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Music Media

Phish Moves To FLAC 377

Posted by timothy from the what's-the-downside dept.
sethadam1 writes "Due to customer feedback, Phish, who have served as pioneers in the pay-per-download online music arena with their livephish.com site, have recently converted to FLAC compression for their high-quality download offerings. Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?" And fans were using it long before ;)
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Phish Moves To FLAC More

Phish Moves To FLAC

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  • honestly? (Score:5, Funny)

    by REBloomfield ( 550182 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @05:58AM (#6282548)
    no, probably not.

  • Yay! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by chendo ( 678767 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @05:59AM (#6282553)
    It's good to see OSS solutions being used on a commercial basis. Maybe this will let FLAC get more publicity, along with the whole OSS movement :D

  • Good. (Score:5, Funny)

    by spacefight ( 577141 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @05:59AM (#6282554)
    All download files are compatible with Windows, Mac and Unix, allowing for maximum flexibility and ease of use.
    Good.
    PLEASE NOTE: LivePhish.com is optimized for Internet Explorer 5 or later. You may experience problems with the web browser you are currently using. Please come back and visit us with Internet Explorer.
    Bad.

    • Re:Good. (Score:3, Informative)

      by bruceg ( 14365 )
      Well, I used Mozilla 1.3.1, to d/l some live music, and din't have any trouble. I received the same warning.
    • All download files are compatible with Windows, Mac and Unix, allowing for maximum flexibility and ease of use.

      Nessecary action to take.

      PLEASE NOTE: LivePhish.com is optimized for Internet Explorer 5 or later. You may experience problems with the web browser you are currently using. Please come back and visit us with Internet Explorer.

      Totally unnessasary, there are -LOT'S- of ways to
      a) Design something all (5+ version) browser compatible..
      b) Lot's and lot's of dirty hacks to make it even Version 4+ co

    • Re:Good. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Neon Spiral Injector ( 21234 )
      Also, odd. They provide CD booklets in PDF format.

      Good.

      There are seperate versions for Mac and PC. The PC version has a larger left margin.

      Bad.

      What does the 'P' in PDF stand for again?

    • But they also give props to the *nix users in their FAQ:

      What are the recommended specs for enjoying Live Phish Downloads?
      Please note: we do not recommend downloading FLAC files on a dial-up modem. If you are on a slow connection, please purchase MP3 files instead of FLAC.

      Windows
      Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, or later
      128 MB RAM
      10 GB Hard Drive (a larger hard drive is optimal)
      Pentium III 750MHz or faster (or equivalent)
      Cable Modem or DSL
      Internet Explorer 5.5 or later

      Mac OS
      Mac OS X or later
      128

  • They could compress more... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @05:59AM (#6282555) Homepage Journal
    ... if they just noted that the tedious jam from Tuesday gig at the Cleveland Enormodome is not different from the Thursday's tedious jam at the Philadelphia Giganto-park, in any musically interesting way.

  • Dude! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fideaux! ( 44069 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:00AM (#6282557) Homepage
    Does it make my computer smell like Patchouli?

    • Re:Dude! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by goober ( 120298 )

      Does it make my computer smell like Patchouli?

      No, and this is in fact the best feature of LivePhish Downloads. I love the music but stopped going to Phish shows years ago because the crowds got too big/disgusting. Now I can go on tour again from the comfort of my own home.

  • Better Yet (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:00AM (#6282558)
    Heck, Why not GIF...the patent just expired, and I hear it's great compression.

  • why lossless for live? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by croddy ( 659025 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:05AM (#6282571)
    I can understand spending the disk/cpu for lossless compression on, say, a 96khz classical recording, but most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources. for live recordings, ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.

    (then again, I haven't been able to deal with internet show traders ever since CD-R enabled them to be even more demanding about recording quality.)

    • Re:why lossless for live? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fwankypoo ( 58987 ) <jason@terk.gmail@com> on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:50AM (#6282696) Homepage
      most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources

      Well, sure, I'll give you that - many mixes come out with undesirables, but the issue is not one of the music needing that extra bit of quality that a lossless compression scheme supplies. Rather, the use of such compression addresses the issue of multiple generations. By trading with SHN (or FLAC) we can then make an _exact_ copy of the master copy; each generation does not add any noise/distortion to the mix, as it might with audio tapes.

