I've been thinking and I couldn't help but conclude that some time in the future, storing CD audio (16bit, 44.1khz..) in lossy format will no longer make sense.. Because of ever increasing HDD space, it would probably make more sense just to store all albums losslessly.

Then, 6.1ch 192khz 24 bit audio would likely be what lossy audio codecs will be actively improved for..

Methinks the Audio CD can hold its own for years to come as I can't see DVD-Audio or SACD overtaking it in popularity anytime soon.

Any thoughts?

It'll take a very long time to the mp3 fans to realize and take the advantages of lossless audio, and to be honest, some people simply dont need lossless, they can't experience the difference. On the other side, the most of the portable players aren't ready for lossless yet (except wav format, of course), so there is no wide hardware support for lossless.

I think we will see an increasing use of lossless codecs, in both audio and video.

However, as I have previously said, if I can have a file 25% the size of the original with 95% of perceptable quality, why should I change? Why not just have four times as much music, or three backups.

There will always be a need, or a wish, for lossy codecs.

As I say though, as storage increases, lossless will become more of an option for people.

For portables, lossy compressed music will be attractive for a very long time. You get

- 4-5 times more music on your player
- better battery life
- faster transfer of files
- more than good enough sound quality, given the limitation on these devices, outdoor noise, etc.

I'd say most people don't care for lossless. They don't even care how their mp3's sound, so I don't think 6.1, 192khz etc. sound will rule the world - ever.

It's always easy to fill up the harddisk. Some people will always demonize any form of lossy compression and some will always argue that anything but lossy encoding is a waste of space since even big harddisks fill up eventually.

However, there might be a trend towards "transform-less" type codecs which easily support both lossy and lossless coding. In the light of hi-res audio such algorithms make a lot of sense to me.

Cheers!
SG

Outside HA and a few audiophile groups lossless isn't the future - yet. IMO lossless is attractive as a one fits all solution: The same file should play everywhere you need it to WITHOUT transcoding much like mp3.

ATM - My entire collection would be around 300GB inc backup to a second drive and I'd have to get more storage / upgrade my CPU to make backups faster etc. Its a drain on my energy. I must say that wavpack hybrid with correction file is a great invention and MPC was a huge waste of time.

Now I know many people ended up lossless, but I somehow sold out big time and decided to go ditch lossless altogether and to stop transcoding. I am certain that lossy encoding like MP3 and AAC is futureproof as they are ISO standards. I encoded everything to LAME 3.98b5 @ 160k VBR (V4). If it sounds odd look at the last 3 years of listening tests @ 128k. I even ditched secure ripping in favour of burst foobar rips except for really bad CD's. I feel much better this way with a 20GB collection of high quality fits everywhere audio without the pressure and transcoding. Why do I need two lossless collections as I already have the original CD's. ?

I think lossy is will only become more popular because a) quality is rising at lower bitrates b) there is enough space for (very) high bitrates too. With more devices supporting AAC and Vorbis, choices will be countless. I also predict rising popularity of hybrid encoders to bridge the gap so too speak. Lossless popularity will also rise but much slower than lossy. It will be used for bit-perfect backups / studio editing - transcoding solutions and of course by perfectionist users like here in HA.

I think MPEG-4 SLS sounds really interesting, and I can't wait to see it in action. I use WavPack lossless, and have been tempted to utilise the hybrid mode a couple of times.

My latest thought revolves around using a 384kbps hybrid with correction, and duplicating the lossy file on my external harddrive at work.

Recently, after playing with ezstream and icecast, this has also evolved into the possibility of a radio station at work, encoding to Vorbis at different bitrates from 384kbps WavPack sources.

I'd like to know how much space my archive would take at 384kbps - I guess I could calculate it approximately.

I'm also interested to see what David Bryant has up his sleeve following the lossyFLAC thread, and the great work that 2Bdecided and others have put in there.

I would say around 140 MB per album for 384 k.

Lossless to some people is not about sound quality, but about keeping your music in a flexible format. I think flexibility will still be important in the future. Maybe it will become more important.

