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Lossless audio. What should I do with this one big file? Digital players with lossless support

If suddenly ordinary person“brings it” to the forum where those who consider themselves experts gather high-quality sound, then he will find that 80 percent of the audiophiles there are talking about the bitrate problem. “Can a true music lover distinguish a recording from good bitrate from a “lossi” file or not” - debates on this topic with arguments for and against have not subsided for quite some time. This proves that it is difficult or almost impossible to force people to abandon their beliefs, to step over their “ego,” even if the facts testify against their delusions. In our article, we will give you some information about bitrate and how it relates to practical music listening experience.

What is bitrate?

If you love listening to music, you've probably heard the term "bitrate" before, so you probably have a general idea of ​​what it means, but we'll try to refresh your memory and give you the "official" definition here. So, bitrate (from the English bit rate) is, in fact, a stream - the speed at which bits of information pass through, i.e. amount of data processed during certain period time. In audio it is usually measured in kilobits per second. For example, the music you listen to on iTunes has a stream of 256 kilobits per second.

The higher the bitrate of a track, the more space it will require on your computer. Therefore, it has become common practice to compress audio CDs so that more music can be placed on a hard drive (or on a cloud drive, such as Dropbox, or any other). This is where the long-term debate about the quality of music from lossy and lossless files grows.

What's the difference betweenlossy andlossless?

When we say “lossless,” we mean that we didn’t change anything during the rewrite. original file, and it sounds like the original CD track. More often than not, however, we save music “lossy.” A typical lossy album (MP3 or AAC) is probably 100MB or so. The same album in a lossless format such as FLAC or ALAC (also known as Apple Lossless) would take up about 300MB. For this reason, “lossy” notation is common for fast download and save more disk space.

The problem is that when you compress a file to save space, you remove blocks of data. For example, when you take a PNG picture of your computer screen and save it to JPEG format, you get a "flaw" in certain parts of the image, making it look essentially the same, but with some loss of clarity and quality. Consider the image below as an example: on the right it has been compressed into JPG format, and its quality suffered as a result (if you look closely at the color of the car, the details and the background). The same thing happens with music files, which are “compressed” into MP3, if such a comparison is correct. Quality losses that are noticeable to the human ear or eye are called compression artifacts.

It is clear that lossy files are a compromise, but a very significant one when we talk about the hard drive space that can be lost. great importance for 32 GB iPhone. But there are also different levels lossless: 128 kilobits per second, for example, takes up very little space, but will be of lower quality than a 320 kilobit file, which, in turn, has more low quality than a 1411 kbps file (which is considered truly lossless). However, there are many arguments that most people may not even hear the difference between the two bitrates.

Is bitrate really that important?

As storing files becomes easier and cheaper, high bitrate music is becoming more popular. But is it always worth your time, effort and disk space?

The answer to this question is not simple, and audiophiles are still fighting in battles, trying to solve an equation with two unknowns. The first part of the equation depends on technical implementation. If you are using expensive headphones or speakers good quality, then you can listen to music in a wide range of sound. This is where the low bitrate becomes noticeable and you can tell that low-quality MP3 files are missing a certain level of detail, subtle background tracks may not be audible, highs and lows won't be as dynamic, or you may simply hear other significant audio distortions. In these cases, the lossless format is justified.

But if you're listening to your favorite music through a pair of cheap and generally crappy headphones on your iPod, you won't notice the difference between a 128-kbit file and a 320-kbit file, let alone a comparison between a 320-kbit file and a lossless one. file 1411 kbit. Remember that picture with the car? The music coming through your headphones looks like a smaller image, and you won't hear any compression artifacts because the headphones don't have enough range.

The other part of the equation is your own ears. Most people simply don't pay enough attention or have the listening skills to tell the difference between two different bitrates. This skill can be developed to some extent over time, but sometimes not. In this case, it doesn't really matter what bitrate to use, does it? The fact of the matter is that it is very difficult to hear the difference between a lossless file and a 320-kilobit MP3 unless you are a sound engineer or musician with perfect pitch. For the vast majority of people, 320 kbps is more than enough for listening.

