Re: Why bother with lossy encoding?

Clyde Lyman wrote:
> 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

There's no need to continue to use MP3 just because you used MP3 in the 
past. You can use any format your players can play. Whether one can hear 
the artifacts introduced with lossy encoding has nothing to do with what 
else is on the same volume, it has to do with the settings chosen at the 
time of encoding. So it's entirely possible that one can hear artifacts in 
an MP3 file compressed with low-quality settings.

I store my audio collection in formats that favor free software (free as in 
freedom, not price) so I have FLAC (primarily), Opus, and older Vorbis 
files all in the same collection organized into folders corresponding to my 
organizational needs.

I don't re-encode from a lossy source to a lossy destination as that's 
generally a good way to introduce audible distortions. Re-encoding either 
from lossless to lossy, or from lossless to lossless both have practical 
use (and the latter can be done losslessly).

Instead of WAV files I suggest using FLAC. WAV file metadata gets spotty 
support but Ogg tags in native FLAC files are widely read correctly.

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

FLAC is losslessly compressed at multiple levels of compression -- the more 
time one allows the encoder to compress the smaller the output file, but 
all FLAC encoding levels are lossless.

There are audio players that won't play FLAC: Apple's portable players 
(such as their iThings) won't play FLAC using the proprietary Apple 
firmware. One could install Rockbox on some Apple iThings to gain FLAC 
playback. But I don't see the point in acquiring an Apple iThing in the 
first place as there are so many other devices which play FLAC files (and 
have for years) that any device that doesn't play FLAC comes off to me as 
uncompetitive and obsolete. And I have other reasons for not wanting to do 
business with Apple which aren't related to audio file format support.

This is getting away from any issue dealing with Audacity per se so I'll 
stop replying on this thread here.

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