Audio CDs are not flexible.
1) They don't store track titles, artist information or any other metadata in digital form.
2) You can't make compilations for digital players or for a CD-R for the car without ripping. And ripping is slow and requieres you to swap CDs.
3) CDs don't store as much information as DVDs.

So, for example I moved out of home and I brought with me all my CDs and my brother's CDs too in 4 DVDs. The alternative would have been burning 50 CDs or bringing just my CDs and leaving his CDs behind.

Now, whenever I want to transfer music to my digital audio player I have many choices:

1) What codec I want to use: MP3, OggVorbis or WMA (in the future I may have more options)
2) What quality/filesize I want this time.
3) What is the best LAME or OGG version to use today.
4) I can keep lossy versions around if i don't want to transcode every time.
5) I can leave one DVD transcoding up to 15 albums all night unattended. No swaping CDs or coping flacs to the HD.

All these advantages and I'm not thinking about audio quality. I don't even have a player that supports flac and I never saw one in stores around here.

To me lossless give lots of flexibility. Now and in the future.

don't forget that audioplatforms on HD-DVD and bluray are lossless DD and DTS, that's pretty cool

I would have thought so... But, the funny thing is, everything has moved in the opposite direction! Higher resolution formats like SACD and Audio-DVD are going nowhere while MP3 is taking over the world. (Some of this is due to limited Internet bandwidth.)

...I can't predict the future... I would have thought that CDs would have improved the music... That musicians and producers would be taking advantage of the CDs dynamic range... I can understand why music was overly compressed in the days of vinyl and AM radio...

I wonder if the same thing will happen with video. If most people consider regular DVD "good enough", then BluRay & HD-DVD may never take over. (Personally, I'm more picky about audio than video so tht wouldn't bother me.)

You probably realise that it raises the possibility of having something with all the advantages of lossless, at a lower file size. If your lossyFLAC was 100% gapless, transcoded to anything as well as the .wav, had never been ABXed by anyone under any circumstances, and was significantly smaller than lossless FLAC for the music which bloats lossless FLAC bitrates the most, you'd have to wonder what excuse people would find for using lossless FLAC.

This is hypothetical. We don't know lossyFLAC works that well yet. We don't know it transcodes that well yet. It's possible though. If it does, I think it's really exciting.

(I know most people who currently use lossless would still use lossless, because most reasons are actually irrational, and others would be quite happy with .wavs if they tagged properly. However, where there's a rational reason not to use traditional lossy methods, but still a desire for smaller than .wav file sizes, lossyFLAC may be competative).

Cheers,
David.

I think:
As for lossless audio, I agree with you.
But as for lossless video, I doubt that there will be an icreasing use in foreseeable future. We will see higher definition but not necessarly lossless video compression. Even TV studios normally don't use lossless video compression. The amount of video data is simply to high to handle them well in lossless formats.

This is a definite Yes. The only question is how soon will lossless be the norm. And I believe it is sooner than most people believe. It is really amazing how fast HD storage space is increasing. The sky is the limit.

I don't really see lossless becoming the market standard until it can achieve near-lossy compression ratios (ie have a lossless file that takes up the same amount of space as a 320kbps mp3). I use lossless for backup solutions but I see no point in carrying around lossless music on my portable especially whenever it limits the amount of songs I can put on my portable and eats away at the battery.

I think everyone should use lossless for backup purposes only. Once lossless achieves better compression, then I can see using it for portable use and it becoming the norm.

As for lossless video, that is going to take a serious amount of time. I think a 1080p 2 hour lossless video (with lossless 5.1 surround sound) will take up over 200GB of space (correct me if I am wrong though, I do know that it takes up way too much space). Looking at the quality of Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies, I don't see lossless video being needed anytime soon as both the VC-1 and mpeg-4 AVC video formats provide pretty good results at the bitrates they use for the two HD disc formats.

Because of the storage increase and price decrease, we are capable to go for a better choice, but it may NOT be loseless in a short time because the size still rather big (still consume relative large amount of resources), I guess we should go for higher bitrate OGG or MP3.

