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Aeabotts
3
Jun 7, 2016
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So I personally have a few other reasons for switching to flac besides audio quality. I can "almost" tell a difference between mp3 and flac, as in, I would likely fail a blind test, but when listening for extended periods of time, flac does seem airier and less fatiguing if only a little. But besides that, I buy flac because it is future proof. Mp3's are famous for degrading when moved. So if I were to stick them on a USB and give them to a friend and then he uploads the music to the internet and I download it back, it will most likely have errors in its coding and will sound inferior. Lossless does not have this problem and will last forever as long as your storage device doesn't go bad and you don't have a backup. Also, that tiny difference in sound may be a noticeable one once I step up my system, so I don't want to be stuck with degraded mp3s when I have a high end system. Right now I use hd598's into a fiio x3. Very happy with both but I can here a little room for improvement that I plan to get once I have real money.
Jun 7, 2016
kiwijunglist
79
Jun 7, 2016
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AeabottsYou are confusing mp3 with vinyl. The only digital degradation would be bit rot and that would effect any file, flac included.
Jun 7, 2016
Aeabotts
3
Jun 7, 2016
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kiwijunglistI wasn't confused. mp3 files do not react well to transfers. The uploading to the internet part was where the loss in quality happened since there was probably some compressing and decompressing happening there. Also, mp3 files lose quality when changed to a different file type because of their lossy nature. Lossless does not have this problem and can be uploaded and downloaded infinitely (if all software and hardware work properly). Also, sometimes when a file is copied, the software is imperfect and can leave behind tiny mistakes and fragments in the file. For flac this is unnoticeable because the mistakes happen to a couple samples and in the sea of samples but on an mp3 it could make a much bigger impact because there a lot fewer samples. This is probably pretty rare but I have experienced it using crappy computers and hardware. But mp3 files are stuck as mp3 files forever and cannot be compressed or they lose quality, so that's mostly why I buy in flac since I can create a copy in mp3 for my phone and use the flac on my fiio.
Jun 7, 2016
Socratease
191
Jun 8, 2016
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AeabottsNo, MP3s won't loose any information when uploaded/downloaded. They already lost everything they could lose when they were originally compressed/encoded. The Internet doesn't change bits in the files that pass through it.
Jun 8, 2016
RankoKohime
25
Jun 8, 2016
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AeabottsFLAC's are just as susceptible to BitRot (check Wikipedia) as mp3's. Better to have a filesystem that actually cares about the integrity of your files than risk having them corrupted by time and radiation.
Check out ZFS and BTRFS.
IMPORTANT EDIT: I can no longer recommend BTRFS, as it has some serious data corruption issues.
Jun 8, 2016
Stevangelist
54
Sep 4, 2017
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AeabottsThe more I read on the topic, it's not just me that gets headaches from badly tuned or recorded high frequencies. In some places on our lovely planet, it's been used literally as a form of torture. The culprit is usually a pirated shit mp3 file.. go figure heh. Somebody screwed up their encoding settings. If I hear any more music where the cymbals reverberate that tinny sound, I may try to end humanity!
Sep 4, 2017
Stevangelist
54
Sep 4, 2017
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SocrateaseThe internet is evil and should be stopped! In all seriousness, yup it's almost always encoding done wrong. Thanks a lot, Nero. Any conversion that is done lossy will lose something, every time, even at max bitrates across the board. Hey, I'm DSD, have we met?
Sep 4, 2017
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