Lossy Files

I'm trying to understand how to preserve lossy music. I enjoy downloading audio files as mp3 because of the compatibility and convenience. However, I realize as these files age, they will degrade in quality due to their lossy nature. I first thought, no problem, I'll just download fresh ones. But wouldn't these degrade too, assuming the source file is never replaced?

Is the only way to deal with this to download lossless files, and then periodically create fresh lossy mp3s for use elsewhere? And if so, what is the approximately lifespan of a lossy file before quality significantly degrades due to age?

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Depends how fast your HDD spins. On 5400rpm, not so much, but on 7200 the situations is quite terrible.

>Is the only way to deal with this to download lossless files, and then periodically create fresh lossy mp3s for use elsewhere?
yes

For each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.

Only SSDs prevent your mp3s from degrading

>I realize as these files age, they will degrade in quality due to their lossy nature.
Files don't degrade by themselves as time passes, are you this retarded?

always use lossless
always

and then there's this faggot

dont listen to him, he works for big audio

So is an SSD the best way to store lossy files then? What about a CD?

Yes optical media works too

Retard

Only if you burn the disc at 0x speed.

Do u guys sniff ur own farts

all the digital music is lossy. you cannot convert an analogue wave to a digital data without losing anything.

>see: sampling

>degrade in quality due to their lossy nature
man that's a common myth for some reason. it's bullshit, btw. you can verify this all by yourself given time, just run md5sum $file > $file.md5 on a bunch of files and check back years later and you'll find that the file still has the exact same checksum.

As for the general question of how to deal with lossy audio files: replace them with FLAC files when you can, keep the lossy files when you can't.

>are you this retarded?
of course OPs retarded, when is OP not

>What about a CD?
enjoy your unreadable files after some use and/or time, specially with burned CDs. I'd like to share some data on this once since you mention the medium: I decided to go through all my burned CDs and save whatever was worth it and throw them in the recycle bin last year. I found totally fine readable burned CDs from as early as 1996. I also found a lot of not readable CDs from the mid 2000's, a lot more of those were unusable compared to those from the 1990s. Also, burned DVDs were a whole lot more prone to being bad even than CDs in general.

quite pungent my dear

But I thought only lossy files degrade over time, while the lossless ones are safe.

Dude, just convert your mp3s into FLAC. They'll stop degrading

>files degrade over time
low quality bait tbqh :*

but that is a SSD

This is a great reddit thread. Upboats all around.

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This is actually a brilliant idea. It won't fix the quality that was already lost, but it would essentially "freeze" the current state of the file, right?

user is talking about creating the sounds physically and capturing it through a converter. not the compression algorithms used, which will cause a music file to degrade over some span of time to very low quality.

fortunately for mp3 users the quality will never reduce to nothing at all, but the music may sound strange. it's probably best to convert to FLAC asap

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