What is the best format settings to store a physical music?
I did look at Flac but the data is almost the same size as the uncompressed Wav and none of my devices or self hosted services seem designed to play flac files. Everything gets converted.
What are people using?
Flac for me has been about half the size of wav, at least for normal 16 bit 44 khz audio. Maybe it’s worse at higher bit depth? Anyway bulk storage is pretty cheap. You could have Flac in your archive while keeping ogg or whatever on your everyday playback device.
If flac is almost the same as uncompressed, I think something is wrong.
OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.
If you care anything for quality it’s FLAC, compression ratio will affect the size
Flac for storage, turn up the compression level. Transcode to an appropriate format when copying or streaming to a device
FLAC is supposed to be way smaller: https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/looking-at-flac-compression-ratios/
I use Opus at 192 kbps. It’s overkill but it should be almost perfect and has the size of an MP4.
Flac 44.1 16bit level 3. Host with something that meets your needs. I have my files in jellyfin and navidrome and can then access the library remotely either through jellyfin web client, navidrome web client, substreamer, Finamp, kodi, etc. but this way if another amazing format comes up down the line I will always have my library in a good state to transcode from. Tag and sort everything with beets.io (or musicbrainz picard is great, I just like that beets is cli). This results in a library I can access on my phone, laptop, tv, carplay, etc
Technically you could go for 24bit but imo the extra file size isn’t justified. though one could make that argument for flac vs 320cbr mp3, transcoding 320 mp3 is more likely to create artifacts, thus the reason for keeping around flac
Alac may be easier for you if you use mac
I use FLAC for long-term storage, 256kbps Ogg when transcoding for mobile devices.
Opus is the best lossy codec in terms of efficiency, but many devices/apps don’t properly support it.
If you’re storing them for yourself I would recommend doing an online AB test to figure out at what bitrate you are capable of hearing a difference (assuming decent headphones or speakers). For some people anything above 256kbps is wasted (or even 128). If you find yourself in that category you can just use lossy formats and stop worrying about FLAC.
This is good advice right here. Unless you’re a dj (even then it’s overkill) and or have incredibly high end equipment (again, it’s probably overkill), just go with some high bitrate mp3. MP3 is incredibly compact, everything plays it, and has all the metadata needed. Seriously you can’t tell the difference.
That depends. Are you looking at preserving the music without loss of information? Then you need to use a lossless format like flac. Formats like aac, mp3, opus can throw away information you’re less likely to hear to achieve better compression ratios. Flac can’t, so it needs more storage space to preserve the exact waveform.
You can use a lossy format if you want. On most consumer level equipment, you probably won’t notice a difference. However, if you start to notice artifacting in songs, you’ll need to go back to the originals to re-rip and encode.
Which compression level are you using? My old server is able to compress flac’s at the highest (and therefore “slowest”) compression level at >50x speed, so bumping the level up shouldn’t be too hard on your CPU.
Sheet music.
Sheet music carved in stone
I save everything in mp3 128kbps. I compared the quality with higher quality and with my setup (Bose speakers & in ear headphones) and with my ears, I can’t hear a difference. Opus is more efficient but my source is already in mp3 and I don’t gain anything by converting it. If I had to convert from flac, I’d choose opus. 1 4k movie is so big, the size of music doesn’t really matter at all.
The only downside to keeping everything in a lossless format is that over the years new formats emerge. mp3 used to be the only game in town, but now we have multitudes of lossy formats to pick from. By having your collection in mp3 format, you aren’t able to say “hey, this new format looks cool, let me switch to that”. By storing everything in a lossless format (FLAC), you can convert for mobile as you see fit.
What could I gain from switching? Playing mp3 will always be there and even if support is dropped in 30 years which is highly unlikely, the server can transcode on the fly. I’m unfortunately/ luckily no person with ears that can hear a slight difference between losless and 128kbps
Just flexibility and future proofing. Having/building a music library is very time consuming, so I’ve chosen to do it properly so there’s no work in the future.
Since my stuff is all FLAC it doesn’t matter what new lossy formats become popular 25 years from now. My music server will convert it on the fly to stream it to my phone.
For you personally? Not much at all. For a real archive future proofing is great.
A lot. Mp3 is a proprietary format on copyright. Some idiot ceo can came and change the rules, let’s add an ads mandatory for each decoder. Today with a bunch of open source good quality formats, is kind of pointless depending on a private company for your music.
patents is what you’re thinking of. and all (afaik) of them relating to mp3 format have expired.
That is valid and good criticism of mp3!
I wonder if navidrome can handle switching from mp3 to opus.
From what I’ve heard it’s impossible to go from one lossy format to another without losing quality.
I’d test it first, I don’t expect hearing a difference
Since FLAC tend to be around 1444kbps I use 144kbps opus and that makes them abour 10% of the size.
Opus is an insanely efficient codec, but unfortunately not very compatible.
Not Compatible with what exactly? It works on my 20 year old ipod using rockbox, any modern players should support it.
Rockbox is a bad benchmark due to its insane versatility. Just because modern players “should” support something doesn’t mean the manufacturer put the work in to do so, or even do it well.
That said, when I buy a portable music player the decision is always based on whether or not there’s a Rockbox port for it.
Tons of legacy devices. Old car infotainment systems, old “smart” TVs, old players that don’t have Rockbox ports, etc.
It’s probably still more efficient to keep a 192k opus and a 320k mp3 around than one flac.
Quite possible, yeah haha
I’m transcoding everything to 320kbps MP3s. It’s much much smaller than flac, and I can’t hear the difference even if I try.
Best part is mp3 even works with older media players like the usb port of 201X cars
If I had infinite storage, for archival I’d preferably use FLAC at its default level 5 compression. But like you and others, I thought the file sizes were quite big for a sizeable collection. So my personal compromise was AAC at 256kbps encoded with Apple’s QAAC. It’s small in size, vastly superior to MP3, and almost as universally compatible as MP3. There’s a reason why iTunes has stuck with it for so long, it’s an incredible encoder. I would never be able to hear a difference compared to lossless, at least on my equipment. So I went with it.
