Thread 106947278

Which audio codec (and if lossy which bitrate) do you do your general music listening in?
I still resort to FLAC (44k/16bit), not because I can hear any difference between lossless and lossy, but just because torrents are mostly FLAC anyway and I don’t see the point in converting as they don’t take up much storage space.

>>106947278 (OP)
>Which audio codec do you do your general music listening in?
Opus
>(and if lossy which bitrate)
Default that yt-dlp/ffmpeg uses

>>106947278 (OP)
>WAV in lossy
The fuck? Who made this retarded shit.

>>106947353
>he doesn't know lossyWAV
ngmi

>>106947331
>ffmpeg
Why not use opus-tools to encode to opus?

>>106947278 (OP)
aac 256 kbps, using apple's encoder. better than mp3, slightly less efficient than opus but with much better hardware support
I don't bother keeping flac sources

>>106947417
>much better hardware support
Stop repeating this meme, all modern devices support opus

>>106947385
Because that's not the default that yt-dlp uses when converting audio in case it's not opus already. I'm lazy

>>106947443
Do you exclusively get your music from YouTube?!

>>106947429
I'm not buying a new car just so my music collection takes 85 GB instead of 100 GB

>>106947447
It's mostly soundcloud actually, sometimes i buy stuff from bandcamp

>>106947429
Smart devices, yes. Dumb and/or standalone players like car radios often don't, even in 2025 because manufacturers can't be bothered to implement anything apart from MP3 and WMA, for some reason

>>106947456
>>106947471
Cars are evil and you shouldn't use them anyway

>>106947478
Apart from that, my car's sound system doesn't justify anything above 192kbit MP3 anyway. It does support AAC, if I remember correctly, but I'm not going to re-encode my library if space is not an issue

>>106947508
>my car's sound system doesn't justify anything above 192kbit MP3
This would unironically be a reason for me to get a new car or at least upgrade the sound system. Having a good sounding system makes driving so much more enjoyable.

it just works

>>106947278 (OP)
>>106947331
I would love to use Opus but it's sadly still not supported by anything so 320kbits mp3 is still the way
>>106947429
>all modern devices support opus
Bought a new car radio in 2022, no Opus support, bought a new portable music player in 2024, no Opus support, stop bullshitting

>>106947522
I'd love to upgrade the sound system, but I don't drive much anymore, so it's not worth the money for me

>>106947522
nigga the average person can't tell 192 kbps from flac on high end hardware, barring some killer samples that get mangled by mp3 in particular
if 192 kbps mp3 is too low for you in a car then you're a "I bought $300 cable lifters and $200 directional AC power sockets" tier retard

>>106947586
If you listen to music at a high volume - which is typical for cars - you can spot the difference easily

>>106947278 (OP)
FLAC 16/44 is enough for anyone until the end of time, anything up to 24/48 is also reasonably sane because it makes little difference to the file size once compressed, and bandwidth and drive space are plentiful. Not that you'll hear any difference.

>>106949118
Why do some people listen to music at 192/32

>>106949143
because they're morons

>>106947376
not sure if you're memeing but there are lossy WAV formats like ADPCM. Seldom used nowadays to be fair, I would have left it off the chart

>>106947353

True WAV is and should be a totally lossless uncompressed format.

FLAC on my computer.
OPUS on my mobile phone.
Case closed.

>>106947353
wav is a container, and supports some lossy codecs
flac in "uncompressed" may be wrong though, i'm not aware of flac having a mode where it doesn't compress at all
also missed opportunity to put wavpack in all 3
"ogg" is also another container so doesn't have any right to be in that chart

overall it's a terribly made chart

>>106949854
>also missed opportunity to put wavpack in all 3
in lossy and lossless i mean, not sure if it can do uncompressed.
wavpack's interesting in that it can do both lossy and lossless at the same time (look it up)

>>106947353
problem?
https://litter.catbox.moe/438o7b7l9r1lvyuk.wav

>>106949810
Why are some of your words in English and others in Polish? God Linux is such a mess

>>106947278 (OP)
>pie chart instead of venn diagram
Learn how to graph, that pic gave me a headache.

>>106950108
>venn diagram
Why would you say such a diagram makes sense in that case?

>>106950127
So you display a format only once and you get to see which category it belongs to by looking at the circles in which it sits into.

