Re: Why bother with lossy encoding?

Clyde Lyman <[email protected]> Tue, 7 Mar 2017 09:57:30 +0000 (UTC)

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.audio.audacity.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Any way to use Audacity as my defalt music player? I've looked but have not found one and it would be a great one. I'd like Shuffle

From: J.B. Nicholson <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, March 6, 2017 7:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Audacity-users] 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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When asking for help on this list, please include the following information, so we can
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* Exactly what three digit version number of Audacity you are using (Help > About
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Mailing list: [email protected]
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