I think a lot of that is that the common players don't really produce a different output, so their incarnation of 320k and CD sound is functionally identical as it arrives at the audio jack. I can't listen to classical on CD, because it loses all the ambient sound that makes an orchestra "sound right" (this is preserved on tape or vinyl, but not on CD which is already a very lossy format). But most people don't notice this.

CDEX uses LAME as encoder, the best of the 3. I don't like Fraunhofer on 320 kbps. And Helix is the quicker variant. There is a lot more to explain about using MP3 the right way. (CBR, joint stereo etc) In the past i had a encoder that also makes 500 kbps MP3 that only plays on an few programs. Useless. Old players, car radio's gives hiccups when they play 320 MP3 SACD makes a lot of difference, it's a real problem to buy these. Audio BD is also a improvement to a CD when it's done properly.

@@Reziac CDs being lossy? In what sense? Afaik CDs are lossless, as encoded by red book standards

..what happened to your CD collection? 😞

I hope you did not "throw away" the high quality cds!

:)

XD

That's Sony's side of the digital audio, and subsequently CD project, where they partnered with Philips, who where forerunning the optical disc side. U-matic was Sony format and they also produced 16-bit digital decoders. Meanwhile Philips had been working with 14-bit digital audio they were planning for the CD as well, but Sony vetoed it. That's why old Philips CD players proudly proclaim 4x oversampling, as they only had 14-bit DACs and had to accommodate them for 16-bit CD audio.

I ripped all my CDs to flac for that very reason. A friend of mine spent ages using windows media player to rip his collection only to find when his Windows went tits up he was left with thousands of unplayable wma files that were drm protected.

Great advice, but I think most people don't really care about having a lossy format. I always rip and convert my music to MP3, even if I buy an album in FLAC, because I know it will play on every device. I've had too many experiences trying to play a FLAC file on a stereo that doesn't support lossless files. I eventually just gave up.

@@ReedsRedactions My old car is so noisy the audio quality doesn't really matter when playing music while driving. So the file format I use is _loud!_

​@@ReedsRedactions How can you have problems playing flac lol

Indeed! Some older formats do tend to hang around!

I remember aiff from my Amiga.

A neat thing with smartphones as mediaplayers is that format compatibility can remain pretty reliably wide. The .SID format is of course superior for having a lot of music on the go.

Serious music players support the delay and padding metadata in the Xing frame, which describe the duration of extra silence and it is then discarded. All lossy codecs have this property. A game engine is a closed system and they could easily either follow the standard or save this data in another format to allow looping.

VLC is the most serious media player around, but still produce a silent gap between each track. I read it was about to be fixed. Il really hope so.

Afaik Spotify uses ogg

Ogg Vorbis produces better results than mp3 at same bitrate, or smaller files at same quality. Long live Ogg.

Today most OGGs (container) use Opus (codec) instead of Vorbis (codec). It is simply the best lossy codec as of today in any aspect.

hear hear

..the skull n' bones "Flag"? 😛

Forever FLAC

TTA and TAK are fine as well!

WAV is better since its compatible with older computers and takes less processing power to play

So true . . .

Sony did a similar thing with, I believe ATRAC (and not forgetting "memory sticks"), and that is why I will never purchase another Sony product or ever buy an Apple item. This despite both companies making some of the best hardware available

@@skf957 Circa 1998 I got an MiniDisc player for my car, and a Sony component MiniDisc recorder. I used the format for mix discs. Anyway, the issue I had.... ATRAC back then had - for me - a lack of lower frequency and noticeably less bass.

@@skf957 Apple, I can understand, but Sony? Even now? They aren't on a non-stop train to purposefully make things difficult like Apple. Every company tries something stupid then gets back on track. It all depends on if the customer allows it. Apple customers allow Apple to do whatever they want and that's why they are the way they are. They can do no wrong. But other company customers will actually speak up.

...and then they have the gall to call it "interchange format"

It is one more mp better, isn't it? Haha

@@bertblankenstein3738 Exactly what Nigel Tufnel would say. And he probably did at some time or another

but it is better. mp4/m4a implies the AAC codec which is lightyears better than crappy old MP3.