Loseless may be future, but need to wait.

I don't necessarily agree. Just because there is more storage available doesn't mean people will switch their audio format of choice.

I don't think most people have a problem with MP3/AAC and therefore would not switch to lossless, at least not quickly.

Are you able to "experience" the difference between a Lame VBR MP3 of about 200 kbps an a lossless file in an ABX test? Have you tried? I don't think so.

Exactly.

For me, larger hard drive sizes almost always mean: I can download more free lossy tracks from Internet sources (e.g. Jamendo).

Larger drives almost never mean: Now I can stop using lossy and use lossless instead.

....

Come to think of it, let's drop the word "almost" from the above 2 sentences

I guess most of this comes down to how you define "the future" and "huge amounts of storage".

I'm terrible at making accurate predictions, but the future might hold just the opposite. With all the press talking about how the internet can't handle the recent increase in bandwidth use, with more and more people downloading music, videos and whatnot, lossy encoding might actually get an even stronger foothold.

Hard drives get bigger, yes. But that's not the only factor to consider. People have been buying more laptops and less PCs lately - which means, smaller (and fewer) hard drives. Also, flash drives are coming, with fast random access, robustness, silent activity, but also smaller capacities.

I'm not sure what the future holds, but it might not be exactly what you think (bigger storage and faster internet access). People might favor other aspects of computing.

250GB laptop hard drives are here, 320GB very soon. Also, some laptops support RAID0 - 500 / 640GB anybody?

is 20mbps free internet connection the norm for internet everywere in the world?

no I think each with its own merits will be used accordingly. Lossless ofcourse is heading to be the de-facto ripping solution, but if I wanted to share files over the net and had to pay for bandwidth, I wouldn't be looking at bitrates higher than aotuv ~80 kbps.

as for portable players, an 80 gb iPod may perhaps hold lossless, but someone with a 2gb flash memory player will be more than happy if 20 kbps were to become transparent.(ok, I am one of them with a T Sonic 610 )

and yes, we no longer need to coppy the audio cd to another disc, and we can just FLAC or WV it to a DVD. Newer bands like Linkin Park(i hate 'em...) can have their entire discography and music videos in ONE DVD. all lossless. Iron Maiden may need 5 discs. BUT... the fact still remains that my Led Zepplin Discography, 224 kbps CBR mp3, which came in 10 CDs(the remastered version) is happily sitting on just one CD.

Yes, but I bet flash drives will become very popular with laptops. Besides, even 320 GB might not fit people's entire CD collection losslessly. Also, they might use the space for something else: movies when travelling, video games requiring ever more space, etc... Besides they probably want to be able to transfer their music from their laptop to their portable music player, in which case they would have to either keep a lossy duplicate of their collection, or to transcode on the fly with every transfer. Storage space isn't everything.

So, in a nutshell - storage space is not a problem but it is a justification to use a lossy codec? Confused.......

Video:

Better than typical studio quality lossless:

width=1920
height=1080
colours=3
bits-per-colour=12
frames per second=60 (or 24, 25, 50, but let's go for the max!)
seconds per minute=60
minutes per hour=60

1920x1080x3x10x60x60x60=16TB per hour!

"Typical" HD video quality lossless:

width=1920
height=1080
colours=1
bits-per-colour=8
+
width=1920/2
height=1080/2
colours=2
bits-per-colour=8
*
frames per second=24
seconds per minute=60
minutes per hour=60

((1920*1080*1*8)+(960*540*2*8))*24*60*60=2TB per hour.


I think we can safely ignore the idea of convenient consumer lossless HD video for a while. What would be the point? Even when that data rate becomes achievable, it will make more sense to increase something else (frame rate or resolution) and stick with lossy.


I don't think lossy audio will die in my lifetime. It will always give you more music, faster access, cheaper back up, and (to most people) identical quality to lossless.

Someone pointed to HD-DVD with its lossless audio formats. So what? CDs have been lossless for over two decades - it doesn't mean everything else will be.
Broadcast and streaming are two things where lossy will probably live forever, or at least until bandwidth becomes free.

