Off-Topic General Discussion - Page 458

On November 01 2013 00:01 jcarlsoniv wrote:


I only sing when I'm alone (or streaming), screaming only happens in the car.

On November 01 2013 00:08 jcarlsoniv wrote:


To build on this

I absolutely love singing, I'm just incredibly self conscious about it.

On November 01 2013 00:08 jcarlsoniv wrote:


To build on this

I absolutely love singing, I'm just incredibly self conscious about it.

On November 01 2013 00:10 Requizen wrote:

Your cat will judge you.

On November 01 2013 00:11 Gahlo wrote:

Favored Soul.

On November 01 2013 00:13 BlackPaladin wrote:


His cat will cry tears of pain.

At least he'll make one pussy wet.

On November 01 2013 00:26 jcarlsoniv wrote:
My company has halloween festivities all day.

SO LITTLE WORK GETTING DONE

On November 01 2013 00:47 Requizen wrote:
So I've never played Settlers of Catan, and the gf just told me she has it and we can play sometime.

things are getting pretty serious

On October 31 2013 23:22 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:


nope

WAV is completely (digitally) unaltered sound, and is probably the most "faithful" to whatever the source is. Downside is that it has no built-in field tagging capabilities (or at least that used to be the case, think there are some basic options available now) and is huge.

Stuff like FLAC/ALAC/APE are comrpessed, but losslessly (preserves quality, but they're still in "bitrates" - everything is... usually see ~500-600kbps, but it varies, can go as low as ~400 or high as ~800. If you use foobar it defaults and dynamically displays the bitrate of the file you're playing). It's what most "audiophiles" like to use and you're probably not gonna hear a difference between source and a properly losslessly encoded file.

MP3 is is a misleading term since it actually encompasses a lot of different compression methods, but they're all "lossy" compressed, which means they lose out on some quality for the sake of smaller filesizes. Most common varieties - 128 kbps, 192kbps, 256kbps, 320kbps. The 128 is the kinda junk you see in single files that you DL off those MP3 sites, whereas *most* torrents these days are somewhere between 192 - 320.

In addition, there is "variable" bitrate compression which tries to adjust the bitrate by segment so that the more complex portions get a higher bitrate - you have stuff like MP3 V0, OGG, and AAC among others who have variable options.

That covers most of the common formats, but audio encoding can get pretty complex and there are plenty of esoteric formats that have their own minute differentiation, not to mention the distinctions that are present within the format themselves.

I'll just close by saying that the file format is not the end all be all of audio quality - in fact it's usually the least important part. It all depends on the source format first and foremost - doesn't matter if you have 800kbps FLAC file if it was encoded based on a 32kbps MP3 (and yes those still exist ;; ), followed by -how- it's compressed, not just the format it was compressed into. Also I'm nowhere near an expert on this this is just a very broad overview I'm sure there are people who will take issue with a lot of the generalizations made here but oh well.

Last I heard you have to take a test on this kind of shit if you want to get into what.cd or something lol, pretty dumb but whatever. Also I think most people probably can't hear the difference between the vast majority of these formats, even if they have decent audio equipment, and a lot of it is a placebo. That's not to say that you can't - I just think it's not applicable to most people who don't actually care enough/listen to enough music/invest in enough gear. I'm perfectly happy personally with anything MP3 320+ and can rarely hear the difference between a MP3 320 and a FLAC.