@@martontichi8611 My point was, is that I get audio identified with an extension of mp4, but it should be m4a. The header data sez M4A bla blah. It affects so many sources that it's hard to believe industry wide stupidity. We *are* dealing with non-english speaking _news_ people.

An M4A is MP4. Apple decided to create a new file extension to indicate that the file has no video in it. You can rename it as your software requires.

Spotify uses OGG vorbis AFAIK, and OGG eclipses MP3 when at the same bitrate. If you're going to listen to compressed audio, you could do a lot worse

If you haven't heard the sound quality of CDs, you are missing out

Try tidal or apple hi-res, surely a difference but don’t play it over Bluetooth:(

I'm surprised you'd call records and cassette tapes. Bad audio, but that's probably because you couldn't afford a really nice. System period records and cassettes, especially Chrome or metal cassettes can sound quite fantastic. I'm not even a ritch guy but I own teac reel to reel decks. Best analog format ever made!

Spotify is really low bitrate. CD (a FORTY year old technology at this point) blows it out of the water. Spotify has been saying for years now that they will let people use a reasonable modern bitrate but don't hold your breath. Tidal is identical to Spotify but with lossless audio, it's like digging mud out of your ears that you didn't know was there.

In Poweramp we trust, probably the most worthwhile purchase I've made on the Google Play Store

Thanks for watching. :)

My lib is like 90gb😅

I actually do the opposite, simply because so many devices and programs can't read, sort or display cover art for opus while storage is dirt cheap. But yeah, if you use a HQ converter the resulting mp3 has around double the bitrate.

Maybe under half. Opus > Vorbis > MP3. I would still - always - archive lossless. The days of me hand-wringing over storage and bandwidth are 20 years ago.

@@hansdampf2084 Same. Or so I thought. It's actually 461GB and I don't even use it; I listen to Spotify. So 461GB was from 5-10 years ago.

The fascinating part is, that is so wrong. It's the kind of wild swing that should never work like you thought it would. And I'm guessing you had no idea WHY that worked, or maybe even any reason to believe it would. But I would imagine it DOES work, and should be totally fine with most players. MP3 is not much of a container format. It's actually just a stream of mostly independent frames. The only thing at all special about it is that several prolific pieces of software added custom headers and trailers to it, in order to support things like titles, album art, sample-accurate lengths, and indexes for easier seeking. This is possible because an MPEG player is just searching for a frame header, which is a sequence called a sync pattern. If it reads a byte but doesn't see the sync pattern, it just moves on to the next byte and looks there, ad infinitum, until it finds one. Ergo, you can drop random data before, after, or between frames and it's still perfectly valid, as far as the MPEG reader is concerned. (At least until sync is lost to the point where the reader assumes the stream is hopelessly corrupted and gives up.) If the reader comes across metadata that it happens to know and understand, it can intelligently handle it -- parse it and benefit from it, or simply skip over it, if it can determine its length. That's why players that didn't support ID3 tags didn't mind them being there. They just ignored them, or supported them enough to know how long they were, and jump past them. When you add an album's worth of MP3s into a ZIP file with no compression, you're basically just prepending a ZIP header and some table of contents garbage in front of the first MP3 file, which might have its own ID3 tags or whatever, and then you roll right into the data that was in the next MP3 file, and the next one, and so on. As long as the ZIP file is _uncompressed,_ the end result is not much different than if you had just squished the files together. Maybe there's a marker or CRC in between them, I dunno, I'm not familiar with the on-disk layout of a ZIP file. But it wouldn't matter. The reader would just see that as "a bad frame" and run through it until it found the next sync pattern. Another way to accomplish the same thing is to use the command prompt with the copy command. E.g.: "copy /b track1.mp3+track2.mp3+track3.mp3 output.mp3" You would end up with the same result, minus the essentially useless, albeit benign, ZIP file overhead. Needless to say, this would NOT work with WAV or MP4 files. (But some other MPEG formats, like VOB, are also fine being split and concatenated on frame/packet boundaries.)

@@nickwallette6201 Exactly right! Only I was shocked and stunned that it actually worked, I never thought it would. Though I did make sure they all had the same bitrates as that would have led to interesting results otherwise, probably. Nowadays I'd use the command _cat ./*.mp3 > albumname.mp3._

@@dittikke Probably would've been fine with different bitrates too! Each frame has its format encoded in the header, and using different bitrates on a frame-by-frame basis is essentially how Variable Bit Rate (VBR) works. Not ALL players support VBR, so it's not a guarantee, but it's usually OK.

