Freesound Forums

Hi, everybody! Bram, my compliments on this great site. And of course on you excellent plugins, which are among my very favorites. Been using SupaPhaser since BeOS.

Anyways, my ? is re: filesize. I have made a couple 20-30 min field recordings available from my FTP space for anyone reading my post at KVR, but I won't leave them up there forever. I divided the 2 files up into 7-min segments and converted them to flac, but they are still pretty large files. Will Freesound take them as large as that?

ATM get them here:

kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2459054#2459054

And I can contribute them to freesoundproject any time.

Cheers, frog

FLAC is an uncompressed codec, so files are still going to be fairly large. The only way to make the files smaller is to shorten them, or compress them with a lossy codec, like mp3, ogg, etc. I don't think there's a limit to file size on Freesound (or at least I haven't hit it yet, and I've uploaded up to 10 min. of stereo CD quality wav, so 7 minutes should be fine. I have to ask though, why do a lot of files on this site end up in FLAC?

many people here, because we are audio folks, use flac more often then not because its no sound loss.

that's pretty much the only reason why. snobbery to a small degree

tweeterdj
FLAC is an uncompressed codec, so files are still going to be fairly large. The only way to make the files smaller is to shorten them, or compress them with a lossy codec, like mp3, ogg, etc.

Thanks for the response. The .flac format is compressed AND lossless, or so I am told, and one preferred for uploading and downloading without quality loss, unlike mp3 or ogg. Looking at the filesizes on my hard drive the ratio is less than 1/2 that of the original .wav. Pretty impressive for a lossless format. mp3 and ogg have much better compression ratios and are lossy.

I don't think there's a limit to file size on Freesound (or at least I haven't hit it yet, and I've uploaded up to 10 min. of stereo CD quality wav, so 7 minutes should be fine.

Good to know. Especially if that was cd quality wav. So my files should take half the space.

I have to ask though, why do a lot of files on this site end up in FLAC?

I don't know why flac really, except it's a lossless audio format that's been around for a while now. The main lossless compressed formats I know of are .flac, .shn, and .ape. I use a really nice free program called dbPoweramp to convert them, but many good audio programs should have that capacity. Like Audacity or Audition, to go alphabetically.

Every generation of recording, conversion, remixing, whatever, especially to a lossy format, can introduce degradation and artifacts. And many of these recordings here at freesound will undergo further processing after they are downloaded, and so keeping the degradation and impurities at a minimum is the desired goal.

the reason i use flac is because as mentioned above it is compressed but yet the audio loses no quality. I'm guessing its also the only compressed file type that the website will read as an audio file. So saves space for more files. Yay!

It has more to do with saving bandwith, the way I see it, who cares about a few Gb nowadays?
But tired of converting to mp3 for people (which too often do not bother to get them), must confess I'm beginning to upload as plain wav.

Well, this is all good, but is there any more response to my question? I guess I'll just go ahead and try it.

go ahead frog_jr,

there's no problem uploading 20 min files...
for processing the file TYPE doesn't matter, so upload whatever you wish!

- bram

Bram
go ahead frog_jr,

there's no problem uploading 20 min files...
for processing the file TYPE doesn't matter, so upload whatever you wish!

- bram

Doing it now. Sorry about your bike accident! I've had more of them than you might believe. Worst damage I've ever done was some broken teeth. So maybe the smilie for that should be :H, I don't know. They are fixed now, so . Cheers, frog

Oh, BTW, I notice the FTP instructions say you can only use aiff, wav, mp3 or ogg. But as per your response I am leaving them as flac. If this is unacceptable I can send up wav files instead, but it takes much longer.

Freesound likes FLAC.
Saves disk space and bandwidth, and it's a faster download than wav (but not, as mentioned, a lossy format.)

My current thoughts are for long sounds (1+ minutes) I will use FLAC, and for shorter ones wav is easier. I have a couple short flacs on here that I think might be too much trouble for people just wanting a sound byte.

I like FLAC because it's lossless, has a decent compression ratio, and is non-proprietary. Unlike many of the other lossless formats listed, it is unencumbered by patents (note the ridiculous litigation surrounding the mp3 format) and is implemented in many free software applications.
This is in contrast to shorten (.shn) which only allows non-commercial encoding useage, and monkey's audio (.ape) which is better but doesn't allow independent implementations without the consent of the authors.
Basically, using flac is a guarantee against the kind of mp3 licensing bullshit that is going on now. (Have to license from Fraunhofer and then get sued by Lucent for patent infringement.)

And in terms of practicality, I think FLAC is pretty easy to work with once people are informed of what it is (I like to describe it as .zip for audio.) Programs like flac frontend, dbPowerAmp, and MacFLAC make it easy to encode and decode. And by using FLAC on freesound we also help increase awareness and use of the format.

Yes, I agree with everything you said, and also one can learn a bit by going to http://flac.sourceforge.net/ which is the homepage for the flac project. I just don't know exactly what makes flac more desirable than .shn or .ape, both of which I think are also open source. Others have asked me to upload my recordings in flac format, and it is easy enough to do. Cheers

ok, question....
it's probably been answered many times before, but i did a search for it and couldn't find it so...

how do i open a .flac file in audacity?

i've done the import audio thing, but it didn' work, unless i'm doing it wrong with all those settings that come up

I apologize. You can't. You need to convert it to something else first. You should go to flac's homepage to see what else is available for converting it. It's here: http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_tasks.html

I notice the one I recommended previously in this thread is on their list. For Windows, download a copy of DB Power Amp and use that to convert. You'll be glad you did. It's a file conversion utility that adds "convert to" to your context menu in Windows explorer (for audio files only) and it makes conversion and especially batch conversion really easy. Just highlight all the files you want to convert, right click, select convert to, and then a dialog opens up asking you what to convert to. And it's free. It has a plugin for each file format you want to be able to convert, and they each install separately, but I just downloaded and installed them all.

And no, I don't work for those guys. I'm just a fan.

For converting flac, get a flac program. See this faq (also linked in my sig).
On-the-fly decoding is far from impossible (and programs such as VLC can play flac), but for right now the intermediate step is necessary for most audio editing programs.

All good things to know! For some reason I always thought .flac was a compressed format. Now that I know it isn't, I'll be making more use of it. And I second the lauding of dbPowerAMP, it's a great little program.

tweeterdj
All good things to know! For some reason I always thought .flac was a compressed format. Now that I know it isn't, I'll be making more use of it. And I second the lauding of dbPowerAMP, it's a great little program.

Read your own post above, and then read the other posts in response to it. You are contradicting your own previous post and almost every one since then. Me, I thought I unclicked the "notify me when a reply is posted" on this thread, since it was approaching flogging a dead horse, and now I'm going to try it again so we don't have to go over the fact that flac is compressed and is not lossy yet one more time. Cheers, let me sleep!

I think he meant lossy instead of compressed.

On a side note, John Gruber wrote a rather interesting article on Daring Fireball today about the AAC format. In a response to reader comments, he published another article commenting on Ogg Voribs and FLAC, and why he thinks Apple doesn't use them.

He posits that these formats are liable to be sued for patent infringement, even if they don't infringe on patents. I fail to see how Apple can get around this by making their own proprietary lossless codec, but it brings up an interesting issue nonetheless.

ok, thanks allot...appreciate it