>>106949958
cool track

>>106949973
you fucking sub 60 IQ cretin, you can set the locale to enUS while having polish dates by setting the LC_TIME variable, because Europeans don't use the retarded American date format. stay on windows you fucking idiot

>>106947278 (OP)
>mp3 in 192kbps
you can't tell the difference
stop pretending like you can

>>106950369
>completely missed the point award

>>106950376
>ffmpeg -i audioIn.flac -b:a 192k audioOut.mp3
here's your homework done for you, now stop complaining

>>106950326
i agree :)
https://youtu.be/LMIxrZZNX3E

MP3 V0
because it plays on everything and because i never cared about making the files smaller than that.

>>106947278 (OP)
OP picrel explains why non-classical three-valued logics are necessary.

>>106949712

I use the true uncompressed WAV format to rip cd's to my harddrive for playback thru my hi-end system, which sounds better than playing the cd's with most transports.

>>106950358
Why are you so angry?

>>106949958
>>106950326
oh btw, for anyone wondering, that's encoded using ADPCM, a compression technique created in the '70s, and was common in computing for a long time until things like mp3 became so trivial to decode in the '00s that there was no need for it anymore
it's basically 4-bit audio, but rather than encoding the sample as an absolute 4-bit value, it instead encodes the /difference/ from the last sample. that's really all there is to it. really simple and really effective, which is why is lasted for decades

>>106947278 (OP)
Opus.

>>106950648
when people say "WAV", they almost always means "PCM", or even more specifically, "LPCM"
someone mentioning WAV without clarification is a good sign they know very little about digital audio.

>>106950923

Yes, LPCM. I happen to be an expert on all things audio.

>>106949164
>i don't have a high end audio system because i am poor

kek

>>106950720
>>106949958
Is there some tool to make adpcm wav?

I don't really care that much

>>106952177
yea, i just made it with ffmpeg. i am aware that there's an almost inseperable correlation between lpcm and wav, but wav really is a a microsoft-made audio container that is simply so old that it only really supports a bunch of forgotten codecs... and lpcm
ffmpeg supports like 50 different variants of adpcm, it was really common, though not usually in places that the average person saw. for example it was really popular during the 5th and 6th gen of consoles

that file was created using;
yt-dlp -xfba https://youtu.be/LMIxrZZNX3E
$ ffmpeg -i \[20190910\]\ Farbrausch\ -\ Masagin:\ Nvision\ 08\ Invitation\ \(2008\)\ demoscene\ PC\ demo\ 1440p60\ \(LMIxrZZNX3E\).opus -c:a adpcm_ms -ar 44100 out.wav

>>106950127
because that's the correct way to show sets, jeet

>>106952177
>>106952349
-- like, there's really nothing hacky or special about that wav file. i bet it'd play in Windows 95 out of the box.
i'm not trying to trick anyone. it's pretty funny to me how .wav became the de-facto "uncompressed" format, despite it never being that. you can put lpcm in other containers too, so it's not that, either.

>>106947278 (OP)
Where is μ-law ? Arguably the most widely implemented compression in the world.

>>106952644
i mean, technically, but mainly in telephony. i can't think of any musical use for it
https://files.catbox.moe/ijdwar.wav

>>106952538
on that note, if you DO want to see something unexpected, try this one...
https://files.catbox.moe/ue8m3b.wav

>>106952813
What is that? 8 KHz?
Honestly, as you get older You can’t really tell the difference. That’s me, but some people go the other way when their hearing starts to go and attribute it to the fact that they don’t have #000 AWG, oxygen free, unidirectional, erbium-doped, gold plated copper speaker wires.

>>106953057
na, all these examples have been 44100Hz
µlaw is typically 8kHz, but it's not required.
>as you get older You can’t really tell the difference
i know. i remember extracting music from Spyro the Dragon and being disappointed it was only 32kHz. i could tell it apart from 44.1kHz music back then :(

>>106947278 (OP)
96 kbps vbr opus
any other answer is wrong.

>>106950923
to be fair who the fuck is using wav as a container for other stuff?
same goes for ogg, like yes technically it's also used for opus and flac plus a bunch of other shit but realistically, when you see ".ogg" at the end of a filename, there's a 99.999% chance it's Vorbis, flac uses .flac, opus uses .opus, you can technically have a .ogg flac file but i've never seen one.

>>106947278 (OP)
I'm using hybrid wavpack and set up syncthing to only send the lossy part to my phone to save space.

>>106947530
>only decent encoder is proprietary apple slop
>most common freetard encoders can barely compete with lame mp3
no, it doesn't just work.

>>106953178
oh and I also forgot about all of the he-aac/he-aac v2 spectrum band replication bullshit
some of the worst audio codecs ever made, cannot sound transparent at any bitrate, plus they all use the same file extension and are all just different "aac" types which complicates things a bunch
>plug usb stick full of aac files to play in my car
>doesn't work
>oh silly me, these are he-aac, not aac-lc, my car doesn't support this!
xiph solved this by using .opus for opus files despite still using the same container, really simple solution, but smegpeg couldn't figure that one out...