Cheers,
David.

Of course, you also remember what a boon it was when the 5.25" floppy disk was increased to 1.2 meg.

And when a 300 baud modem was an amazing technology.

Yes, but the whole operating system would fit on it, and programs and data.......

8" Floppies FTW!

But you have to remember that the development and innovation in HW is slowing down. While in the 90's it was normal to get a 2x faster CPU after one year (for the same price), now it takes much longer. Last autumn I upgraded my computer after 4 years. I replaced my 100$ Athlon XP 2000+ for 100$ Athlon 64 3500+. Not even 2x faster after 4 years.

I think what the future mainstream codec will be depends on

a) the personality of the majority of the users
b) what the industry offers with mainstream players
c) an interaction between these two which cannot be predicted.

As for the personality it depends on whether the user is
a) a practically minded person (who uses 128 kbps when using mp3 as this is good enough)
b) a quality paranoid minded person (who in the case of mp3 uses 320 kbps or similar but prefers lossless)
c) a quality aware person in 'the golden middle' (who uses 192 kbps or similar).

Guess the personality of the majority of users is of a) type.

The ever improving situation with storage space and price is only relevant for the quality paranoid or very quality aware persons. This will not influence choice/change of mainstream codec.

I agree that lossless vs. lossy is a personal decision based on many factors of an individual's circumstances. Many people say HD space is cheap nowadays, but that's not true for everyone. A decent 250gb external HD can cost $100.00 or more, not everyone wants to spend the extra money for storage. I came very close to purchasing one yesterday and thought, why spend the money? I am currently archiving a small CD collection (compared to what some people have) using FLAC and DVD-Rs because this is a manageable solution for now. Once all CDs are archived I will probably convert the files to lossy @ 192 kbps or better for listening.

I dig the concept of the hybrid format, but there are still obstacles to its acceptance in the music market (though I'll admit I'm only familiar with wavPack's method). Once they've been overcome, at least to some degree, we might see lossy music downloads with an option to purchase the correction file for an additional fee. That'd be tremendously beneficial to us, but would end up going unnoticed by the majority. If some distributor tried it, it'd probably vanish so quickly our heads would spin.

We have to consider the distribution systems as well. With such a significant shift toward e-distribution, any increase in file size yields an increase in bandwidth to satisfy the ability to be able to distribute that extra data. When you start considering market models and technological limitations, it becomes very difficult to justify these seemingly frivolous concepts. Since the dawn of "e-music", we unfortunately haven't seen a great deal of momentum toward higher bitrate formats. I wouldn't really say it's at all surprising, but disappointing, yeah.


A product of such widespread adoption, I suppose. The industry is so unwilling to accept change, in some sense, that other formats like DVD-A and SACD are destined to fail. Even if a new CD standard were issued - one that supported all the features of the flexible format you listed - what kind of adoption rates would we see? The grand minority is concerned about the features you listed, and would be highly hesitant to submit to new formats unless they're fully backwards-compatible.

I think people are satisfied with the "need" CDs currently fulfill, though it's kind of a shame we self-professed audiophiles are basically left optionless. I thought that, by this time, we'd have an internet-distributed alternative, but advancement in that area has been essentially snail's pace.


I think most people do consider DVD "good enough", but for some reason there's a much greater push toward high-def video than there has ever been for what might be called high-def audio, and I think that's because the balance between video and audio has been "unbalanced" for a long time. We've had ways to buy pristine audio for a long time now (or at least what most would call pristine), but we've been living with very low-resolution video for a very long time, and I think most people are better able to realize it. It seems logical that the push is toward increasing video resolution, which is one reason why there's at least some adoption of HD displays, HD-DVD, Blu-ray and so on, but, thankfully, we're also seeing some better audio being tied in with that as well thanks in part to Dolby and DTS.

I think the big thing stifling HD-DVD/Blu-ray adoption is the fact that consumers have no clue which side to take, not the idea that most consumers feel DVD is particularly good enough. Consumers are always interested in greener pastures, but the marketing aspect has to work, and it seems to be working relatively well-enough so far.

