[ArsTechnica] Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself - Page 16

I downloaded a song in flac format and i cant hear the difference with 128 kbps mp3. But on youtube i can hear the difference between 360p and 480p .

FLAC is great...for desktops. I, and others, can notice the difference doing at home blind tests with fairly cheap hardware, they're small but they're definitely there; especially on tracks with a lot of background stuff happening such as Devin Townsend, Rush, etc and considering that I can get enough room to store my music 20 times over for under AU$100, there's little reason not to.

As for mobile devices...I encode my phone to 48Kbit/s ogg, which is the same as 128Kbit/s MP3. It's also insanely smaller, my library when I last converted it all went from 70GB+ FLAC with a few MP3 bootlegs and the like to 3.96GB ogg total, on very few songs I can notice the difference between FLAC, MP3 and Ogg but the size difference means I just encode to ogg.

FLAC has its uses in tracks that have a lot of crap at once, all over the spectrum; for example it's very easy to tell the difference between 320Kb/s MP3 and FLAC on YYZ by Rush ripped straight from the DVD edition of the Moving Pictures album; however I can't tell the difference on the same hardware with Trapped Under Ice by Metallica; yet off the same album I can tell the difference with the Call of Ktulu. These were blind tests too, a friend was playing them in random order (3 times each) and I had to write down what I thought each track was before he either switched to the other version or started the previous one again, this is with hardware that cost $200 total; a Xonar DX and a TDK headset.

I love foobar2000, the batch options (Copy all files while renaming them to blah, convert, etc) just work so well and are easy to get to; the plugins are extremely useful and it is light on resources.

If you're on Linux Audacious and DeadBeef are the XMMS2-like ones that I hear all the time and I like Audacious...maybe I'm just throwing in more placebo but Floating Point output is what I run everything at. Otherwise it's whatever music manager that works best with your DE (Rythmbox, Amarok, etc).

As for the windows world...eh...I gave up looking for a replacement to iTunes as I need it for the damn iPod and I don't listen to music that much in windows since I'm either gaming or on Linux.

You can use...wait for it... Winamp!

yup, I stopped using winamp after AOL came into the picture and innovation went down the tubes.

LMAO, to be honest that was one of the answers I was expecting .

It has been so long since I used it, I was unaware that it offered encoding to FLAC.

Very good to know.. Thanks

Again, WinAMP is a fine media player. There's a lot of bloat in the UI but all that can be hidden away. It plays nice with my system and I live the wide variety of skins for it. It is by no means better or inferior to anything else out there.

And FLAC vs MP3... There is a massive difference to music that isn't part of the stupid loudness wars. Any half decent headphones will do the job and you CAN hear the difference. You don't need to be a dog.

As for FLAC on phones/mp3 players? The only issue is battery life. FLAC albums around 500mb,my 16GB SD card holds around 30 flac albums. I can listen to one song at a time... It's not an issue.

But that due to the dynamic range within the file, very little to do with the bitrate or codec.

Yes, but if the sound engineer who mastered the CD cut a lot of the higher ranges out of the tracks then it's going to sound invariably worse on a lossless format compared to an MP3 - making it harder to tell the difference between the two.



When music has been clipped at the source it's a lot harder to justify bigger bitrates since that range is lost anyway and there is no advantage to having it

For example, an MP3 clipped at 320kbs loses whatever else may have occurred outside of that range, whereas a FLAC or ALAC copy would capture that ok... but only if it's in the source to start with. Thus, these loudness wars are ruining music.

For instance, Brutuz said he could notice addition stuff in Devin Townsends' stuff.. This is because he officially pulled out of such mastering a while back with Ki.
Edited by Rubers - 6/27/12 at 1:54am

I used Winamp for quite a while, but prefer the library/playlist management of Foobar.