Always FLAC if available, when I rip CDs myself I also use FLAC.
Why the fuck would you need anything else? Your 128MB MP3 player can't play them and has too little space anyway?

>>106947530
>>106953178
Even in the apple slopsystem AAC can mean like 3 different things with unpredictable quality. Good on paper, a nightmare in reality.

>>106953162
sure, like i've said, i do get it, but it still annoys me. it depends on the context as well, like there's a difference between "i extracted wav's from this cd", and "cd's contain wav files". like one could be implied to mean something wrong, and the other is just wrong. cd's don't contain wav files, wav as a format is several years newer than cd.
ogg is more understandable, that doesn't support as many formats as wav, and for a while until flac and opus showed up, was only used for vorbis. i'd have to look up if it even supported anything else

but wav. idk, you can literally put mp3 into wav. it's a container, it's not a lossless audio format, and it never has been.

>>106953234
I though the aapl slop-system would have a good i infrastructure and system for audio because of the AV types that use it.

Why store compiled music when you can listen to the pure source of it? 0% compression, super compact and maximum fidelity. You don't need anything else

>>106953234
>AAC can mean like 3 different things with unpredictable quality
their coreaudio encoder now also supports xhe-aac encoding
so it's 4 different things, two good codecs (aac-lc/xhe-aac) and two awfully shitty ones that have no use case since opus 1.0 released in 2013 (he-aac/he-aacv2)
also fuck he-aacv2 for completely ruining the DAB+ radio standard, that shit pretty much defeated the whole point of a digital audio broadcast, it's in most cases not much better than fm audio quality.

>>106953335
It's not just that. Airpods have different AAC quality on ios and mac os.

>>106953254
>it's not a lossless audio format, and it never has been.

When fools profess themselves to be wise.

>>106952177
Audacity can make it.
There's also a tool called adpcm-xq which encodes with more advanced search methods for much higher quality, and supports bit depths other than 4.
Support for other bit depths can be iffy since they're rarely used. Last I checked VLC plays them just fine, but the progress bar goes at the wrong speed. Kinda funny.

>>106953297
>sounds completely different depending on your player
Tracker formats are where it's at
https://files.catbox.moe/92rc8d.IT

I have a shitload of pirated music that I need to convert to a smaller format for long-term storage. I'm going with MP3. Which bit rate should I use? I personally don't think I can tell the difference between 192k and higher, but I might go 256 or 320 just to be safe.

>>106947353
I have personally encountered ATRAC9 in WAV files. Fucking NOTHING could play them right back then.
FUCK YOU SONY

>>106947278 (OP)
Opus

>>106947568
i use opus to bluetooth stream my phone to my HTPC

What's crazy is that it didn't require any specific setup, it just worked and I only realized because my phone showed the BT codedc

>>106950700
he's polish

>>106947278 (OP)
opus 128k vbr

I don't give a shit, they all sound the same (aside from retarded shit like 128k mp3s)

>>106955936
if you have to use mp3, just use v0 with LAME

>>106955936
>I'm going with MP3
retard
>I personally don't think I can tell the difference between 192k and higher, but I might go 256 or 320 just to be safe.
...why not go for V3 which is both higher quality and less space compared to 192k cbr? you'd get to be safe and also slightly less of a retard at the same time

>>106947278 (OP)
>I still resort to FLAC (44k/16bit)
I use this too unless it's a very special piece of music, then I'll have a WAV which are not compressed.

>>106949854
>overall it's a terribly made chart
I agree. Can't tell if bait or just bad chart

>>106955974
>ATRAC
>FUCK YOU SONY
whenever I see one of those minidisc threads I have these same thoughts

cute format, shame about the codec

>>106947278 (OP)
>torrents are mostly FLAC anyway
no, they're not.

>>106950358
Absolutely disgusting.

>>106947568
>I bought a PMP that doesn't run Rockbox
Ya dun goofed

>>106947278 (OP)
I listen to ALAC mostly but I also rip to FLAC in case Tim Cook ever pisses me off too much

>>106958293
>mfs tell me about this now
So what's the best supported device for this?

>>106958293
Rockbox can get fucked. It doesn't do gapless MP3 and I'm not gonna convert my entire library to try and get it to do it.

>>106957630
>I use [FLAC] too unless it's a very special piece of music, then I'll have a WAV which are not compressed.
...how does this make any sense?