Well, MusicGiants tried. Granted, they started selling lossless music using Microsoft's WMA codec with DRM, but it seems that they will start unlocking their files this fall. They might as well switch to FLAC or WavPack...


No offense, but this isn't SteveHoffman.tv, we are not self-professed audiophiles


The big difference is that anybody who doesn't wear glasses can immediately see the difference between DVD-Video and HD DVD or Blu-ray, if shown side by side or switched from one to the other quickly. It's not anywhere near as obvious with lossy encodes of music, even in the 100-200 kbps range, provided a good encoder and sensible settings.

what I dont get is the whole 6.1 audio.

a band plays in front of you! if somebody sings you look at them and face them etc. .... stereo is all you need for music.

I agree. CD audio rules! I think SACD and DVD-A will never replace CDs. While it seems mp3 is taking over the world, I really hope that eventually everyone will at least consider lossless as the format for long-term storage... but then some people don't really care about long-term

As for video, I think they introduced all this 'HD' carry on too soon. The difference between DVD and HD-DVD isn't even noticible unless you watch closely on a 32 inch screen.

btw: you mean TeraBit

The digital cinema folks set a new digital cinema standard recently. They plan to use losslessly coded "I-frames" (no motion compensation). Lossless coding is done via the reversible integer wavelet transform. The colour space (its importance is usually underrated) they intent to use is XYZ since it has the greatest gamut. Two resolutions are specified, 2K and 4K (2048x1080 and 4096x2160).

Let's calculate the datarate of the uncompressed stream:
4096*2160 pixels * 36 bits/pixel * 24 frames/sec = 7.6 Gigabit/sec = 911 MebiBytes/sec = 3.18 TebiBytes/hour

Lossless compression (lossless JPEG2000-like) should bring this down to a third.

Funny fact: As one of the original goals digital cinema was supposed to ease the 'delivery part' (how do movie theatres get the movies?). Ideas like broadcasting encrypted movies via satellites came up. But with this amount of data a movie requires you'll still be better off shipping harddisks, I suppose. Try sending 5 TebiBytes over satellite

Cheers!
SG

What some people do not realise is that 99.9% of DVD-Audio discs contain high resolution stereo layers that sound amazing, and the audio can be ripped quite easily. The future is definately lossless in my opinion it is only a matter of time.

I'm currently in the process of designing an audiophile digital audio player (DAP), not portable to start with, that plays 16bit and 24bit stereo FLAC files at any sampling frequency. On board HDD storage space will be around the 1Tb mark at least. With that kind of hardware mp3 will not be neccessary.

Again, how do you rip DVD-Audio discs easily? Last time I checked it required using a specific version of WinDVD along with ppcmripper.exe (IIRC). Then there's also the issue of decoding .mlp files...

Yes but once you have the WinDVD and ppcmripper, ripping is very easy indeed. If you are only ripping the stereo layer, ppcmripper will handle the decoding of the .mlp files automatically.

The storage issue is becoming moot as we speak. 10,000 CDs at 300MB/CD is 3TB. So even the most massive personal music collections either already fit onto $500 worth of storage, or will fit within a couple years. $500, mind you, is a very small price to pay with respect to the cost of the music, and in relation to other audio equipment purchases. That $100 worth of storage for 300GB is enough for most peoples' lossless collections is icing on the cake.

For widescale adoption of lossless to occur, either the online retailers must move to it en masse as part of increased competition with regards to quality, or some very compelling reason must exist for consumers to move over to it. So far, the only big reason is to avoid transcoding penalties, which few people care about. And retailers (and consumers) may still be bandwidth-constrained enough to avoid lossless for now.

Things that would compel more people to go lossless:

• Major flaws being discovered in iTunes AAC or LAME, leading to widespread disenchantment in lossy encoding for purchased music
• Any uptick in audiophilia among music listeners
• Value added releases. Perhaps bundling lossless music with complete pdfs of liner notes, etc, so that the purchaser could essentially recreate the CD release from scratch if desired. Similar to arxivMusic's just-in-time CD manufacturing, except on the listener's machine.
• Sold as a standard encoding in iTMS at no extra charge.

