I thought lossless bitrate = quality and lower rate meant less quality, [was “Selling Poor 'Lossless'…sample rates variate wildly”,etc Options

[jackybb]

Hi there,

I've recently purchased a lot of music from various online stores. Bought a few tracks off Beatport, Digital Tunes, SURUS and Juno.

I've noticed that the lossless versions of tunes that they sell vary wildly in sample rate.

Surus, for example, Blocks & Escher's - Broken is sampled at 1002kbps, sold as a Flac, which is acceptable. Whereas DJ Madd's - New Reality is only 457 kbps, (also sold as FLAC). Which is pretty pointless since I might as well have just bought the MP3 instead. (50pence less)

I'd assume if these places are selling lossless quality versions of tunes that they'd be CD quality, 1441kbps or thereabouts.

Who's to say that the 1441kbps file I downloaded from Beatport, DJ Shadow - Blood on the Motorway, was just converted from a lossy version of the track? This might be me becoming a bit paranoid though.

Is this not the store's fault? Is this just down to the labels sending over lossy copies of their tunes?


It'd be great if anyone could enlighten me on the matter.

Cheers

[jackybb]

So are you saying that the song with a bitrate of 1002kbps is of the same audio quality as the tune that has bitrate of 457kbps?

[Porcus]

So are you saying that the song with a bitrate of 1002kbps is of the same audio quality as the tune that has bitrate of 457kbps?

Go to random.org and generate a text file from random characters (10000 strings of 20 characters, using both numbers caps and minuscles) file. That gives you 10000 lines, each of 20 characters. Save it into a .txt file.
Compress it into a .zip file.

Then create a text file consisting of 20000 lines, each of 20 characters, where all characters are space. That is the same size as the previous .txt file.
Compress it into a .zip file.


Both zip files will be unzipped to their respective originals, yet the latter is much smaller. Is that because it is of lesser quality?

This post has been edited by Porcus: May 13 2012, 16:52

[tuffy]

Both zip files will be unzipped to their respective originals, yet the latter is much smaller. Is that because it is of lesser quality?

Better yet, try it with the FLAC encoder itself:

CODE

flac --force-raw-format --channels=1 --bps=8 --sample-rate=44100 --sign=unsigned --endian=big -o test.flac test.txt

will happily encode a file of raw text and even give a bitrate for you. Then decompress it with:

CODE

flac --force-raw-format --sign=unsigned --endian=big -d test.flac -o test2.txt

and compare the two text files. They'll be identical, regardless of what bitrate the FLAC file winds up as.

[Porcus]

Both zip files will be unzipped to their respective originals, yet the latter is much smaller. Is that because it is of lesser quality?

Better yet, try it with the FLAC encoder itself:

I don't think that's my first suggestion to a beginner who needs to know the concept of compression, but I was curious enough to try.
Uncompressed:

219.980 strings0.txt
219.998 strings1.txt

7z:
232 strings0.7z
158.369 strings1.7z

FLAC
117.006 strings0.flac
204.762 strings1.flac


Obviously not optimized for this