@@nickwallette6201 This was long before VBR was widely supported, early 2000s if I remember right. I did a weird transition from cassette tape to mp3-CD. Since all my "music" was recorded off the radio in mono, I also did the split-channel millisecond (nanosecond? I forget) shift thing to make it sound like stereo. So no, the quality wasn't exactly premium either. But I had my entire music collection on one CD, that was so wild.

Greeting Leslie. I hope that all is well with you.

Good old limewire.

That was the early 2000s, not the 1990s. And they weren't "chasing" anyone as P2P sharing of music wasn't illegal until later. 16-year-olds* But you got Napster right in that comment.

@@encycl07pedia- _Money good, Napster bad!_ Metallica.

@@encycl07pedia- Thanks for the history lesson

@@encycl07pedia- Napster launched in 1999.

My car too. 😊 How do you rip your SACDs? I have everything else covered from CD to UHD Blu-ray, but i thought SACD needed some special players hardware.

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/n5yeYNNqrcrHf4E.html

Intresting... Flac rocks !

Makes sense since it’s a lossless compression algorithm. No different to compressing a very large text file with zip.

So, you compressed and decompressed a file, and checked if any data was lost using a SHA-256 hash. Very nice, I never would have thought of taking the hash. My 7 year old brain would have just used dd to make a copy of the original, performed the experiment on the original, and used diff to check for equality. Question - what was the file size of the original WAV, and how much did it shrink when compressed to FLAC?

@@Tom-uy4io I didn't actually check the compression ratio when I did this test but when I routinely convert .wav to .flac files I usually find that the flacs are around half the size or maybe a bit less.

I onced got into an argument with an audiophool who claimed that FLAC sounded better than ALAC. I did exactly the same experiment -- or, mostly the same, anyway. I took a source file, compressed with ALAC and FLAC, then decoded back to WAV. Then, to avoid any arbitrary differences in the WAV format headers (note), I used an audio editor to save the resulting decodes as raw PCM data. Then I used "fc /b" to compare them. "No differences encountered." The guy's reply? "I don't care. I hear the difference, even if tools like that can't distinguish them." Sure ya do, bud. (Note: If you write the bare minimum WAV file, the headers will _probably_ be identical too. But there are lots and lots of ways they can be different, while describing exactly the same audio data. This would ruin a checksum, and produce benign differences with a comparison utility, but the audio samples would still be a 100% match, so I dropped the headers before comparing to avoid that.)

Thanks. :)

Greetings Chris. Sounds like an interesting career.

Raspberry Pi by itself doesn't have enough amplification to drive a set of speakers. I've seen Raspberry Pi "hats" (accessory boards) that are DAC's (Digital to Analog) converters but no audio amplifiers that would drive a speaker. "Toids DIY Audio" had a nice feature about an amplifier sold by "Parts Express" that included onboard programmable DSP (Digital Signal Processing) that could be done from a PC to achieve premium sound for whatever speaker drivers you were using in your build. Hope this helps!!!

Build a Pi4 into a boombox. Better than using a laptop for entertainment. Power tool batteries, 5A buck converter. You'll want to power using 2 separate batteries. Android 13 because of higher over_voltage allowed for overclock. Accessories would cut out. I use mine for music, movies and tv anywhere.

Thanks :)

Greetings Brian. :)

Thanks for your support my friend. :)

And then it's funny when you find Brits insistent that aluminum is an Americanism that we just made up who then get mad when you point out that the term aluminum was created by the English chemist who first discovered the element.

Al-u-min-u-mmm

Mine, too, with the exception of a small percentage of downloads that aren't available in lossless formats. ~26k tracks (just under 150GiB at 192k) and still growing. And while I am keeping an eye on its successor, Opus (very nice, both qualitatively and quantitatively), there's just no way I'm going to re-rip that many CDs. I prefer to keep things as uniform as possible. Plus there are a few idiosyncrasies in tagging that I don't like. I have switched to it as the go-to audio codec for my video encodings, though.