      If a lossy compression were regularly used, and people burned to disc, encoded to OGG/MP3, decoded and burned again, distortion and data loss would be added to that copy of the source, which is unaccptable. That's why we also use MD5s as well.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:03AM (#6282737)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • So, you have people trading crappy live recordings made through sub-standard microphones, placed 100 yards away from the performers, that picked up the sound from so-so PA speakers and fed a consumer-grade portable recorder


        And what about the ones who have permission to plug a line feed into an MD recorder direct from the desk?

        I think they could require lossless recording, especially if the intention is then to encode it into lossy formats.

      • Re:why lossless for live? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        How about:

        4. We realise that MP3 is not going to be around forever, and converting from one lossy codec to another ends with crappy sound?

        So you disgree that FLAC is suitable for end use. Fine. But a master copy compressed in a non-lossy way helps the sound quality five, ten, fifteen years from now. You aren't thinking about forwards compatibility.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • 6. So you believe that master copy compression should use lossless compression. Fine. So does everyone else. The fact of the matter is we are NOT talking about master copies, we're talking about pay-per-download songs on a Phish site. That's about as end user as you can get.

      • "So, you have people trading crappy live recordings made through sub-standard microphones, placed 100 yards away from the performers, that picked up the sound from so-so PA speakers and fed a consumer-grade portable recorder insisting that they need lossless compression for the audio treasures that they that they exchange.

        Perhaps, they want to maintain the roughness, the distortion and the crowd noise? If they wanted to trade hi-fidelity CD rips which have been recorded in some sterile studio, they could

      • Sub-standard microphones? So Neumann U89s and the Lunatec V2 preamp and the Apogee AD1000 ADC and the Tascam DA-P1 are either sub-standard or consumer grade? I think not, and that is just the setup that Phish's New Years show (all 10 CDs worth of music) from 2000 was recorded with. Please don't comment on something you don't know about. I far prefer audience recordings to commercial releases, as they aren't compressed to hell and actually have dynamic range. By the way Neumann U89 microphones are roughly $5
      • I have yet to see any scientifically valid, double-blind test in which users could distinguish between a CD and an MP3 at 320kbps

        I'm not sure what you consider "scientifically valid" but I have done blind testing with my own equipment and I can hear a difference between 320kbps MP3s (yes encoded with lame, not that it matters) and WAVs. I think the differences are quite clear on sufficiently good equipment. It is mostly a loss of "life", "richness",a certain airiness or "soundstage", and high frequency de

    • Re:why lossless for live? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nathanh ( 1214 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:10AM (#6282761) Homepage
      I can understand spending the disk/cpu for lossless compression on, say, a 96khz classical recording, but most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources. for live recordings, ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.

      Because we're talking about audiophiles here (who else would *complain* about the previous audio format on the Phish site). You know. These are the people who think they can hear the difference between a CD and a CD with green ink on it [urbanlegends.com]. The same people who insist that vinyl has higher fidelity [furious.com] than CD. The same people who compare the dry tonality of different digital interconnects [kuro5hin.org].

      Even supposedly decent sites make so many mistakes [howstuffworks.com] when discussing digital audio that they'd fail an undergrads signals course. "No information is lost" my arse. And what sort of nonsense is that idiot trying to pass off as a digital signal; don't these "experts" know what low-pass filtering means?

      Audiophilia. It's a disease. Kill it before it spreads.

      • Vinyl vs. CD (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Phreakiture ( 547094 )

        First off, let me state that for the vast majority of people (myself included), CD is superior to vinyl.

        That said, vinyl has a superior frequency response (potentially 5Hz-27kHz) than CD. To someone with odd hearing (yes, I knew someone who could hear that high) this makes a difference, provided the source material was also analogue, or at least sampled fast (e.g. 96kHz).

        CD blows vinyl away on signal-to-noise ratio (98dB vs. ~40dB) distortion, wow and flutter, and, most pronounced, media durability.

        I

  • Phish cool (Score:5, Informative)

    by Madcapjack ( 635982 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:06AM (#6282572)
    Phish has always been cool about their audio property. They have no problem with people recording their shows and trading their music. See there policy at: http://www.phish.com/print/guidelines.html

    • Re:Phish cool (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mumblestheclown ( 569987 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:21AM (#6282797)
      yes, because they have an active concert 'culture', just like their previous equivalent, the grateful dead, who used to be routinely wheeled out as some sort of examplars by the pro-piracy crowd.

      the myth is, of course, that such examples scale. they don't. i wouldn't ever want to see half the artists i listen to in person and many of the others make it impractible because they're half a world away. phish and the gd are clearly exceptional in that they attract a large number of people to their concerts, often for reasons not directly related to the music per se.

