Is flac even necessary if they are coming off CDs? A CD is most often 192kbps mp3 format.
This is not correct, with the caveat that you can burn a 192kbps mp3 file onto a CD-R if you want, I’ve done it a lot in my younger days.
When you buy an album on CD from the store, that disc will almost certainly have a mark on the label that says Compact Disc Digital Audio. Which means it conforms to the so-called “Red Book” standard which defines its own data format, which consists of uncompressed, 2-channel, PCM audio sampled at 44,100Hz. This works out to be 1,411kbps. WAV files are much more similar to CD digital audio than mp3 files are, and a 16-bit 44,100 Hz WAV file has basically identical sound quality to a CD.
mp3 uses a lossy compression algorithm that allows an mp3 file to be a tenth the size of a CD-quality WAV file at the expense of audio quality. With more modern encoders and selecting a higher bitrate like 320kbps or so you can get pretty good mp3 files but they will not match a CD. There were some cd ripping software packages that would describe 192 or even 128kbps mp3 files as “CD quality” which is demonstrably incorrect but probably the source of this misconception. If you were to repeatedly rip CD audio to mp3, then burn an audio CD from that mp3, then rip the copied disc to mp3, the audio quality would degrade with each iteration.
FLAC uses a lossless compression algorithm and can achieve similar results to ripping a CD to WAV format, but at smaller file sizes than WAV. it won’t be as small as an mp3 but it won’t suffer from audible compression artifacts. Rip a CD to FLAC format, then burn a new CD from that FLAC recording, and it might not result in a bitwise identical CD because I bet the gaps between tracks wouldn’t be perfect but take any random 10 seconds from a track and they should be identical. Repeatedly rip to FLAC and burn to disc and the audio quality won’t degrade.
It’s theoretically possible to encode higher quality audio than that but you start hitting the limits of human hearing at that point. Also CD audio is strictly stereo; the earliest versions of the standard briefly mentioned quadraphonic audio but this never made it to production, and it can’t even do mono. CDs with monaural audio on them are stereo with identical left and right tracks. I personally wish they had included a mono mode in the red book standard so you could have audio books with 2.5 hours on a single disc, but that’s what I get for wishing I think. Whatever we have downloadable files now.
But to answer your actual question,* FLAC isn’t necessary. mp3 files are capable of sounding pretty good at smaller file sizes than FLAC. Because the devices I own that I use to listen to music all have 256GB of file storage or greater, I am personally not as concerned about file size as I used to be so when I do buy CDs I rip them to FLAC and listen to them in that format, and the audio quality is better than the 128kbps mp3s I was perfectly happy with as a teenager.
I was aware of mp3 being lossy and flac being lossless, but I had thought that CDs used a lossy format of some kind. Which was apparently wrong. I’ll look more into it.
Alec at Technology Connections did a good series of videos on Youtube about it, and he’s always a hoot.
There is an argument made mostly by the “vinyl is best” audiophile crowd that ALL digital audio is lossy because of an upshot of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, a key principle in how digital audio works. In order to avoid distortion due to aliasing, the sample rate of a digital recording must be at least twice the bandwidth of the signal. There’s a problem where if the frequency of the audio is way higher than the sample rate, it could produce the same series of samples that a lower frequency sound might, so it might play back incorrectly.
In practice, this means any audio that is digitized must be band-pass filtered before sampling. We tend to recognize the range of human hearing to be from about 20 Hz to about 20,000 Hz, so digital audio is low pass filtered to remove any sound above 20,000 Hz before being recorded. A sample rate of 44,100 Hz is a little more than twice that maximum bandwidth to allow for some wiggle room. There are people who claim they can hear sounds above 20,000 Hz, but they had to draw the line somewhere.
A practical upshot of this is you can’t record an ultrasonic dog whistle to a CD; even if the microphone could pick it up it would be filtered out before sampling. But, when taking practical constraints such as the biological limits of human hearing and the inertia of the speaker cones into consideration, CD audio can perfectly replicate any sound humans can hear in 2-channel stereo, which is why it hasn’t really been improved on in terms of sound quality in 40 years.
Compression, whether lossless or lossy, is a whole other can of worms that red book audio has nothing to do with. It’s amazing they were able to produce consumer-grade electronics that could decode that amount of raw data in real time in 1980, especially given the robust error correction it has built in. The processing power required to decompress audio before decoding it just wasn’t available while the Red Book was being written, so they didn’t include compression in the standard.
We treat CDs as obsolete here in the Spotify era but they’re still technological marvels.