>>106960387
it doesn't, but he doesn't understand digital audio

>>106960392
unless it's something to do with compatibility, it seems more like a case of not understanding lossless compression.

>>106947278 (OP)
128k mp3

>>106947385
Unless you compile it yourself with the latest libopus you won't get latest features like machine learning based optimization, binaries on xiph haven't been updated since the last kalpa

>>106950392
The absolute funniest bit related to audioNIGGER delusions is that most of the time the tranny tracker 10000kbps flac is just a rencoded rip from a streaming website complete with all the aliasing and quantization noise but not one person on the planet can perceive that and their blissful ignorance keeps them fed on their own fantasies

>>106947278 (OP)
Whatever I can download off of deezer - mp3 320

>>106950358
you can reverse month and day in english too lol

>>106947471
>for some reason
because there's no reason to. mp3 suits all end-user needs.

>>106947278 (OP)
I use 2Bit-IMA-ADPCM encoded with adpcm-xq @ 44.1 kHz at maximum lookahead samples.
This means about 170 kbps of almost transparent sound with extremely low decoding complexity (only integer math with no division).

>>106957630
>I use this too unless it's a very special piece of music, then I'll have a WAV which are not compressed.
...please let this be bait

>>106962300
>170 kbps of almost transparent sound when opus/aac-lc and even mp3 can do that with almost half the bitrate just so that the decode complexity is lower
...why?
literally what the fuck is the use case? the amount of processing power an actual non-retarded audio codec uses for decode is immeasurably small, you can get away with opus even on an early 2000s mp3 player running rockbox, why do you need extremely low decode complexity AND subpar lossy at the same time?

>>106962300
damn, that's cool. didn't know 2-bit ADPCM could sound this good
https://files.catbox.moe/4g1mun.wav

>>106962521
> ...why?
I can play my complete music library in best possible quality on any device with a faster clock speed than half a MHz, including all my retro gear (Atari, Amiga, MSX, ).
A micro controller powered by my body heat via a peltier cell source could play music for ever without the need for a battery. So far it works for music stored in ROM but reading from SD takes too much power.

>>106950358
>>106949973
This isn't even Polish

>>106947278 (OP)
>lossless
FLAC (use for listening)
>lossy
Opus (storage space is cheap, just use lossless)
>uncompressed
Use case?

>>106962697
>best possible quality
"almost transparent" isn't "best possible quality"
>Atari, Amiga, MSX
...there's no fucking way you're seriously using an atari to listen to music.
>A micro controller powered by my body heat via a peltier cell source could play music for ever without the need for a battery
...sure

>>106962300
really this makes me question what all the usual lossy codecs are doing. like this sounds really good to me, and yet this is done with a compatible adpcm encoder? at <180kbps?
i've always known things tend to get most of the way with little effort, but this seems a bit too much

>>106962697
>I can play my complete music library in best possible quality on any device with a faster clock speed than half a MHz, including all my retro gear (Atari, Amiga, MSX, ).
>A micro controller powered by my body heat via a peltier cell source could play music for ever without the need for a battery.
Fukken
Based

>>106963597
>"almost transparent" isn't "best possible quality"
i read it as best quality for extremely limited hardware, which seems be be the case. LPCM is lower complexity, but it's also very high data rate, something like this could be pretty ideal for a lot of hardware, the right mix of low complexity and low bit rate

>>106947278 (OP)
FLAC on my expensive PC setup, OPUS on my phone/car.

>>106953162
if you say WAV and mean LPCM, then just say LPCM. WAV isn't an audio codec, if you say something that compares WAV to audio codecs like MP3, then all that says is you don't know what you're talking about.

>>106949810
>>106964416
this, but WavPack instead of FLAC

>>106947353
An "audiophile" looking for an excuse to continue using snakeoil bullshit like FLAC.

>>106963597
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acAm5HmIBO4

>>106962642
Song source?

>>106964328
It is the power of using proper noise shaping and exhaustive search at the encoding stage.

>>106965925
Not the guy, but every demo scener knows the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_oTQd93eRI

>>106947278 (OP)
SACD isn't an audio codec, DSD is.

>>106966145
>but every demo scener knows the song
Thanks, don't follow the demoscene that closely so I wasn't aware

>>106947278 (OP)
I download FLAC but use Navidrome to stream it to my mobile devices. I have it setup to transcode to opus 160kbps when it does this.

>>106947278 (OP)
i stream FLAC via spotify lossless to my bluetooth headphones

>>106950627
same bro

kek, why does mp3 STILL make this board sperg out? 320 and then even v0 was already peak transparency. If someone is using that for their personal music collection, it's not going to matter because they're not running a fucking CDN serving millions of customers.