It would also be a big misconception that the higher the bitrate, the better quality track, since simpler audio signals will be compressed better and have a lower bitrate, and more complex ones will be worse. This is why classical music in lossless files has a lower bitrate than, for example, rock music. The ideal is to record with a variable bitrate, but with high quality. Therefore, the bitrate value is by no means the main indicator of the quality of the audio material.

Let's summarize. Lossless files are more promising in the sense that you can always "compress" the music, but you will never be able to get its quality back, so you will have to re-record it from a CD. This is the problem with online music stores and music libraries: if you've built up a huge library of iTunes music and then decide you want the same thing but at a higher bitrate, you'll have to start all over again. But MP3 has been great for exactly 20 years now. sound standard, and that's not likely to change anytime soon, so unless you're planning on becoming a militant audiophile fanatic, there's no need to worry about the recording quality of your favorite songs.

Hello everyone, in this article I will try to talk in general terms about what affects sound quality, what differences there are between digital and analog formats, and how to hear the difference between lossless and lossy audio.

What is sound

Basically, sound is mechanical vibrations transmitted in a solid, liquid or gaseous medium. Most often, when talking about sound in the context of music, they distinguish between analog and digital formats.

The analog format is used in cassette recordings and vinyl records, and the digital format is used in any modern player, smartphone and many other sources.


However, before you get a good digital recording and talking about its lossless/lossy versions, it is worth talking about how digitization occurs.

Digitization

I thought for a long time about the simplest and most clear example to explain this process and finally remembered a great illustration from my childhood. Do you remember when you were a child, they sold those coloring books in which you had to connect the dots with lines to make a picture?

So, imagine that analog sound is an ordinary full-fledged picture, and digital sound is a copy made from it. And those same points are used as reference points for copying. The more often they are used and the smaller the distance between them, the more our copy will be similar to the original. However, no matter how close we place the dots, it will not be possible to achieve 100% similarity with the original. The more detailed the digitization, the more space the final file will take up.

Formats

After receiving digital copy, it needs to be packaged in one of the popular music formats. Depending on the choice of format and compression settings, the file size and sound quality will differ. However, it is important to understand that if the digitization was done sloppily, then no lossless will save you.


Compression methods

And now we move on to the actual differences between lossless and lossy formats. In fact, both of them are powerful archivers that can significantly reduce the size of a track, however, in the case of lossless (for example, FLAC), this compression will occur without loss in quality, and with lossy (MP3) - with losses, but more In this case, the track itself will be significantly smaller in size.


It turns out you need to listen only to lossless?

Okay, let's say we have a correctly digitized track, then converted to one of the lossless formats. It turns out that we can pour it into any smartphone and hear a significant difference in sound?

Not really. Why: While playing this track, four more parameters will play a role: your smartphone's DAC (built-in or dedicated), amplifier, headphones and, oddly enough, your ears. If you have regular phone Without a dedicated DAC and supplied headphones, then most likely you will not hear any differences between MP3 and high-quality FLAC.


However, even if you have good music smartphone and decent headphones, then in the absence of good hearing, the difference will be either less noticeable or not audible at all.

I have good hearing, I want to hear this difference

In this case, you will need one of the smartphones with a dedicated DAC (for example, Meizu PRO 5), good headphones(the same Meizu HD50) and a set of favorite tracks in FLAC. The built-in Flyme player can work with FLAC, and then it’s up to your ears. With good hearing, you will notice a noticeable difference between MP3 and FLAC versions of tracks.

Conclusion

I myself am not an audiophile, for me music is a mood, a balm for the soul, something that can lift your spirits or help pass the time when traveling on the subway or flying to another country. Of course she is important part my life, but I focus more on how a particular track makes me feel rather than how much detail I hear it.

What is the lossless format for?

This is music encoding (Lossless data compression) - compression without loss of quality, an information compression method that allows you to restore the compressed information of the original with bit accuracy.

