I’ve been experimenting with high fidelity audio recently. I primarily use Linux so I thought I would mess around with FLAC audio. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec and it is precisely that. FLAC is “an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.”
What you get when you rip a CD to FLAC or convert an existing audio file to FLAC is a completely free and super high quality file. The bit rate of such a file gets as high as 1000 kbps or more.
A couple of interesting points to keep in mind:
Music as we know it today is digitally recorded using extremely sophisticated recording equipment in a fancy music studio. At least as far as I understand it, this original recording is digitally recorded using 24-bits per sample at a sample rate of 96 kHz. However, when the engineers transfer this original sound to a CD, it is converted to 16-bits/44.1 kHz. This standard for audio on CDs is defined as the Red Book CD Standard.
At first I thought, well if I want the “best” possible version of my music I should accept nothing less than 24-bit/96kHz audio files. However, the difference between Red Book (16/44.1) and master (24/96) is really not that great. You can read a great article by Ars Technica on the subject. Apparently iTunes is thinking about offering 24-bit audio as an option for their digital music files. The argument against is simply that the difference between master and CD is just not significant enough to warrant a massive change like that. (Side note: it’s not easy to play back 24-bit audio either. Many popular audio playback devices will not recognize or play 24-bit audio).
Now, what is a significant change that is worthwhile in my opinion is listening to audio files in lossless quality at 16-bit/44.1 kHz. This can be achieved using a lossless audio codec instead of lossy one like MP3 or OGG. What’s the difference?
MP3 is a popular (albeit patent encumbered) audio codec for storing digital audio files. MP3 audio is a heavily compressed audio file which strips some of the quality and data from the original recording. This provides a file size that is very small compared to lossless audio while sacrificing some quality in the process. OGG on the other hand is a free and open source audio codec that while lossy like MP3, doesn’t suffer from patent restrictions.
Takeaway: Use MP3 or OGG if you want a small audio file.
FLAC is a popular (free!) audio codec for storing digital music files that are compressed without any loss in quality. FLAC audio files are identical to the sound you hear from an actual CD.
Takeaway: Use FLAC if you want to keep your audio files in high fidelity. You can also record them back to a CD at the same level that they were ripped. This is useful if you want a replica of your CD collection on your computer without any reduction in quality.
Warning: You should never convert an audio file of a particular quality level to one of a higher quality level. Technically you can do this, but you’ll lose quality in the process and it just doesn’t make sense. Think of it like trying to convert an old VHS recording to DVD or Blu-ray. You could do it, but the picture quality isn’t going to get any better).
So anyway, at the end of the day here is what I’ve decided. I plan on ripping or converting my audio collection to FLAC audio so that I can have a digital replica on my computer in high fidelity. I’ll keep my iTunes collection in MP3 for roaming around, but I’m going to store all of my music in FLAC as well so that I can listen to the sounds as the artists originally intended.
For example, Radiohead just released their groundbreaking new record “The King of Limbs“. They offer the eight amazing new tracks in either 320 kbps MP3 or high fidelity WAV audio. I downloaded the WAV version of the album and converted the files on my Linux desktop to HiFi FLAC audio. Here is the command I used:
$ flac --fast --delete-input-file -V originalfile.wav -o newfile.flac
- –fast means it will perform minimal compression
- –delete-input-file means it will remove the old file if it’s successful
- -V verifies that the conversion was successful and identical to the original
- -o just means that I wanted to rename the new output file
You can also use a program called sound converter if you want to use a GUI tool. Just change the preferences so that it uses FLAC as the output. You can use a program like Audio CD Extractor (sound juicer) to extract the audio straight from your CD using a GUI tool. Again, remember to choose FLAC for the output.
Update: Use EasyTag as a tag editor for FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis files and more. Editing the tags before importing your music into your favorite music player makes life much easier.