This is not correct, with the caveat that you can burn a 192kbps mp3 file onto a CD-R if you want, I’ve done it a lot in my younger days.
When you buy an album on CD from the store, that disc will almost certainly have a mark on the label that says Compact Disc Digital Audio. Which means it conforms to the so-called “Red Book” standard which defines its own data format, which consists of uncompressed, 2-channel, PCM audio sampled at 44,100Hz. This works out to be 1,411kbps. WAV files are much more similar to CD digital audio than mp3 files are, and a 16-bit 44,100 Hz WAV file has basically identical sound quality to a CD.
mp3 uses a lossy compression algorithm that allows an mp3 file to be a tenth the size of a CD-quality WAV file at the expense of audio quality. With more modern encoders and selecting a higher bitrate like 320kbps or so you can get pretty good mp3 files but they will not match a CD. There were some cd ripping software packages that would describe 192 or even 128kbps mp3 files as “CD quality” which is demonstrably incorrect but probably the source of this misconception. If you were to repeatedly rip CD audio to mp3, then burn an audio CD from that mp3, then rip the copied disc to mp3, the audio quality would degrade with each iteration.
FLAC uses a lossless compression algorithm and can achieve similar results to ripping a CD to WAV format, but at smaller file sizes than WAV. it won’t be as small as an mp3 but it won’t suffer from audible compression artifacts. Rip a CD to FLAC format, then burn a new CD from that FLAC recording, and it might not result in a bitwise identical CD because I bet the gaps between tracks wouldn’t be perfect but take any random 10 seconds from a track and they should be identical. Repeatedly rip to FLAC and burn to disc and the audio quality won’t degrade.
It’s theoretically possible to encode higher quality audio than that but you start hitting the limits of human hearing at that point. Also CD audio is strictly stereo; the earliest versions of the standard briefly mentioned quadraphonic audio but this never made it to production, and it can’t even do mono. CDs with monaural audio on them are stereo with identical left and right tracks. I personally wish they had included a mono mode in the red book standard so you could have audio books with 2.5 hours on a single disc, but that’s what I get for wishing I think. Whatever we have downloadable files now.
But to answer your actual question,* FLAC isn’t necessary. mp3 files are capable of sounding pretty good at smaller file sizes than FLAC. Because the devices I own that I use to listen to music all have 256GB of file storage or greater, I am personally not as concerned about file size as I used to be so when I do buy CDs I rip them to FLAC and listen to them in that format, and the audio quality is better than the 128kbps mp3s I was perfectly happy with as a teenager.
Thanks for the info and detailed response!
I was aware of mp3 being lossy and flac being lossless, but I had thought that CDs used a lossy format of some kind. Which was apparently wrong. I’ll look more into it.
Alec at Technology Connections did a good series of videos on Youtube about it, and he’s always a hoot.
There is an argument made mostly by the “vinyl is best” audiophile crowd that ALL digital audio is lossy because of an upshot of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, a key principle in how digital audio works. In order to avoid distortion due to aliasing, the sample rate of a digital recording must be at least twice the bandwidth of the signal. There’s a problem where if the frequency of the audio is way higher than the sample rate, it could produce the same series of samples that a lower frequency sound might, so it might play back incorrectly.
In practice, this means any audio that is digitized must be band-pass filtered before sampling. We tend to recognize the range of human hearing to be from about 20 Hz to about 20,000 Hz, so digital audio is low pass filtered to remove any sound above 20,000 Hz before being recorded. A sample rate of 44,100 Hz is a little more than twice that maximum bandwidth to allow for some wiggle room. There are people who claim they can hear sounds above 20,000 Hz, but they had to draw the line somewhere.
A practical upshot of this is you can’t record an ultrasonic dog whistle to a CD; even if the microphone could pick it up it would be filtered out before sampling. But, when taking practical constraints such as the biological limits of human hearing and the inertia of the speaker cones into consideration, CD audio can perfectly replicate any sound humans can hear in 2-channel stereo, which is why it hasn’t really been improved on in terms of sound quality in 40 years.
Compression, whether lossless or lossy, is a whole other can of worms that red book audio has nothing to do with. It’s amazing they were able to produce consumer-grade electronics that could decode that amount of raw data in real time in 1980, especially given the robust error correction it has built in. The processing power required to decompress audio before decoding it just wasn’t available while the Red Book was being written, so they didn’t include compression in the standard.
We treat CDs as obsolete here in the Spotify era but they’re still technological marvels.
Commentary: I would expect someone familiar with Technology Connections to ideally call it a Hoot for sure.