      • who used to be routinely wheeled out as some sort of examplars by the pro-piracy crowd.

        I'm not part of the 'pro-piracy' crowd. I just think that its cool that their not being tight-asses about it.

        • Phish grammar police! (Score:5, Funny)

          by Marijuana al-Shehi ( 609113 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @08:22AM (#6283012)

          Whoa brother, like it's not cool that their not being tight-asses but cool that they're not being tight-asses , 'cuz, you know, they are not being tight-asses. Get it? It's a contraction. It's like compression, brother. The "'" replaces the " a". It doesn't compress much, kinda more like FLAC than ogg or mp3. Haha. Speaking of kind, you got any? Let's burn one! My bro grew these nugs. It's his own hybrid strain he calls Trey An!

          And you know besides "their" and "the'yre" there is "there"? Not to come down on you too hard bro, but you kinda got that one wrong in the grandparent post. Remember this?

          ...and trading their music. See there policy at...
          So yeah, brother, like the first "their" was right on! But it's their policy, like their music. Yeah, it blows my mind too! Like, I would use "there" to communicate things like "there goes some tasty sisters--wonder if they got any gooballs for sale?" or "I was standing over there when I spilled the liquid acid those kids fronted me".

          Does it all make sense now? Cool man, I'm gonna get back to burning these Lemon Wheel shows for some kids I just met...

      • the myth is, of course, that such examples scale. they don't. i wouldn't ever want to see half the artists i listen to in person and many of the others make it impractible because they're half a world away.

        The model does not encompass every single artist and every single fan, but it does "scale". There are thousands of musicians in any medium sized city who make their living primarily through live music (from punk bands to jazz musicians to oboists). And, after all, there was a time when this was how mo

  • Could be (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MrZilla ( 682337 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:09AM (#6282581) Homepage
    It's all about someone taking the first step. Most end users won't install new codecs for anything unless they absolutley have to (like divx), or if it's included in the player/program they're installing (like mp3 in winamp).

    More sources start releasing their audio in FLAC, then more software developers will include support for it, and even more audio will be released, and so forth.

    It's always that first step that's the hard part, after that, good solutions often spread themselves.
  • This is great news for all music lovers, being a lossless, open-source audio compression algorithm. FLAC is also one of the most efficient lossless codecs.

    Ummm, I think that's all I have to say. Let me check, first.

    Oh yeah, down with the riaa. and microsoft, too.

    Slashdot karma whoring checklist: [X] Pro open-source [X] Anti [RI|MP]AA [ ] Anti Microsoft

  • etree uses FLAC too (Score:5, Informative)

    by technology is sexy ( 636179 ) <tobiasboeger.yahoo@de> on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:18AM (#6282608) Homepage
    It has been discussed [etree.org] to replace the outdated lossless codec shn in the bootleg community etree.org [etree.org], since it offers better compression and the possibility to compress higher resolution (24bit) and/or multichannel files.
    • One small correction. There are no bootlegs offered at etree, the ppl there are very picky about only trading music that is permissable by the bands. Also, another thing that I like about flac is the metadata info, which includes builtin md5sum info as part of the file. The md5s are one of the things that I like best about etree. I know that I have byte for byte the same recording that was posted, and this is the same as everyone else has. This is much, much different than fishing up those bad sounding

  • FLAC vs WinRAR (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Inda ( 580031 )
    I'm not trying to troll but I did a very quick experiment last time FLAC was mentioned on here and was not impressed in the slightest.

    I took one CD and ripped it to a single standard WAV file. I then compressed it with both FLAC and WinRAR and the results only differed by 20-30MB in favour of FLAC.

    I was not impressed in the slightest.

    • Re:FLAC vs WinRAR (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tangent3 ( 449222 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:42AM (#6282682)
      Parent is probably a troll, but I'll bite.

      On average, lossless compression can do 2:1 ratio, so that's 20-30MB out of 300MB worth of wav. I'd say 7-10% is rather impressive considering WinRAR recognizes audio formats and does optimisations on them. Try comparing against ZIP or something.

