Size Does Matters

I would assume that most people won’t notice they are not getting the maximum out of nearly everything. Simplest example – MP3 songs. MP3 is a lossy audio format, it compresses up to 80% from the original source file, particularly from audio CDs. But are you hearing silent loops when playing your MP3 songs? Unless it’s a corrupted file, you won’t notice any difference at all.  Still, people invented other types of audio container formats that implemented lossless compression method. Somehow “lossless compression”  sounds a bit awkward, at least for me. One of the file format – FLAC – stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec – really grabbed my interest. It won by being the most versatile and flexible and widely available format.  I’ve been downloading few songs albums hoping to hear the mere difference between lossless and lossy audio. Note that they’re not typical 128kbps mp3s, they’re high quality 256kbps ripped from audio CD. So, it’s a battle between FLAC audio files vs high quality MP3 songs.

Here’s the question. Is there any difference between both files? The answer is yes, although it was just a slight distortion which could only be heard using my Sennheiser earbuds (not a chance using my laptop’s speaker!). But then there comes an issue – are the songs ripped correctly? I mean, of course it stated 256kbps, but I used to get a 320kbps songs with truncated audio waveforms. So, the bit rate can’t really reflect the whole quality of the files.

Since the quality isn’t differ that much, we shall see another important aspect – the capacity. A 6.03 mins track will cost your harddisk:

MP3 : 8.33MB

FLAC : 38.95MB

That is not a pleasant fact at all.  Those FLAC files eat up your storage nearly 4 times bigger than a normal MP3 do. So, why care about lossless? Well, from my personal point of view, the fact that i’m listening to a nice lossless audio files, be it Bach’s or Matthew Bellamy’s, it satisfies me enough. It’s like the “Wow, I own a Vaio although the specs are far less better than an HP!” feeling, if you know what I mean. Currently I’m not switching all my MP3 songs to FLAC, just only few albums from my favourite British band. Why? Because size does matter! Yeah, until I get myself a 1.5TB of external storage.

The developer – Xiph.Org Foundation

Though, I have to admit that I’m being unfair for not revealing the whole features of FLAC – it’s multichannel support, encode/decode time etc. I would suggest that you experience it yourselves. Try to get some files to your hard drive, blast  it on your 5.1ch Harman/Kardon. Perhaps you can hear some more significant difference.