Comment by Mediterraneo10
7 years ago
Thanks to this article, when I torrent music that is shared in 24/192 format, I always resample to 24/96:
ffmpeg -i foo.flac -ar 96000 -acodec flac bar.flac
7 years ago
Thanks to this article, when I torrent music that is shared in 24/192 format, I always resample to 24/96:
ffmpeg -i foo.flac -ar 96000 -acodec flac bar.flac
To thank the article even more, you could resample to 16/48kHz.
Even if the lower sample rate of 48kHz would be entirely reasonable and 96kHz is overkill, 24 bits still makes an audible difference for the material I listen to (modernist classical music and ECM jazz), which is why you can find 24/48 from some labels. For pop music, which of course is distinguished by little dynamic range, then 16 bits would be fine just like on the CD format.
The only issue with low bitrates is noise floor, so if you're hearing other distortions, it's not caused by the bitrate but maybe your room treatment or headphone drivers. A recording would have to have a hilariously large amount of headroom for 16-bit noise floor to be noticible when the music is played at a desired level, and while symphonic and jazz recordings have ridiculously high dynamic range, it's not 100dB of headroom, maybe 60, so 16-bit should be fine.
If you still think it's a problem, adding good dithering with ffmpeg's quantizer/resampler flags will make the noise floor 6-10dB smaller.
> 24 bits still makes an audible difference
The article (and numerous other sources I've seen over the years) disagrees with you so I'm curious why you're so certain?
4 replies →
To put things in perspective, 16-bit PCM audio has a noise floor around -96dBFS, ie. the difference between the loudest possible sound the format can contain and the noise floor is 96dB. That's what the bit depth determines; the level of the noise floor in relation to the loudest reproducible sound. It does not add any more detail, it's not like the resolution of an image file, the added bit depth does not allow for finer-grained details, audio doesn't work like that.
96dB is a lot more than you probably think, it's like the difference between an anechoic chamber (nominally ~0dB) and someone jackhammering concrete right next to you (~90-100dB). Add to this that even a quiet room has a noise floor around 20-30dB, and to even hear the noise floor in CD quality audio, a full-scale peak would hit 130dB!
Try generating a sound at 0dBFS, the attenuate it in steps of 10dB and make note of when you can't really hear it anymore. At -50dB the sound is already extremely low and barely audible, and there would still be 46dB of attenuation available.
In addition to this, noise-shaped dither can push the noise floor towards frequencies where the human ear is less sensitive, giving a perceived noise floor of around -120dBFS. In other words, 24-bit audio for distribution and listening is absolutely pointless and has absolutely no audible difference when compared to 16-bit audio.
I'm curious why you torrent music still when streaming is so widely available and free/cheap?
I did a lot of torrenting back in the 2000s, but thinking back on it I spent a ton of time finding things, organizing my file system, transcoding, editing metadata, etc. I do not miss that hassle at all now.
I spend about half of every year traveling, often in particularly undeveloped countries and/or far from a mobile signal. Having my entire music collection on a portable hard drive is more convenient for me personally than being bound to streaming.
Makes sense, thanks for answering!
Streaming music services lack all the options in foobar2000 that I've grown accustomed to over the last 10+ years.
Personally, I buy music rather than torrent, but the pace at which I buy new music (either on bandcamp or physical CDs) costs me about the same as a Spotify premium subscription anyways, only I get to keep the music forever.
>I'm curious why you torrent music still when streaming is so widely available and free/cheap?
To provide you with another answer, most of the artists I listen to aren't on any of the music streaming services. Because local underground bands whom only have CD's handed out at their shows rarely exist outside of the pirating scene - which has a knack for distributing local underground bands with limited release/number of CDs. A small percentage of the bands/artists are on Spotify or Bandcamp but most aren't.
I buy what I can because I enjoy having the album arts but most of my music cannot be purchased or streamed.
There's also no guarantee that the streaming services will still exist in 10, 20, 30+ years - but there is an almost 100% chance that the hardware and software necessary to listen to or convert .flac will exist for me to continue to listen to my music.
I refuse to pay streaming subs, I buy second hand CDs for pennies and rip to flac. I'll always own my content and play it whenever/wherever I want at the best quality.
Some bands still refuse to be available on streaming (ex: Tool). Some will never be on streaming.