Freesound Forums

Hi there,

been pondering the sound format issue here at FS, you know, wav, aiff, mp3... oh yeah, and flac too A contradiction is bugging me that I wanted to share.

Well, you all know that there are frequent pleas at the forum (written in various moods and tones) to increase the quality of samples in FS. Curiously enough, however, and according to fairly rigourous tests made by user Acclivity and my own observations, high-quality formats are often disregarded in favour of MP3s. These are facts. Now my interpretation.

The 'typical' FS downloader don't care much about sound quality. This *may* indicate that a) the ratio of casual downloaders to 'pro-like' users with a concern on quality is huge; b) most users have slow connections, are short of disk space, or are reluctant to 'new' stuff (e.g., unfamiliar formats such as flac).

My conclusion is quite obvious and simplistic: if you want to see your samples downloaded many times it is certainly better to upload as MP3. If you don't care about the number of downloads then use lossless formats. This is up to you to decide... and I'm still questioning myself.

cheers

Dob

It should be possible to create on item with different file versions: E. g mp3 and flac.
Mp3 should be used for preview on the website.

-erdie

I have a sneaking feeling that MP3 at 256 kbps is pretty darned good, and at half or one third the size of even flac (cf Rain30s and StormLoop22Jul06 flac and mp3 versions), has a lot to be said for it. If anyone can really hear the difference, do tell me. I could always go to 320 kbps and still achieve a space saving.

An interesting side issue of uploading both formats, if an aim is (as I confess mine partly is) to achieve a high number of downloads, then maybe putting up a FLAC as well as MP3 slightly reduces the hits the MP3 version could achieve.

mjk

I think I'll stick to FLAC for quality and compression. It's more considerate of bandwidth concerns than posting raw WAV/AIFF files, but it won't bug the fidelity nuts that often frequent these boards.

Still, FLAC can be a bit unfriendly for the average user who just wants to use it on their phone or something... maybe we should put up a quick conversion tutorial.

can someone convince me to switch to flac? i still don't see the difference than using a wave file. i don't care about "its the latetest thing". i want practicality. if flac is more reasonable to use,i want to learn about it more in depth-but i dont care to use something just because everyone else thinks its good.

wave files aren't good enough? i can see why one would use wave over mp3-but does flac truly beat the both out?

1. freesound uses about 1.5TB/month. If all wave files were compressed with flack this could be cut down tremendously.
2. some people have a poor connection (dialup), and still want to upload high quality lossless file formats. using flac they can greatly cut down the upload time.

the sentence "flac is like a specialized ZIP, for audio files" summarizes all that is good (lossless compression) and bad (as it's an "extra" file format) about flac.

- bram

flac is like a specialized ZIP, for audio files

that' makes sense to me. thanks bram. i'll look deeper into flac then.

If you have windows, definitely get dBpowerAMP converter with the FLAC plugin, it lets you convert to and from FLAC via the context menu. For Mac OS X, MacFLAC is a good choice.