Lossless- this is a so-called “archive” (compressed wav, lossless codec), with source audio material, from an audio disc, CDDA, SACD, DVD-A or vinyl record, which is supplemented with information. In this form it can be stored and listened to.
When you unpack (decompress) such an archive, you receive the original audio material (from which the rip was taken) accurate to the bit.

For compression, lossless codecs such as - APE, Flac, WV, ALAC, TAK, TTA, the main purpose of which is to transform (convert) an audio file to reduce its size from any source of uncompressed audio (original), using lossless information compression, i.e. lossless.
When compressing (converting) into any of the above codecs, the difference is only in the bitrate (bitrate - data flow rate in kilobits per second during playback), how much the audio material is compressed, the parameter of which has nothing to do with the safety of the sound, i.e. You can use any codec convenient for you, there is no difference in sound quality between them.

Why do we need lossless?

1. First of all, the ability to make a copy of an audio disc.
2. Convenient storage and exchange via the Internet, having smaller size, compared to the original.

Lossless formats and how to work with them

The article addresses the following issues:

1) What is lossless?
2) What is CUE?

4) Is it possible to play lossless with my Winamp (Windows Media Player and etc.)



8) What is a transcode?

Maybe I didn't look at everything FAQ. You can add your own questions not included in this list. If the question falls into the FAQ category, I will include it in this article. I will also listen to your comments and indications of inaccuracies (write in a personal message). The purpose of the article was to create material that would make it easier for beginners to get acquainted with lossless and simplify its use.

1) What is lossless?

Lossless- This is lossless data encoding (lossless compression). Of course we're talking about about music encoding ( digital audio). Lossless compression can be well understood if we consider an example of the work of ordinary and familiar archivers (WinZIP, WinRAR, etc.). Let's say we take text file and archive it. We get a much smaller archive with the document. Having unpacked it, we will have exactly the same document. The same goes for lossless audio compression. We compress a regular WAV file with a lossless codec and get a smaller file. From it we can always get our WAV back in its original form and burn, say, a disc exactly in the form in which it was purchased in the store. There are quite a lot of similar codecs. The most popular are APE (Monkey's Audio), FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), WavPack. All these codecs have compression around 30-50%. But I want to note that we don’t have to convert everything to WAV. We can listen to these compressed files completely calm on our computer. We'll talk about this below...

2) What is CUE?

CUE (Cuesheet)- This index file in which there is a marking on the tracks. The fact is that by distilling our WAV into one of the lossless formats, we get one solid and continuous file. To make it possible to navigate and jump from track to track, CUE files are used. These files have the extension .cue. Its structure is very simple. Let me give you a small example:

PERFORMER "Rise Against"
TITLE "Appeal To Reason"!}
FILE "RA-ATR.flac" WAVE
TRACK 01 AUDIO
PERFORMER "Rise Against"
INDEX 01 03:21:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Long Forgotten Sons"!}
PERFORMER "Rise Against"
INDEX 01 04:03:00
TRACK 03 AUDIO
TITLE "Re-Education (Through Labor)"!}
PERFORMER "Rise Against"
INDEX 01 03:44:00

As you can see from the example, at the beginning there is data about the disc itself (artist, album). Next comes the FILE line, which indicates the actual file that was indexed. And then comes the track index (track number, track name and beginning of the playing time).

3) How can you play lossless formats?

Of course, there are a great many players. I would like to focus on a fairly simple and at the same time very functional player - Foobar2000. This player has many versions and assemblies. I've tried quite a lot a large number of these variations. I settled on the assembly from Dr.Death (you can download it from our server). The fact is that this assembly contains all the plugins and codecs we need. So we don’t have to search for and download anything. So to speak, the finished product. It's also a bit spruced up and doesn't have as sparse a design as the original Foobar. Well, these are all goodies and tricks and we are of little interest to them.

And so, having downloaded the archive, unpack it and run the file foobar2000.exe (no installation required). Take a look and get to know the player. Note: in the archive there is a wonderful readme.chm file with instructions for setting up the player for yourself. It discusses setting up the technical part and setting up buttons and other beauties.

