This is why you should use FLAC and stop using lossy audio formats.
Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that 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.
really old bait, yes. Like, it references CDROM and SCSI.
Cooper Phillips
>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 reason they sound like crap is because the files are old and have suffered file corruption due to their age. They've been sitting around for almost 2 decades after all. It has nothing to due with the format. Download them fresh and they'll sound great.
Samuel Ward
Lol dude no, you just need to activate the "lossless" flag in the mp3 file, it'll behave like flac for sure plus the sound will be better.
Owen Wood
> muh dreaded bit-rot > having mp3's older than 1/2 of Jow Forums users
i know this is bait but Id swear FLAC does sound better than mp3 320. I know it shouldn't and nobody can hear above 20hhz , but it does. Maybe its placebo effect since I have not done a blind test.
Nathaniel Scott
There is no point of doing blind tests on that matter because storage is cheap today and you should use flac anyway.
Connor Green
Luckily, the rotational velodensity degradation is a thing of the past thanks to NAND Flash. However, flash storage has another problem; it's usually too fast. Whether it is MP3 or FLAC, you probably notice that your music collection is playing too quickly. Your device has to keep up with the raw speed of reading, and therefore speeds it up. The final solution to this problem is streaming; services such as Spotify(TM) ensure that the data rate is exactly what is needed to play the music perfectly.
Kayden Sanchez
>flash storage has another problem; it's usually too fast >tfw listening to yurobeets on my nvme ssd SPEEDY SPEED BOI
Lucas Stewart
Realised the other day that I couldn't tell apart a few hundred FLACs from MP3 320k so I converted them to MP3s and deleted the FLACs. There's always those online indexes if I ever want to recover them but probably not anytime soon. Fight me.
You can always convert the MP3s back to FLAC anyway. I converted all my collection MP3 128k, knowing I can always go back to FLAC if I need lossless compression again.
