<sigh> Digital to Analogue

[Welder]

Trouble is that flac will die and wav will be back - if we're talking sound quality. Why? The best players are in-memory. Flacs have to be "exploded" back in a wav for an in-memory player to work. Saving a bit a disk space is irrelevant today, let alone in the next year or two. The processing power used during the explode process with an i5 CPU results in a flac loading in the same time as a wav. Flacs are like disk compression, a passing fad this will be overcome be technology advances.

Not quite sure why you believe this to be true Clive.
If someone does convince audiophiles that there is an audible difference between Flac and WAV then perhaps a small section might just use WAV.
Nor sure that memory players by their nature give the best sound either.

[Clive]

Not quite sure why you believe this to be true Clive.
If someone does convince audiophiles that there is an audible difference between Flac and WAV then perhaps a small section might just use WAV.
Nor sure that memory players by their nature give the best sound either.

Do you use disk compression today? That's all flac is. It brings a little and rather unnecessary complexity in that it has to be unpacked. With internet speeds heading towards VoD usability then compression really is an anachronism. Just like shorthand too.

There are those that believe WAV sounds better though I've yet to hear that, clearly it must depend on the effect the unpacking has on the performance of the server.

Memory players that stop everything else working in // thus freeing up a lot of machine performance may not guarantee great sound but it's not a bad approach! In computing if you want Real-Time response, ie totally predictable and fast, you do everything in memory keeping other processes completely under control. This is what we want when feeding dac with data. There are of course various ways to achieve this in detail but this is the key to predictability.

[Alex_UK]

IMO the FLAC advantage is in the tagging.

[Clive]

IMO the FLAC advantage is in the tagging.

I agree flac does have an advantage there. It's easily fixable with wav if a standard were developed, indeed that's an issue flac has. Different players and servers implement different levels so tagging so it's not universal but yes it's better than basic wav.

[Welder]

Interesting view of the future Clive.
Given the improvements in processor technology I'm not convinced the unpacking of Flac files is, or will be, enough of an issue to make Flac obsolete.

It seems that data volume will always have some bearing on data storage; portability for example. Perhaps the multiple TB flash cards aren't far away but even then if one can pack the same data into a smaller volume without sacrificing integrity or retrieval times then it seems to be in our nature to want to do this. Take mp3 as an example; what tends to happen is people store more music, not use the extra storage for another higher volume format. I can't see that changing for the majority.

As for predictability from storage to Dac and transfer speeds, well I think we will see more sophisticated on board Dac buffering so what goes on before will have minimal impact.

[Clive]

Interesting view of the future Clive.
Given the improvements in processor technology I'm not convinced the unpacking of Flac files is, or will be, enough of an issue to make Flac obsolete.

It seems that data volume will always have some bearing on data storage; portability for example. Perhaps the multiple TB flash cards aren't far away but even then if one can pack the same data into a smaller volume without sacrificing integrity or retrieval times then it seems to be in our nature to want to do this. Take mp3 as an example; what tends to happen is people store more music, not use the extra storage for another higher volume format. I can't see that changing for the majority.

As for predictability from storage to Dac and transfer speeds, well I think we will see more sophisticated on board Dac buffering so what goes on before will have minimal impact.

I did make the proviso "if we're talking sound quality" so I'm not so much talking about mobile music but the days of high compression of data are more behind us than in front of us - in the world of IT at any rate.

Buffering in dacs is quite a problem today, re-clocking of data in shallow buffers still needs a lot of help. Async usb improves re-clocked buffers so something more is needed. A deep buffer will give the best quality but it needs to be filled at the same rate or faster than it's emptied. Also if you have let's say a 10 sec buffer then you have a delay before the music starts. This is very much an issue for in-memory players until memory replaces disks by the TB; then it won't be a buffer in front the dac, it'll be the main data store. SD card players are perhaps the start of what's to come but they still seem rather gimmicky.

[Smoker]

with the risk of sounding rude, the relience on hdd's is worrying! i might have missed any mention of backups in this thread, but I hope everyone has that side already covered.

on the safe side at least back up to tape drives and always have some file recovery software handy! eg r-studio is handy, managed to recover audio and video files off drives that had been accidently formatted...lol

[northwest]

at least back up to tape drives

Decent drives are not cheap and would cost more than many systems here. Backing up big chunks to DVD would be much more practical in many cases.

[bobbasrah]

Decent drives are not cheap and would cost more than many systems here. Backing up big chunks to DVD would be much more practical in many cases.

Have we completely lost the plot here.
Compression and decompression are techniques to compact file size for storage or transfer. That technique will be around for as long as required for it's purpose, which will not end anytime soon.
If a program can decompress digital audio on the fly and play it so much the better, but it can be reconverted to satisfy the purists who believe they hear a difference, for whatever reason. The key is LOSSless.
I convert all my video to hard drives in a form which preserves video quality (depending on the movie) at a fraction of the feature packed original size, not because drives are cheap but to minimise wasted space, and the fact that the video player can handle the format. My eyes cannot tell the difference, but others might...

A decent 2Tb drive is/was around the 70 quid mark, so backing up changes is a breeze while retaining library folder structure. Hot swap or usb, the process is simple and fast.
The notion of my backing up 700+Gb of FLAC to 170 odd DVD, manually selecting folders to backup the latest additions is frankly absurd in this day and age....

[Chops]

A decent 2Tb drive is/was around the 70 quid mark, so backing up changes is a breeze while retaining library folder structure. Hot swap or usb, the process is simple and fast.

+1