Александър Л. Димитров: > Quoth Jochen Schulz: >> >> It is! It looks as if it may become the de-facto standard for lossless >> audio (well, there's Apple's lossless format, too...). I use it to >> archive my CD collection and encode to other (lossy) formats only when I >> need them. What's especially nice is that FLAC uses Vorbiscomment for >> metadata storage. That's why you can encode Ogg Vorbis directly from >> FLAC files while keeping all the original metadata. > > Most notably, it seems to be all pirate's choice for lossless audio encoding.
Not only pirates', but bootleggers' choice as well, ACK.
> And everyone publishing his/her music on the web (paid or not) I've seen so
> far
> offers flac if they offer lossless at all.
I think Apple sells some lossless files as well -- of course, using
their own lossless format (ALAC). Unfortunately, Apple is in a very good
position to introduce new formats into the market via iTunes and iPods.
But probably lossless audio formats won't play a big role in the near
future anyway. Any good MP3 or Vorbis encoder can produce very good
results for at least 95% of the listeners in 192kBit/s. Using more
space is just waste. My (FLAC-compatible) portable player has never seen
a single FLAC file although it features a 20GB hard disk.
And, let's be honest: even most file sharers don't care very much about
audio quality. If they did, they wouldn't fill their hard drives with
128kBit/s CBR MP3s and listen to them with the crappy earphones they
bought together with their portable player. Before the iPod, many people
didn't even know that there are other formats than MP3 and most people
still have no clue what VBR encoding is and why it may be a good idea to
use it.
J.
--
My medicine shelf is my altar.
[Agree] [Disagree]
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