To get started, first of all go to File >>> Preferences >>> File Types

Here, select the formats that will be played by Foobar. If you use it only for lossless, then check APE, FLAC, WV, and don’t forget to check CUE.

Thus, we have associated the files we need with Foobar and now, after double-clicking on the formats you noted above, they will be played in the Foobar player

4) Is it possible to play lossless with my Winamp ( Windows Media Player, etc.)?

Of course, no one is forcing you to use Foobar. I considered it as a fairly simple way to play it. We can also use our usual players. For example, Winamp.

To play, you need to install the codecs themselves on the system. I will provide links to install the most popular codecs:

1) http://www.monkeysaudio.com/download.html - Monkey's Audio (APE)
IN included plugin for Winamp, which is installed along with the codec.

2) http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html - Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)
Direct installation link for Windows: http://cyberial.com/flacinstaller.asp
The kit also includes a plugin for Winamp

3) http://www.wavpack.com/downloads.html - WavPack (WV)
The codec and plugins are installed separately. Plugins available for Winamp, Apollo, XMMS, Nero Burning Rom.

4) http://homepage3.nifty.com/blacksword/ - OGG Vorbis
There are several options similar to LAME. I recommend using a build called Lancer, because... among other things, it is also optimized for different processors.

5) http://www.musepack.net/index.php?pg=win – MusePack
Everything is simple here, it is on the official website in the Windows section “Encoder”

6) http://www.nero.com/nerodigital/eng/down-ndaudio.php - MP4 (Nero): (meaning AAC format).
The archive contains the win32 folder and the file NeroAacEnc.exe.

5) What should I do with this one large file?

As a rule, lossless music is distributed as two files. The first is the music itself in one of the formats in the form of one whole continuous file. The second is a CUE file (about CUE, see point 2).

In order for us to be able to listen to the album normally, switching between tracks, the package must include a CUE file. The Foobar player allows you to play a combination of File+CUE. In this case, the playlist immediately displays a list of tracks without physically cutting the entire file.

There is also a special plugin for Winamp to teach it how to work with CUE. Let's take it.

6) I open the album through CUE and see an empty playlist. What to do?

This problem often occurs when working through CUE. This is due to the fact that the CUE file references the wrong source sound file. Most likely, CUE refers to a file with a WAV extension, while ours, for example, is APE. This is due to the fact that initially (when creating the image) the CUE is created specifically for the WAV file, which is then converted to lossless and many simply do not bother to forward the CUE.

Let's figure out how to fix this:

1) Open CUE in any text editor. For example, in a regular Notepad
2) We will see the code itself CUE file, which we need to tweak a little.

PERFORMER "Rise Against"
TITLE "Appeal To Reason"!}
FILE "RA-ATR.wav" WAVE
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "Collapse (Post-Amerika)"!}
PERFORMER "Rise Against"
INDEX 01 03:21:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE " Long Forgotten Sons"!}
PERFORMER "Rise Against"
INDEX 01 04:01:00

3) Find the line starting with the word FILE. It contains a link to the source sound file.

FILE "RA-ATR.wav" WAVE

We see that the file has a wav extension, and my source file is, for example, in APE. We look at the format of our source file and change the extension to the one we need (ape, flac, wv). We get a line like:

FILE "RA-ATR.ape" WAVE

5) Save our file and run it in the player. The list should now display correctly.

7) How can I convert lossless to MP3 (for listening on the player)?

This question also comes up very often. Of course, we want to listen to music on the street, but today there are not many players that play lossless. There are options to reflash your player, but this is a separate topic.

There are many conversion methods. You can use converter programs. I prefer to use Foobar again. There are several advantages:

Not needed additional software
+ We add it ourselves required formats(if they are not available by default)
+ At the same time we cut our big file by track

So, let's begin.

1) Upload our album to the playlist using the CUE file.
2) Select all tracks from the list.
3) Click right click mouse on the selected tracks and select
Convert >>> Convert to...