All of these are pretty unlikely.

I don't think lossless is needed for video. It's far easier to cheat the eyes than the ears. Check it out: 24 images per second in cinema, 44,100 samples per second in music...

I completely disagree. Not many animals have better eyes then a human. If we (humans) have a good sense, it's sight. Humans' sight is much better then hearing. Comparing sampling frequency and framerate doesn't make much sense. Try comparing the bits needed for a perfect transcription of a picture.

Even fullHD 60p for our eyes is not as good as CD-DA for our ears. CD-DA is basically almost as perfect as the original. Try to imagine, what you would need to simulate a real view.

Lossless in video is not possible at all, because the size of such video would be incredibly huge.

And btw. I don't think a lot of people will start using lossless audio neither. There simply is no demand for it. I don't have a $10 000 Hi-Fi amplifier. I have a decent $1000 micro-system and I don't hear any difference between original and MP3 -V 5 or Vorbis q 2. And the hearing of majority of people is just like mine or even much worse. For 99% of population, there is no need for a lossless audio compression. The price of storage or availability of players has nothing to do with it.

If for a specific task, lossless is useful, depends on:

- hardware/software support and compatibility
- there being so much space available, that you cannot fully use it
- there are no other space-consuming features available, which are desired

Lossless is choosen, when the difference between lossy and lossless is minor, compared to the total amount of space available.

For example, it doesnt matter today if a plaintext manual on a hdd, takes up 200kb (8bit encoding) or 400kb (16bit encoding). The only reason why you dont see that more often is because of software and hardware support for UTF16.

The same is the case for other media. For video, the space-difference is significant and additonal features are more desirable. So you wont see lossless video in the mainstream soon.

For 2-channel audio. Space will soon (next 10 years) become a non-issue. So you will slowly see more and more lossless formats in the mainstream.

If however, additional features become desirable for audio.....not just multichannel, but maybe an entirely different concept, how to store audiodata (possibly not recording point-sources, but instead the entire room, or something like that), then lossy quickly becomes an interesting choice again for this task.

Where lossy audio and video is there to stay for a very long time, is broadcasting and streaming. Even though video and audio broadcasting has become popular, the users still depend on large servers, because their inet-connection is so weak. When line speeds increase, you will see more and more direct broadcasting without servers. But those line speeds wont be much better, than nowadays big servers.... so bandwidth is still a bottleneck. Thus, lossy audio and video will stay for a long time in broadcasting tasks.

- Lyx

You've never heard ambisonics then.

The front/back "depth" which audiophiles like to set them selves over in stereo recordings is a fragile illusion with stereo. It can be as solid as left/right with good ambisonics, because the various reflections from the original recording venue are reproduced accurately, giving your ears the exact cues they need to judge distance as well as direction.

Sadly most 5.1, 6.1 etc is far from ambisonics. It's pan-pot mono extended to more speakers. Good for effects and multi-track music, but poor for re-creating an original event / sound field.

Then there are 127-channel wavefront recreation systems...

Stereo - pah!

Cheers,
David.


You assume people want to spend money for something that has no benefit for them, but slows down transfers and eats HD space.

People talk about audio as if it's the only use for HDD space. I'm finding my use of HDD space is rapidly going out of control! Digital photos, M-JPEG, DV and HDV video, lossless audio (usually stuff I've edited), lossy audio, picture files I've created (edits, collages, birthday cards etc), documents, emails etc etc etc. If the size of any of this stuff can be reduced in a way which has no consequence for me, I'll do it. Naturally, the music which I already have on CD and can work from a lossless source is going to be the _first_ content to be compressed. Anything more unique, or already compressed, or both (so that's all digital photos, all digital video) would be last.

I don't have any DVDs on my HDD, but if I did, I think I'd recompress those too.

Lossless?! I'm looking for better compression algorithms!

Cheers,
David.

It's posible. Check out MJPEG or huffyuv. The question is whether it's practical.