      Furthermore does RAR allow you to stream the audio? Seek (sample-accurately)? Error resistant (a small error won't affect the whole stream)? Can you play the RARs in your favourite audio player? Well I guess Foobar2000 [foobar2000.org] can , with it's zip/rar support but then it has to decompress the whole (10MB/minute) track before being able to play it, while it can play a FLAC directly from any point in time of the track.
      • No no. Honest, I was not trolling. It was just an opinion.

        For me, the story was about a lossless audio format and downloading music off the Internet. It didn't cross my mind about the streaming side of things even though I've read about it somewhere. Download, burn and delete is a favourite for me and lots of other people too.

        I don't understand your 2:1 ratio statement. I understand 30MB of downloading though... Putting that in perspective for me again; 30MB takes ~4 minutes to download.

        BTW... Do any CD

  • WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dspisak ( 257340 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:27AM (#6282636)
    ....my eardrums are bleeding!

    How many people could even tell the difference between a FLAC encoded live concert and a properly encoded 128-192kbs AAC/256kbs MP3 via LAME with the advice of r3mix.net/whatever the hell settings you ogg guys use for archival quality.

    I mean, do I really need to hear a lossless version of your live concert? If anything, I bet it would make me notice any noise that might get subtly masked by the psycho-acoustic models used by MP3/AAC/Ogg. Stuff like dirty power in the recording equipment or mics, things of that nature.

    Even with that said, how many of you will actually be listening to your FLAC encoded audio in a proper listening environment with a properly laid out, quality audio setup?

    Nah, odds are you're just going to take your FLAC and then transcode it to MP3 or perhaps AAC if your an iPod owner or Ogg if your one of those wierdos who uses it (I think Ogg is a cool idea but honestly MP3 and AAC now are good enough for me and what I do)

    And you'll do this why? Because how many portable and/or home stereo components play FLAC? I'd venture a guess of: none. But many units do play MP3, or WMA (ick, altho WM9 is nice), or recently AAC.

    Of course I'm sure some of you will say: "But I run my computer audio to my outboard A/V reciever surround sound system via optical TOSlink out" For these people, this very small, limited audience market FLAC will be great, sure. I should know, I am one of those people. But even I can't tell the damn difference most of the times between the lossless and lossy audio codecs. Heck, I'm one of the people who finds the 128kbs AAC files from the Apple iTunes Music Store to be superior in quality to the old 192kbs VBR MP3s I made of the same CD track with LAME and the great advice from r3mix.net.

    So, yeah I'm glad someone is doing this but I honestly think the market they are speaking to is so small and niche that its going to be lost in the statistical variance of the overall group.
    • You bring up some good points and yes, most people wouldn't be able to perceive the difference between a properly mastered liveset encoded lossy and lossless. But by providing a lossless version the consumer is given the freedom to choose what lossy codec to use for his portable/DVD-player (be it Vorbis, MP3 or even MPC). And there already is hardware [request.com] playing FLAC files.

      How many people could even tell the difference between a FLAC encoded live concert and a properly encoded 128-192kbs AAC/256kbs MP3 via L
    • You have to realize your bias towards lossy is a temporary phenonmenon. I have 500 GB in my PC now, and just use Flac. I can backup everything on a reasonable number of DVDs, just like a in 97 I could back up everything on a reasonable # of CDs.

      Percussion sounds better in Flac. And the whole thing has more energy, more life force, more kick-you-in-the-gut than lossy. Flac has more "bite."

      You take the way Phil Lesh sounded during the peak of say Terrapin Station (or anything with a lot of gut-punching
      • You have to realize your bias towards having a ludicrous amount of hard drive space in your home pc. Listen to yourself here:

        "I have 500 GB in my PC now"

        I have 120gb in my desktop, the laptop has 40gb. I do work on DVD's so I use a lot of that space for video I am editing and/or compressing or touching up. The *only* system I use that has 500GB is the main video capture station I use at the media lab I help out at that has a 3ware Escalade RAID card with 8 IDE drives in a RAID 5 array totalling 500GB in s
        • My 250GB drives were like $275 ea. at Frys. Not cheap, but not an insane amount of $.

          Yes, it's about 11 CDs per DVD. Usually a bit more; most albums don't fill up a whole CD.

