CD Quality Downloads
This article first appeared in HiFiCritic magazine back in 2007. One has to note that the magzine’s editor, even to this day, has not fully embraced the computer. I’m sure he’d be happier if we still submitted typed copy through the post!.
To many observers, especially those-digital-provides-the-answer-to-everything visionaries, the days of purchasing music on physical media are all but over. In the near future, they’re eager to tell us, the Compact Disc will be little more than a memory and we’ll all be buying our music by downloading it from vast repositories on the internet. The phrase “Yeah, right” springs instantly to mind, but I’ve become increasingly wary of making such remarks ever since my crystal ball went dark and hazy – although it wasn’t too far off the mark in its glum predictions for the meteoric disappearance off the radar of SACD and DVD-Audio.
50FootWave promote free HD downloads
This music-by-download vision is presently a dream – although it will remain as such for those without sufficiently fast internet connections and appropriate hardware in their homes, such as cash-strapped baby-boomers turned pensioners living in rural areas for whom the cost and accessibility of such luxuries might be less vital to their lives than, say, food and drink.
That having been said, however, we have already seen moves in the direction of direct delivery of music with the popularity of sites selling songs in MP3 format and the ubiquity of devices such as the iPod. Only yesterday I travelled to London by train and witnessed the disturbing sight of a young lady apparently having convulsions in the seat opposite me, only to discover that she was merely ‘dancing’ with her eyes closed while enjoying music through headphones that were concealed beneath her hair. A quick look at the rest of the people in the compartment revealed that she was not alone in this respect: several other travellers were sitting trance-like with a headphone lead disappearing into their pockets or handbags, while their slack jawed mouths silently mimed whatever they were listening to.
While the MP3 format might be quite suitable for those who merely wish to numb the tedium of a train ride, it isn’t appropriate for the discriminating listener who wishes to enjoy music more thoroughly. For that purpose a format that doesn’t rely upon horrendous amounts of compression is required. Several such are available but to be worthwhile they need to be more widely adopted by music suppliers – or content providers as the digerati insist upon calling them.
The beauty of MP3, if one can, indeed, call it that, is that the lossy compression it uses reduces download times to a minimum: click on a link to a track you desire and it has arrived on your computer before you can say ‘hideous sounding but damned convenient and quick’. Music files stored in non-lossy formats, however, are much bigger and, therefore, are slower to download and require considerably more storage space than the typical portable player can provide. The advantage, though, of uncompressed or losslessly compressed music is that the files offer bit-for-bit, genuine CD quality music.
One such format, whose acceptance seems to be growing and is becoming more widespread is FLAC. FLAC, which stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, uses an algorithm designed specifically for compressing music and works in a not dissimilar fashion to the ZIP format used for compressing other computer files. FLAC software is ‘open-source’ and is freely available and supported by most computer platforms including Windows, Mac and *nix systems. It requires only modest hardware, because it relies on integer arithmetic for its decoding, and it has already been incorporated into a number of hard disk servers, which look set to become the new sources of the future. Manufacturers that have incorporated FLAC in their products include AudioReQuest, Escient, HiFidelio, Roku, Sonos and Turtle Beach along with others. FLAC support has also been included in in-car and portable players, including the Harman International-backed PhatNoise PhatBox.
FLAC content is becoming ever more widespread and many of the more enlightened commercial download sites now offer music with the choice of MP3 or FLAC downloads. Others, particularly those that specialise in ‘free’ live concert recordings by bands such as The Grateful Dead use the Bit Torrent system to cope with transferring the huge amounts of data involved, which can easily run to several GigaBytes for such recordings. One five-minute Cream track – White Room – encoded into FLAC from a CD returned a file size of over 35 MB, which is considerably larger than the MP3 of the same song which runs to just under 7 MB. Generally, I would say, one can expect FLACs to be four times the size of high bit-rate MP3s.
