James Gaden wrote:
I don't want to get into a big argument or anything, I want to ask a simple question. I think it's fantastic that these concerts appears for downloading so quickly after the event, but I don't understand why they are put up as flac files. I know flac has no quality loss but surely if you encode an mp3 at 160kbps or higher the quality loss is not noticeable. If it was, nobody would use mp3's anymore and the iTunes store seems to be doing alright.
My point is all these shows are audience recordings. None are direct from the soundboard, so just how much quality is the much larger flac file giving you? I would've thought mp3 was quicker to download and just as good for what these shows are. Please tell me if I've overlooked something but I know from experience how long it takes to go the bittorrent-flac route rather than download a bunch of mp3's.
JG
It's a legitimate question that hasn't been addressed recently in this forum. I'll give you my thoughts, for what they're worth.
First of all, let's examine the mp3 format. Mp3 is known as a "lossy" format because, in order to keep the file size down, some information (samples) is deleted from the source file when it is converted to mp3. Those samples are now lost forever. The first time this happens, you might not hear a difference in sound. However, let's suppose you download a concert in mp3 format and then you burn it on an audio disc. Later on, someone wants to trade or you want to upload the show. In order to do this, you rip the disc and encode it as a set of mp3 files. When this new set of mp3s is created additional samples are deleted. You still might not hear a loss of quality at this point, but what if each person who receives that show does the same thing? After many generations, what would the show sound like as additional samples are lost in each generation? There would come a time where the show would start to sound like those crappy samples you can hear on Amazon. So, the worst thing you can do if you want to build a collection of shows to trade is to burn CDs and then rip to mp3 in order to copy them.
On the other hand, if all you want to do is have the shows, and you will never become a trader, then mp3 will probably work for you.
For people who want to collect shows with the purpose of trading them, lossless formats such as FLACed wav files are essential. Wav files are not missing samples, and that's why they're so much larger. FLAC is simply a way to compress ("zip") them to about half their original size to make it easier to download them. Thus, when you get these files, you know that you have all the available data, and you have the best possible copy. If you then use a good extraction program and extract from disc to wav in order to make copies, you should be able to make an exact duplicate of the show. This is very important over many generations of copies, because there should be no difference from one generation to the next.
I hope this helps.