          Thanks for making me feel all "ahead of the curve" with the disk space issue. I got spoiled where I used to work -- we had 10 1.5 TB SANs, and one 4 TB thingy, and I got to play with all of em. Funny thing is for desktop scenarios my $500 of disks is speed-comprable to a $100,000 SAN (that's single-user mind you; multi-user is way

    • Stop being so short-sighted (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mr.Ned ( 79679 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:21AM (#6282796)
      Whenever an article like this is posted, when someone is going above and beyond a 128kbit mp3 to try and offer improved sound quality, a few individuals will always say that it's stupid because no one can really hear the difference and will go on to demean all those that say they can.

      Any way you cut it, although Apple's iTunes store is a step in the right direction, you're buying an inferior product from that which you could purchase in a store. A lot of people spend a lot of time mastering and remastering audio to sound its best, and a lot of that work is just thrown out the window with an mp3. Not that this is a crime against humanity and that mp3s are bad, but I would rather not purchase for the same price a product that is by definition inferior.

      Now, if I go buy a Phish concert, I can burn it to a CD and have as good a copy as I'm going to get. If I want to convert it to mp3 for my portable player, I can do that. If I want to convert it to a high-VBR ogg for my computer, I can do that. It's flexible. If I got the mp3, well, I'm stuck. I don't have those options.

      Isn't consumer freedom good today?
      • True, but if most of thier audience can't use the files without converting them, than its kind of a waste, eh?

        Now, its Phish, so I'd be a lot more of their audince can figure it out than the average artistis, but its still about making thier audince happy. How if they had both, that'd be a winner.

        (caveat: I hate Phish, so I'm neither listening to their FLAC or mp3 files, so I have no idea if they're still releasing in both.)
    • Its for archiveing, and haveing a source file you can treat as if it was a WAV from the mic/CD/whatever.

      For just listening yea, its a bit much, but if you archive/want to use many codecs

      or simpley never have to rerip again like me and have space a plenty, then its a worthwhile thing to do.

    • Re:WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @01:12PM (#6285875) Homepage
      I'm one of the people who finds the 128kbs AAC files from the Apple iTunes Music Store to be superior in quality to the old 192kbs VBR MP3s I made of the same CD track with LAME with the advice of r3mix.net

      Well, part of that will be that r3mix is bogus; it's going in the right direction, but the lame --r3mix option is by no means as good as MP3 gets at those bitrates.

      I, like you, once thought r3mix ruled, and ripped all my CD's with it.

      Then I discovered the --alt-preset settings and EAC and.. well, ripped my CD's again, using --alt-preset standard.

      Then OGG Vorbis arrived, and I re-ripped (with EAC normalization) to Vorbis -q6.

      Then I discovered ReplayGain, and, joy of joys, re-ripped again. Guess what? A few of my CD's have been damaged becase they've been stored badly or dropped during their lifetime.

      Now I've got MusePack and new Vorbis encoders tuned to higher bitrates, and I'm looking to rip them *again*, and some of my music's stuck several formats behind.

      The point is, codecs change, codec tunings change, software changes, hardware changes, and *people* change, and everyone experiences these changes differently -- I get a new hi-fi and start noticing artifacts in some of my encoded MP3's; you get a new portable and start wanting 64kbps MP3 files. Your portable gets a firmware update and switch to Vorbis; Vorbis 1.1 comes out, and I want to benefit from the higher quality at lower bitrates.

      With lossless sources, everyone can burn a perfect original to CD and generate precisely what they want on their HD without the evils of transcoding lossy formats, and they can change should the need or desire arise. Not so if they just get a 160kbps MP3 to play with.

  • Phish! Um, yeah, Phish... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) * on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:27AM (#6282641)
    Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?"

    Of course! "As Phish goes, so goes the Music Industry," everybody knows that! As a matter of fact, they were discussing this very same trend during Phish's appearance last week on TRL.

    In a related story from the same Styles page, Michael Crichton and J. K. Rowling have announced they are going to have their nipples pierced to better emulate their idol, Poppy Z. Brite.

  • We have arrived. (Score:5, Funny)

    by nadaou ( 535365 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @06:36AM (#6282665) Homepage
    The xmms playlist makes it around to bouncing around the room (ogg:), reload slashdot, ahhhh.....

