Re: Why bother with lossy encoding?

By "Continuity with the rest of the collection" I meant something like the following. I have 15\00+ mp3's, having started my collection in the days when an 8GB card was huge. It could make no sense to now put WAV's in that group. There are those who say that the difference between mp3 and loosless files is noticeable. so anything I add to that group will be an mp3
I can think of one more place where mp3 would be useful. The old GEM Genisys keyboard could play mp3's as samples for it synth. Now, an mp3 CD/DVD can hold way more samples than using the WAV/CDA files

Are there actually players that won't play at least FLAC (which is a compressed file if I understand correctly)

      From: J.B. Nicholson <[email protected]>
 To: [email protected] 
 Sent: Sunday, March 5, 2017 5:36 PM
 Subject: [Audacity-users] Why bother with lossy encoding?
   
Clyde Lyman wrote:
> With the vast amounts of memory we have today, why bother with lossy
> files at all unless it's to keep continuity with other elements of a
> collection?

I'm not sure what "continuity with other elements of a collection" means.

Lossy encoding is useful for:

- delivering multimedia over slow links or to low-end computers (mobile 
phones, tablets, some laptops, toys). Even YouTube finds it useful to 
encode a lot of audio as Opus and a lot of video with VP9 nowadays.

- embedded players that don't handle lossless encoding (some cars and some 
portable playing devices don't support FLAC, WAV, or AIFF files, for example)

- maximizing use of (as you point out) inexpensive storage. If I can't tell 
the difference between a high-quality Opus encoding over the same audio 
ripped from an ordinary Red Book audio CD and encoded as a FLAC (which is 
lossless), I might choose to keep the Opus file because it uses 
significantly less space and works with every computer program I use for 
playback. Thus my casual listening needs are met and I get to store a lot 
more audio.


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