According to wikipedia.org, while “ZIP may compress a CD-quality audio file by 10–20 per cent, FLAC achieves compression rates of 30–50 per cent.” It goes on to say that “FLAC uses linear prediction to convert the audio samples to a series of small, uncorrelated numbers (known as the residual), which are stored efficiently using Golomb-Rice coding. It also uses run-length encoding for blocks of identical samples, such as silent passages. The technical strengths of FLAC compared to other lossless codecs lie in its ability to be streamed and in a fast decode time, which is independent of compression level.”
The same source adds that “FLAC supports only fixed-point samples, not floating-point. This is to eliminate any rounding errors to ensure bit-perfect reproduction. It can handle any PCM bit resolution from 4 to 32 bits per sample, any sampling rate from 1 Hz to 1,048,570 Hz in 1 Hz increments, and any number of channels from 1 to 8. Channels can be grouped in cases like stereo and 5.1 channel surround to take advantage of inter-channel correlations to increase compression. FLAC uses CRC checksums for identifying corrupted frames when used in a streaming protocol, and also has a complete MD5 hash of the raw PCM audio stored in its STREAMINFO metadata header.”
One major advantage with FLAC encoding is that it can be used to archive your CDs: should you need to replace any discs that become lost or damaged, FLAC provides an exact duplicate of the original, which is a trick that no MP3, for example, can manage. Furthermore, FLAC doesn’t trouble itself with proprietary Digital Rights Management, or any DRM, come to that. As its developers note: “(… since copy protection is futile, it really carries no information, so you might say FLAC already losslessly compresses all possible copy protection information down to zero bits!) Of course, we can’t stop what some misguided person does with proprietary metadata blocks, but then again, non-proprietary decoders will skip them anyway.”
As I noted earlier, FLACs are becoming more widespread as switched-on musicians and labels come to appreciate what the format has to offer. Classical fans who’d like to investigate it might wish to visit www.thephiladelphiaorchestra.com while rock-oriented listeners might like prefer sampling www.throwingmusic.com/freemusic/ where 50 Foot Wave (Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh and Bernard Georges along with drummer Rob Ahlers) is making freely available a five-track EP as a FLAC download. MP3s of each track are also available for anyone who wishes to compare the formats. Once convinced of the FLAC’s superiority, you might care to look at www.allofmp3.com, a commercial Russian site hosting a vast range of recordings, many of which you can purchase either as MP3s or as FLACs for, generally, a couple of dollars more.
For more information about FLAC you should visit http://flac.sourceforge.net/ where you’ll find all the technical data you might need along with links to various resources. If you want to listen to FLACs on your Windows PC using Windows Media Player you’ll need to download a small codec – the latest stable version (0.71.0946) worked for me – from www.illiminable.com/ogg/downloads.html. Mac users can download open-source players such as Cog from http://cogosx.sourceforge.net/.
Burning FLACs to CD
One of the conveniences of the FLAC format is the simplicity with which you can burn the downloaded files onto a CD for use in your in-car CD player or if, say, you want to play them on a CD player on a non-wired friend’s system. To do this you simply need to use CD-burning software that can convert FLAC to regular CD format. Many programs – paid-for and free – are available for the PC that will allow you to do this. Free programs such as Burrrn (www.burrrn.net) or Burnatonce (www.burnatonce.net) don’t require any messing about configuring ‘plug-ins’ or additional software. Commercial programs such as Nero might require you to download a small additional piece of software to enable them to support FLAC. Toast for the Mac, I’m told, has native support for FLAC.
Both of the free PC programs I’ve just mentioned are child’s-play to install and use, which I consider to be an essential attribute now that I’ve shaved off my beard and sent my sandals to the Oxfam shop. They both installed themselves with a couple of mouse-clicks onto my lap-top, auto-discovered my CD-writer and set themselves up for optimal performance with no intervention from me. Burning a CD was no more difficult than dragging the tracks from an Explorer window onto the program. Those who have a more hirsute and open-toed approach to life – and who, perhaps, believe that human existence is not too short to enjoy playing with *nix and reading arcane instruction manuals – might like to try the KDE front-end, Arson (http://arson.sourceforge.net/).
So, with the majority of domestic platforms and operating systems covered, there’s little left for you to do other than help create an even greater demand for this saviour of decent quality music.