    A great man once said "If the Grateful Dead were like watching a beautiful sunset, Phish are like a blowjob."

  • Flac is awesome... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Aknaton ( 528294 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:00AM (#6282729)
    but I can't seem to find a player or plugin for .flac files on the Mac that will allow me to play the files I create without decompressing them first. This is probably the one thing I miss after switching back to the Macintosh. (That and good CD ripping software, like Windows' EAC.)

  • 7-bit encoding? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Linker3000 ( 626634 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:01AM (#6282734) Journal
    But did the Mayans do it first? Knot, knot, no knot, no knot, knot, knot, knot ...OK Tahmas, that's a b-flat on the pipes....

  • Oh the irony (Score:5, Funny)

    by drix ( 4602 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:09AM (#6282757) Homepage
    I'm not sure if I support this... if you think about it, very few phans have ever heard a live Phish concert in high fidelity. Take me for example: at the last Phish concert I was at, I saw the music emanating from the speakers as green clouds, which then coalesced into a giant steel Beethoven, who proceeded to eat me--all to the tune of "jingle bells", played backwards at a high tempo on the kettle drums. As you can guess it made concentrating on the latter 2/3 of the set very difficult. Hence I download these new high-fi with much trepidation: what has Phish actually been playing for the bulk of all those live shows? No one I know has any idea...

  • Defacto Standard (Score:4, Funny)

    by billmaly ( 212308 ) <bill.maly@NosPaM.mcleodusa.net> on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:16AM (#6282779)
    "Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?" "

    Yes. Or maybe no. Clouded, the future is. Outlook uncertain.

  • Here's why they switched!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:21AM (#6282799) Journal
    Did they switch for legal reasons? No.
    Did they switch for technical reasons? No.
    Did they switch for political reasons? No.

    So why did they switch? Obviously, Phish just happen to be fans of the logo. [xiph.org]

  • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:wide acceptence? no. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by clonebarkins ( 470547 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @09:07AM (#6283247)
      as with "Ogg Vorbis" (that's the name, right?), the only place I've ever heard of FLAC is on Slashdot.

      Well then you should try browsing the net a little! ;o)

      Seriously, though, every new format (audio or otherwise) has to build a base of dedicated users before it gets widely recognized. When PNG first started, it wasn't the most well-known either (though being developed by an international standards organization helped a little ;o).

      When people begin supporting newer (I would say better in this case, but I'll leave that up to you to decide) formats then you only have positives because then people can choose what they want. If you want to continue using formats you're comfortable with, that's fine.

      basically, I'm saying "pfft" at your silly audio formats that nobody uses. :P

      That's simply not true. Regardin Ogg Vorbis (which is a lossy format and so not comparable to FLAC anyway), if nobody used it then why does the newest version WinAmp support it natively? Not only that, but RealMedia has said they are going to support it as well. This is because they realize that people do use it, and that as the benefits of using an open standard (as opposed to mp3, which is proprietary) will reveal itself to more people in the future. FLAC is the same way -- Phish realized that 1) it is technically a better format than SHN (lossless and compresses smaller), and 2) more people are beginning to desire it.

      There's really no good reason to say, "Well, not everybody's using it yet, so I'm not gonna either." What you should do instead is look at the merits of one format vs. another and then make a decision for yourself instead of relying on public opinion (which will screw you over every time).

  • how easy is it to convert to MP3?

  • Phish Moves To FLAC (Score:5, Funny)

    by somethingwicked ( 260651 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @07:58AM (#6282920)
    Cool, I've never been much of a fan anyways, so no big loss.

    Will all their nomad fans be following them there too?

    BTW, where exactly is FLAC? I hope its somewhere cold. Summer Phish concerts mean hippies in armpit hair revealing clothing. *shudder* At least somewhere cold they will bundle up

  • Phish has a non-free EULA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gunzour ( 79584 ) <(gunzour) (at) (gmail.com)> on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @08:21AM (#6283006) Homepage Journal
    Phish puts unacceptable restrictions on fan sites -- although I'm not sure how they would go about enforcing them. For example:

    "Newsletters, web sites, clubs, or any other communication forum facilitating audio trading cannot accept advertising, offer links for compensation, exploit databases compiled from their traffic, or otherwise derive any commercial proceeds in any form."

    In other words, if I run a site that facilitates tape trading among phans, I can't have banner ads on that site. I can't even try to cover the costs of running the site.

