Seek Advice / Discussion re File Formats: .flac, .mp3 and .m4a

[Shepherd Jim]

Hi all - I am plugging away; digging into my library and slowly repairing most of the havoc wreaked by iTunes over the years. Thankfully, l did a fairly good job of saving full backups when moving onto a new computer or operating system, and am able to locate tracks that had disappeared.

I am keeping most of my music, what I think of as my recreational stuff, as mp3's. I opt for either the "maximum" or "highest" quality although I'm not at all sure my 67 yearold hearing will register the difference.

The music I care more about, in the senses of 'quality listening' and wanting to best preserve and archive, I save as .flac's.

Assumptions / Questions:
1) Is there any advantage to be gained by creating a flac copy of a track long ago saved as an mp3?
2) Is there any sense in saving a low quality mp3 at a higher quality rating?
3) Some of what I read suggests m4a's are preferable to mp3's. But, I keep coming back to m4a being an "Apple format" and the worry that 10 years from now I'll discover that there's no software able to play the m4a's.

It's a sad state of affairs when you're trying to assess whether your music sounds better through headphones while wearing, or not wearing, your hearing aids. I am no expert but I get the sense that hearing aids, despite costing THOUSANDS of dollars, deliver extremely low quality sound ...at least as with regards to music.

I will welcome all advice and discussion!  Thank you!  Jim in Maine USA

[sveakul]

My own answers to your three questions:

1.  Only if you still have a lossless original--as in, the music CD.  Making a FLAC from a MP3 is pointless.

2.  No.  It won't sound any better than the original, and quite possibly worse as it adds another lossy encoding generation.

3.  You'll get the most opinions on this one.  First, you're comparing apples and oranges unless other factors like bitrate are taken into account.  The short answer is that both MP3 and M4A have the potential to sound equally well, depending on the encoding options used.  As far as "long distance device compatibility", I'd have to bet on MP3.

And don't worry about being 67, you care about the music you listen to and that's the main thing.

[frankz]

sveakul is right on all three points IMO.

Once a sound file is compressed (mp3'd), anything you do to it will only corrupt the sound further.  FLAC creates a copy identical to the source.  If you're using a MP3 as your source, you'd get a very large file that's identical in sound to your MP3, which is pointless.

M4A doesn't sound any better than MP3 at the top quality for each.  

At low quality (high compression, smaller files), M4A has the ability to sound better than MP3 at low quality.  So you could compress a song to (for example) 3MB in M4A and get the same quality as if you'd compressed it to 3.5MB in MP3.  But if you're encoding for sound quality, MP3 and M4A are indistinguishable at their highest qualities.

M4A tagging is a pain.  MP3 is the accepted standard, has been for some time, and will be for any foreseeable future.  You can use MP3 on anything.

[Shepherd Jim]

Thanks sveakul and frankz,  

I'm happy to learn that I was pretty close in my understanding of how the audio file formats work and interact.

With disk space being so cheap I will probably go back and re-rip a few favorite CD's ...this time to flac. It's funny, I'm not sure that I can hear the difference between a high quality mp3 and a flac, it's more like I feel it.

[frankz]

It's funny, I'm not sure that I can hear the difference between a high quality mp3 and a flac, it's more like I feel it.

The way sound and perception works, if you think it sounds better, it does legitimately sound better to you.  It's a psychological phenomenon.  

That's why I compress all of my mp3s to Lame V0 rather than V1 or V2 although in blind tests my ability to tell the difference even through headphones under perfect conditions is very limited.  In my mind, I know V1 isn't the best quality I could have gotten, so it sounds lesser.

[Mauser69]

Here is the process I have evolved to over the years.  My main music player for many many years has been Windoze Media Player, simply because it always seemed the most intuitive and easiest to use when organizing my music library.  I have looked at other players over the years, and found all of the ones I tried to be lacking SOOooo much of what was important to me, so I just quit looking at anything else except WMP.  But now the idiots at M$ have started jacking around with WMP under Windoze10 - does not even run on some computers anymore!  So I just found MusicBee in the past few days, and I think I am going to like it.

Now to the real subject of your post - what format to use.  I have made some dumb decisions over the years, and I have evolved there too.  I used to be bit of a real audiophile - huge expensive systems back in the 70s before modern electronics wiped out so many of the quality differences.  When I started moving all my music to the computers for ease of access and organization, I insisted on going totally lossless, but I always struggled with the extra large files and lack of available players for my preferred formats.  I hated all things MP3 (for mostly irrational reasons), and I eventually decided to just stick with WMA lossless since I was married to WMP.  In hindsight, it was not a very good decision.  Now that I am getting old, I do not listen to music the same way I used to, so I have revised my entire plan.

First of all, I finally decided that I just had to let the evil M$ empire go and get totally away for as much of their proprietary BS as possible (the same way I have felt about Apple for 30 years).  And when I reconsidered how and when I listened to music these days, I decided that only rarely did the full lossless quality make any real difference.  Furthermore, as long as I had the original CDs in my possession, I could always access the full lossless format if I wanted it.  Vinyl album rips are a different story, both in ease of access and available quality, but I'll leave that for another time.

So here is my current process:  Where I have the original CD, I keep either a medium or high quality MP3 rip in my library (depending on the type of music and inherent complexity of detail).  If I no longer have the original CD, I seek out and keep a FLAC copy if possible, or at worst a highest quality MP3. 

It is taking me a very long time to slowly work through all my old WMA format files to replace them, but even that is getting easier with MusicBee's ability to convert all the formats without having to re-rip them.

[frankz]

It is taking me a very long time to slowly work through all my old WMA format files to replace them, but even that is getting easier with MusicBee's ability to convert all the formats without having to re-rip them.

Please tell me you're not converting the WMAs to other formats.

[Mauser69]

Yes I am.  Why shouldn't I?

[frankz]

Because converting lossy format (wma, mp3) to lossy format (wma, mp3) (i.e. double compression) wrecks sound quality, and converting lossy format (wma, mp3) to lossless format (flac) does nothing but waste space (it doesn't increase the source's quality).

Good conversions:
CD to lossless file
CD to lossy file
lossless file to lossy file

Bad conversion:
lossy to lossy

Waste of time / space:
Lossy to lossless


EDIT:
How did I miss this in the original post (must have gotten lost in all the "M$ windoze" ranting - just use a different OS already!):

"...with WMA lossless..."

So, nevermind, carry on.

[ShayUrkell]

Because converting lossy format (wma, mp3) to lossy format (wma, mp3) (i.e. double compression) wrecks sound quality, and converting lossy format (wma, mp3) to lossless format (flac) does nothing but waste space (it doesn't increase the source's quality).

Good conversions:
CD to lossless file
CD to lossy file
lossless file to lossy file

Bad conversion:
lossy to lossy

Waste of time / space:
Lossy to lossless


EDIT:
How did I miss this in the original post (must have gotten lost in all the "M$ windoze" ranting - just use a different OS already!):

"...with WMA lossless..."

So, nevermind, carry on.

It all makes sense. Thank you very much!