4) Select the required format (in our case it is MP3).

Before clicking OK, we need to download the codec itself to convert to MP3. We will use Lame 3.97 (you can download it). Let's unpack it and remember where we put it.

After clicking OK, the player will ask you to specify the folder where lame.exe is located, which is what we do.

Then we indicate the location where the files will be saved and that’s it, the conversion is done.

Note: By default, only one MP3 conversion option is available in the list (avg 245 kbps with JointStereo). This is actually enough. If that’s not enough for you, then you can add your own version of bitrate and stereo. To do this, go to the MoreSettings conversion window and select AddNew. Next in the list, select Custom and enter your values:

The screenshot shows the settings for MP3 320 kbps with “full” Stereo (--cbr -b 320 -m s - %d)

8) What is a transcode?

Transcode- format soundtrack. There are people who rip MP3s from Audio CDs via EAC (Exact Audio Copy, more details on the official EAC website) to Lossless. The transcode can be easily recognized by the spectrum. It is a DTS lossy format, i.e. with losses. You can convert using dBpowerAMP Music Converter.
Let's grab it here: http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

How to work with the EAC and dBpowerAMP Music Converter programs is explained in some detail on their official websites.

Lil' gRyphY,
www.respecta.net

If you translate this word into Russian, you get “without losses.” This format is good because its sound quality is better than, for example, Lossy codecs. The files also don't take up much space. Most programs can play the Lossless format, and those that can’t have special plugins for them that allow them to play this format. Let's now take a closer look at the lossless format.

Music of the highest quality

People who understand music and connoisseurs of good sound are unlikely to agree to listen to audio in mp3 format with compression, or the like. Of course, if you play such formats on ordinary equipment, such as a cheap smartphone, then you will not catch all the sound shortcomings, but if you have a sophisticated player for 40 thousand, then all the sound shortcomings will be revealed. So that there is sound highest quality, the Lossless format is just right. Even when using compression on this format, the sound will remain the same and will not become worse. Moreover, today there is equipment with reasonable price, which is capable of playing music of this format. I want to show several formats with no compression and with compression, but without loss of quality:

Uncompressed:

  • CDDA
  • IFF-8SVX
  • IFF-16SV
  • AIFF

Compressed:

  • M4A – Apple Lossless
  • FLAC
  • WV-WavPack
  • WMA – Windows Media Audio 9
  • LA – Lossless Audio
  • TTA – True Audio

And now I want to talk about several formats this list. Go.

FLAC format

This format is very common and when using it, the sound does not lose anything, unlike audio codecs. This format can be used with equipment High Quality Hi-Fi and Hi-End. Since the format is quite popular, almost all media players support it.

APE format

For of this format There are only plugins and codecs for Windows OS, and for others operating systems and players, there are more expensive solutions. When compressing a file, you can achieve minimal losses by several times.

Apple Lossless Format

Music files lossless format can be listened to Apple equipment. For this purpose it was developed Apple format Lossless, which is available on both iPhone and iPod. According to tests, this format is not even bad, since compression occurs from 40% to 60% of original file and without loss of quality. The only drawback of this format is that the extension is the same as the AAC format, although the AAC format does not have high quality properties. In this case, the manufacturers decided that the information will be stored in the MP4 container, the file extension will accordingly be .mp4a., as a result, the format works on Apple products, and on Windows products.

What software should I use to listen to Lossless?

I want to say that many players did not immediately start working with this format.

Winamp

The well-known WinAmp player plays almost all formats without loss of quality; it processes tracks in the Lossless format well.

AIMP

I use this player. It can play most formats too.

Which players support the Lossless format?

Here are a few players that users respond well to: SpiderPlayer, jetAudio, Foobar 2000.

They all support this format, and it’s up to you to decide which one to choose. See reviews on the Internet, price. There are very expensive Hi-Fi options for 40 thousand, you need to listen to only high quality music on them, otherwise an mp3 format will reveal all the shortcomings of the sound, and you will hear it perfectly.