    There's more:

    "All sites with such Phish-related content must agree to the Statement of Compliance provided below, and clearly display the following: "This site voluntarily complies with the Phish fan web site policy at http://www.phish.com/statementofcompliance.html""

    Hmm... must...voluntarily... comply. That's interesting use of the english language.

    "Fan sites must not contain any defamatory, offensive, illegal, and/or otherwise actionable content, nor may they allow such content from any user."

    Not only is a fan-site operator's right to free speech taken away, he must also take away his users' rights.

    • Re:Phish has a non-free EULA (Score:4, Informative)

      by Phishcast ( 673016 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @08:48AM (#6283131)
      I've never had a problem with the no-advertising clause. (I've been running Phishcast [umn.edu] for the past 4 or 5 years.)

      In a sense, maybe my site isn't entirely "free" (freedom), but not having any advertising ensures that the music itself stays "free" in just about every sense of the word.

      It's the music that's most important to fans of the band, and to operators of fan sites. I've never had a problem with the fact that I can't make money on a product the band gives me for free.

      Even if I could, I wouldn't.

      Jon

    • A site that "facilitates" trading is fine. But a site that offers *downloads* can't accept advertising. I don't know why that's not fair -- if you run a site that offers their work, not far off from these discussion of "IP," to use a buzzword, you can't generate money. It's free or it's not allowed.

      Why is that bad? Don't want to use your own cash? Don't redistribute their music.
    • "Not only is a fan-site operator's right to free speech taken away, he must also take away his users' rights."

      Hey! Guess what! Choices involve the loss of alternatives. If you want to be a semi-official ghoti fan site, you volunteer and abide by the rules. If you don't, you don't. You can rely on the First Amendment and Fair Use to do what you can. Note: these two universes are not 100% congruent.

  • A couple of months ago I was playing around with lossless audio codex just to see how well of a job they did on the compression side of things. I mainly ended up using Monkeys Audio and FLAC as they ended up being the most compatible with the program I was using. What surprised me though was how much faster Monkeys compressed in comparison to FLAC...with monkeys having slightly smaller files no less. Am I the only one seeing this or is this common..or most importantly what was I doing wrong?

  • whoa whoa, everyone just CALM down... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gosand ( 234100 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @09:46AM (#6283663)
    Why is everyone here giving Phish so much...

    .. (wait for it) ..

    FLAC?

    badum-tchhh. Thank you, I'll be here all week, tip your moderators.

    I kill me.

  • Maybe... (Score:2, Funny)

    by lauterm ( 655930 )
    ...if they changed the name to Absolutely Free Lossless Audio Compression...then they could do tv commercials where this duck wanders around quacking their acronym...oh wait, already been done.

  • The Real Reason Lossless Compression is good (Score:5, Informative)

    by doublem ( 118724 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @10:04AM (#6283885) Homepage Journal
    I have a portable Minidisc player for listening to music in the car. This player uses it's own compression scheme. I want to download some audio, and I download from two sources, and MP3 and a lossless compression program.

    Since the MP3 was encoded at a high bitrate and used a decent encoder, I can't tell the difference on my computer.

    I burn them to CD, and I can't hear the difference on my stereo.

    I copy them to the Minidisc player, and I can hear a few nasty audio artifacts.

    Let's say I loan those CDs to a friend. They rip them to MP3. The CD burned from the lossless source sounds like just the same on his equipment. The CD burned from the MP3, when ripped, sounds terrible.

    It's the same reason people tell you not to convert your MP3s to OOG Vorbis, but to rip the original CD instead.

    Whenever you take a lossy audio file in one format and encode it into another, you get layered audio artifacts.

    To get a visual representation of this, take a JPEG of a photo and put it through several file format changes. Save it as BMP, then open the BMP and save it as something else. If you keep opening the resulting file and saving it to a new format, you'll start to see pixilazation and compression artifacts, until the image is a fuzzy disaster that looks nothing like the original.

  • Funny in the FAQ :-) (Score:3, Funny)

    by barnaby ( 20280 ) on Tuesday June 24, 2003 @12:34PM (#6285469)
    Looking over the PHISH FAQ under....

    What are the recommended specs for enjoying Live Phish Downloads?

    Under Unix it says...

    Unix
    You probably don't need our advice.

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