Firefox 51 To Support FLAC Audio Codec

[starshipeleven]

Audiophiles are next to nothing within the audience that consumes music today.

The same can be said for people that use browser extensions in web browsers.

But as I said they are a vocal minority, a public opinion beacon. A browser for general population (idiots) is the stock browser in Android, it has a few basic options that will remain on defaults and that's it.

I mean, even some of those considering themselves audiophiles, they just mean they got a home theater system at home.

Those are the actually sane audiophiles and the most common kind. It's those that demand ridicolous bitrate like 384khz or something and gold-plated sound system with old-style vacuum tubes that are rarer and raise some concern on their sanity.

[starshipeleven]

unapproved post above for bug77

[starshipeleven]

LOL, yeah the idiots at bandcamp just re-encode the mp3 files as FLAC and sell it that way thinking no one will notice. Piracy is more reliable as hilarious as that sounds.

Uhm, I'm not finding articles about this. You have any source for this claim?

[GrayShade]

Uhm, I'm not finding articles about this. You have any source for this claim?

We can disprove it. Let's take this song which I had already bought (by the way, the video is fun and worth watching). Bandcamp offers it as FLAC, 320 kbps MP3 and a VBR MP3, so let's download them and look at the spectral view in Audacity. Here it is, can you guess which is which?

Look at the high-frequency content; I'm not sure about the scale Audacity uses, but the bottom version seems limited at the 22 kHz notch throughout the track. The middle one has some energy about that limit in some parts, but mostly tops out around 17 kHz during the quiet part from 1:20 to 1:50. The top one has no such "brick wall" limit that's visible.

We can deduce that the bottom track is the 320 kbps CBR MP3. The middle one is the "V0" VBR MP3 and we see that it can preserve more details in the high frequency region than the CBR version does, but at the expense of other, less quiet parts. The top one is FLAC.

So no, Bandcamp does not sell MP3s re-encoded as FLACs. They can't stop artists from doing that, of course, but they do discourage it.

Can I tell which is which by listening to them? I know I tried it before (with other music) and I was able to tell. Right now I'm on a laptop with less than great speakers, but I still feel I have enough reasons to prefer storing my media collection as FLAC. And once my browser adds support for FLAC as HTML5 audio I might crop up something to let me listen to it. Is this a "good enough" use case?

[carewolf]

Funny thing with Chrome is that they do support FLAC and bundles libFLAC, just not here.

[SaucyJack]

Uhm, I'm not finding articles about this. You have any source for this claim?

Personal experience (and some audio analysis software). I'm sure they're not all like that, but I paid money for legal FLAC music and got scammed.

[GrayShade]

Personal experience (and some audio analysis software). I'm sure they're not all like that, but I paid money for legal FLAC music and got scammed.

If that happened to you, it was probably the artist's fault. You should raise your concerns to them if that happens again.

[starshipeleven]

Personal experience (and some audio analysis software). I'm sure they're not all like that, but I paid money for legal FLAC music and got scammed.

did you report the issue to them at least?

[FuturePilot]

Nobody sells uncompressed music

Wrong. There are several places you can purchase WAV/FLAC music from.

[FuturePilot]

Bandcamp, Loudr.fm, Humble Bundles, and others I'm currently forgetting about will give you FLAC.

TracItDown and Beatport sell WAV