it, because there’s just so much sound getting cut! Even taking in account psychoacoustics, there’s just too much to convince me that the difference is indistinguishable.
It seems that this is a pointless argument, unless you can actually prove that you can hear the difference with an ABX double blind test (bringing it up on an enthusiast forum is sure to bring forth a barrage of furiously masturbating people which will quickly point this out). And while I didn’t go as far as setting up a scientific experiment, I fell in love with FLAC because I can’t help but notice that when compared to commercial grade MP3s, for a lot of music, it does make a significant difference.
You can really appreciate the increase in resolution. All the subtle and intricate background effects like drum riffs and beats, become sharp and well defined, with the sound’s “contour” much easier to distinguish. Voices sound clearer and with more depth. You even start noticing things like the sound of the singer’s breathing. Everything gets more “oomph” to it. You can almost feel, even if not hear, all of the supposedly “inaudible” frequencies, and the sound becomes a lot more friendly to high volume listening. And what astounds me the most is that FLACs actually let me hear parts and effects of the music, which I simply previously didn’t know of at all. Things like stereo effects, subtle modulations, little sounds and decorations, and so many more tiny things. It’s almost like rediscovering my favorite music all over again.
Of course, it depends on the music. There are some things that are worth it, and others that aren’t. A lot of music doesn’t need all that quality because it doesn’t actually make use of all of the resolution. But if you take something like the rich and deep sounds and vocals of Muse, or the addictive electronic pulse of Daft Punk, or just about any live recordings, and FLAC completely blows MP3 out of the water.
Daft Punk in concert
And of course, you actually need a decent sound rig to be able to produce the difference in the first place. If you have an integrated sound card, and basic computer speakers, you’re not going to get much more than MP3 has to offer anyway. Despite all the wild claims of being “Ultra Clear 3D Hi-Fi Xtreme!” that chipset manufacturers make, all integrated sound cards sound like utter crap, even for basic things. I’ve checked this with every motherboard I’ve owned, and always ended up disappointed. I personally have a Creative X-Fi rigged up to an old Technics SADX850 living room amplifier that I confiscated from my parents for never using. That’s connected to a pair of large, 80 watt front speakers, and three smaller satellites for surround.
I still lack a dedicated subwoofer, so I also linked it with an old Creative 2.1 speaker set for the bass. It’s not the best approach, and any real audiophile will wince at the sight of it, but it works quite well. I have a large room to fill with sound, and most computer speakers are designed for covering a small range. At full volume, my rig can be heard two floors down. This is where FLAC really shines.
All of this isn’t really a compression problem as much as a publishing problem. Keep in mind I’m comparing FLACs with the kind of MP3s one would normally own - commercial grade MP3s, not handcrafted laboratory MP3s. You can certainly get a lot more from MP3s if you know what you’re doing and rip them yourself from the original, with the right codecs and the right settings. However, Most MP3s are either downloaded straight from the internet (and judging by the growth of the digital music industry, that tendency will keep growing), or ripped using Media Player, or some other consumer software.
I’ve worked for two years at MusicaOnline, a digital music shop in Portugal. The usual “process” for publishing digital music isn’t exactly refined. The way things are done, you can easily end up with a “320 kbps” file, that got artificially padded up from a 128 kbps WMP/iTunes rip, and was re-encoded half a dozen times by an automated encoding server. I’ve seen this happen in front of me, and it made me cringe. This wouldn’t happen if the music got encoded in FLAC, since there’s no way to rip it in a way that affects the quality of the resulting audio. No matter how you do it, you still get all the same data.
The main reason that lossless methods aren’t widespread yet is that FLAC files are on average 4 or 5 times bigger than their 320 kbps MP3 counterparts. An entire CD can easily cost you ~400MB of disk space, plus the increased download time, if you’re not ripping it yourself. Its size isn’t friendly to portables either, and because of that, FLAC doesn’t have the widespread hardware support that MP3 enjoys either. There’s only a handful of portable players that can handle it, but the list is growing.
It’s also very hard to find digital music stores that sell lossless music, and as usual, it’s file sharing networks that are leading the way. If you feel that some music could make use of FLAC’s increased quality, then you can usually find it on a torrent search. Provided you actually bought the music, obviously.
The size of FLACs doesn’t intimidate me. Disk space doesn’t cost much, and drive capacities are counted in terabytes these days. Broadband internet has become widespread as well. We already waste tons of bandwidth on HDTV just so we can inspect the pores on actors’ faces, so why not increase the quality of my audio content as well?
In any case, now that FLAC’s popularity is increasing and FLAC rips are becoming easier to come by, I’ve started to migrate parts of my library to it. It’s still a painful process because of the size and availability, but so far it’s been paying off. I’ve been enjoying a lot of music all over again, on a whole different level, and it’s just awesome. So if you love music as much as I do, give FLAC a try. You might find yourself surprised at all the things you’ve been missing.