Opus, the successor of Vorbis is better than Vorbis in every way. • Quality better than Vorbis • Encoding speed faster than Vorbis (libopus 1.5) • Decoding speed faster than Opus (libopus 1.5)

This I did not know!

@@ExplainingComputers My job here is done! However do look into it (fact-checking and all) :-)

Opus: => Much better quality than Vorbis => Higher encoding speed => Higher decoding speed => Low latency => Even more efficient for small files like sound effects => Surround optimizations (The LFE channel gets lower bitrates since it only needs a very low bitrate)

@@EmergedFromReddit It might have better quality than vorbis *for a given bitrate*, but this isn't 2004 where storage is tiny. And not sure why decoding speed means anything when vorbis has been hardware decoded for over 15 years on SoCs for android and other chips. Latency also means nothing when listening to music. LFE is a thing but again, means probably little when dealing with gigabyte size files. And again, opus means nothing to me unless my car supports it.

I copied a lot of files, ripped from my CDs, to it in MP3 format. It sounded fine.

Like the other guy said, MP3 is fine. Stick with 320k. It does support ALAC (at least mine did) if you want lossless, but it will affect battery life. Unless you have some high end headphones you probably wouldn't be able to notice the difference between lossy and lossless anyway.

If you flash the Rockbox firmware, it'll play 320kbps FLAC no problem. That's what I've done to mine, along with the iFlash SD card adapter, and not only does it hold more tracks than the original hard drive, but it's more battery efficient too.

Agreed -- I still use Minidisc. But sadly not a mainstream audio format in use today.

@@ExplainingComputers Replaced by Mobile phones. Jack of all trades, master of none.

I did exactly the same. Except once I got computer with two 500 mb hard drives, I redid them third time into .WAV

@@jhutt8002 Yep. Wav files are pretty big, though. My current collection, which has grown rather a lot, occupies about 30gb on disk. The whole thing is now housed, along with 1,400 transcoded movies, in MP4 files, on a 4tb NAS drive in an external housing.

@@Douglas_Blake_579 500 mb... Yea, sorry bout that, I of course meant 500 gb! They are large indeed, but storage is cheap these days. I upgraded my computer with two 1 tb drives couple of years back, as I couldn't fit my digitized library on it anymore. Currently at 456 gb of WAV + 387 gb of ISO files containing virtual copies of my music CD's.

I'm 20 and I can barely hear the difference between 256 kbps AAC and 16-bit 44.1 kHz FLAC. I'm totally content with lossy, even though it's worse. I grew up on WMA 128 kbps, so anything that or higher, I can enjoy

Can you hear a difference between a 96Kbps Opus file and a 320Kbps file?

@@EmergedFromReddit I don't encode files in Opus so I wouldn't know. Opus and AAC on KZfaq music is a far cry from FLAC, ALAC, or 256 kpbs AAC / 320 kbps MP3

wav is wav, we don't make the rules

Thanks for the sub -- welcome aboard! :)

If you Own Nokia Phone Back In The Day. They always Used AAC Quality For Ringtones 👍

Given that MP3 is over 30 years old, it's surprising how well it still holds up today. It can still keep up with modern codecs and is perfectly usable, although I'd say that AAC is probably more prevalent in newer media.

@@cromulence there was a time when I used to have my mp3 files on 128kbs range. I can’t stand the sound of files lower than 192kbs.

@@dougr.8653 Agreed, 192 is really the viable minimum, but 128k files were my first foray into music files I could actually keep on my PC!

Happy Monday 😁

Suzanne Vega?

@@michaelhall9211 yes. Not randomly mentioned either, that song was used to test the digital compression schemes while developing mp3. She's sometimes called "the mother of the mp3"

Thanks for this. :) I too prefer the older transition, but had to run with what I could (relatively quickly) set up in Autograph in Linux. The old bullet animation will return. :)

@ExplainingComputers that's good to hear

Cool! :)

Network bandwidth is also an issue, not just storage space. :)

@@ExplainingComputers I know, I'm just having wishful thinking. 👍😃

Great to hear!

WavPack is from 1998, so there must have been a bit of a mix-up there. Great and comprehensive video as ever overall though!

My bad -- typo. :(