Lossless audio formats, why didnt WAV take off?

[Maximilian]

Why is it FLAC everyone swears by? By everyone i mean the few people who uses lossless over MP3 heh. WAV as far as i know has been around a lot longer, are there drawbacks to it? Even an ipod will play WAVs.

 

[Jinny]

huge filesize.

 

[CallMeJoe]

WAV is uncompressed; as Jinny posted, file size remains a problem. FLAC and other lossless formats offer compression without degradation.

 

[sdifox]

compress with flac, upload, download, de-compress


you get the lossless and smaller file size, why won't you do it?

 

[alcoholbob]

Putting info about the song on FLAC files.

 

[lamedude]

WAVs will drain the battery faster on HDD MP3 players since you can't fit them into the RAM and have keep the HDD spinning.
As for being around longer. The first lossless codec, Shorten, came out in 93 so I doubt anyone was ripping WAV music to their <1GB HDDs or would be unwilling to switch to they did.

 

[JSt0rm]

We use wav in pro audio. Hell even semipro audio uses wav.

 

[darkswordsman17]

File size and tagging.

 

[shortylickens]

WAVs will drain the battery faster on HDD MP3 players since you can't fit them into the RAM and have keep the HDD spinning.
As for being around longer. The first lossless codec, Shorten, came out in 93 so I doubt anyone was ripping WAV music to their <1GB HDDs or would be unwilling to switch to they did.

I did it in Win 3.1, with about 4 songs.
Thats all I had hard drive for back then, and I had to delete Doom to do it.

 

[Modelworks]

FLAC is also open source. WAV remains a MS copyright. MP3 is copyrighted as well.
In other news google has chosen Ogg Vorbis for their new format for youtube converting all uploads to that format and using vp8 for the video.

 

[Cogman]

FLAC is also open source. WAV remains a MS copyright. MP3 is copyrighted as well.
In other news google has chosen Ogg Vorbis for their new format for youtube converting all uploads to that format and using vp8 for the video.

Copyrights have very little to do with adoption.

 

[Modelworks]

Copyrights have very little to do with adoption.

Someone has to make the hardware to play the media and licensing fees are a big factor in the decision of what hardware will be produced. One of the reasons MP3 was adopted was because the licensing for it was cheaper than the alternatives from companies like Dolby . Even Flac isn't the best loss-less codec. It is the best cheap codec. Copyrighted codecs are a huge income for their parent companies. You cannot make a single player with the Mp3 logo, dolby logo , etc without having paid royalties to the companies.

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[Ross Ridge]

Someone has to make the hardware to play the media and licensing fees are a big factor in the decision of what hardware will be produced. One of the reasons MP3 was adopted was because the licensing for it was cheaper than the alternatives from companies like Dolby

MP3 became the dominant compression format for music because it was used to distribute music over the Internet. This was done without the permision of MP3 patent holders, let alone the copyright owners of the music itself. No licencing fees were paid because it was all done illegally. This was before any licenced portable MP3 player existed, and indeed the reason why companies eventually started making them. If the Internet MP3 piracy revolution hadn't happened it's very unlikely that the MP3 codec, which was designed for use with MPEG encoded movies, would've ever been used in consumer audio-only devices.

There are no patents controlling uncompressed WAVs and anyone could and can use them without paying licencing fees to Microsoft. The reason why this format was never popular was for the reasons given already in this thread, it was too damn big. In the earliest days of Internet music piracy you did see music in uncompressed formats, but it was using 8-bit samples and 11kHz sampling or worse, usually in .AU format. Most sounded like they were recorded over the telephone. This was quickly replaced by MP2s and then MP3s once computers got fast enough to decode these formats in realtime, as the files were both smaller and sounded much, much, better.

 

[Modelworks]

No licencing fees were paid because it was all done illegally. This was before any licenced portable MP3 player existed, and indeed the reason why companies eventually started making them. If the Internet MP3 piracy revolution hadn't happened it's very unlikely that the MP3 codec, which was designed for use with MPEG encoded movies, would've ever been used in consumer audio-only devices.

Millions were paid in licensing fees. Mp3 players have existed since the codec was created. The first decoders were custom ASIC because a home pc couldn't decode the data fast enough. Search usenet and you will find thousands of people asking how they can get their 486 cpu to play an mp3 file without stuttering. That is a market that companies like Diamond Multimedia jumped on early and it ended up costing them huge in court. The reason MP3 succeeded is the codec had decent sound quality and the hardware didn't cost a fortune to decode it.

There are no patents controlling uncompressed WAVs and anyone could and can use them without paying licencing fees to Microsoft.

MS holds the patent on .WAV since windows 3.1 . You may use it without licensing fees but you cannot alter the specification . You can't modify the .WAV format to add things like album info without getting a visit from MS lawyers. That is why FLAC and other open licensed codecs are preferred.

 

[Tiamat]

I'm too lazy to deal with monkey audio or flac, so I just rip directly to wav. Saves time and harddrives are cheap...

 

[Ross Ridge]

Millions were paid in licensing fees. Mp3 players have existed since the codec was created.

Only in DVD players and other MPEG video devices. MP3 as an audio format was created by music pirates on Internet. Because the MP3 format was already the dominant audio format on the Internet that's the format the first licenced consumer MP3 audio players used.

Search usenet and you will find thousands of people asking how they can get their 486 cpu to play an mp3 file without stuttering.

That only confirms what I was saying. They were using unlicenced software to play their pirated songs. Songs that were encoded using unlicenced encoding software. Why would a music pirate pay for licensed software when he's already illegally copying the music?

MS holds the patent on .WAV since windows 3.1.

There is no patent on the uncompressed WAV format.

 

[queequeg99]

tagging.

+1. If you use a device like a Squeezebox or even a PC-based program that can sort songs by genre, year, composer, etc., (and you use these features) having robust tagging is absolutely essential.

 

[JSt0rm]

wav = pcm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-code_modulation

 

[darkswordsman17]

I'm too lazy to deal with monkey audio or flac, so I just rip directly to wav. Saves time and harddrives are cheap...

Do you self organize/tag all the music? It takes just a bit to get FLAC/ALAC/etc encoding/tagging setup, which would save you a lot of time.

 

[thomsbrain]

Every CD ever made is essentially wav, so I'd have to say it caught on pretty well there for a while.

 

[KAZANI]

What are you talking about? It's the lossy compression that's so old-skool it's a mystery it's still around.

BTW, anyone gotten FLAC frontend to work fully in Windows 7? I don't understand why FLAC has become so popular when the project has been dead the last three years?

 

[Cogman]

What are you talking about? It's the lossy compression that's so old-skool it's a mystery it's still around.

BTW, anyone gotten FLAC frontend to work fully in Windows 7? I don't understand why FLAC has become so popular when the project has been dead the last three years?

Ever watch videos on youtube? That is why lossy compression is still around.

As for audio lossy compression. Despite what many audio snobs claim, most fail double blind tests of AAC (@128kbs) vs lossless. Thats still a huge bandwidth saver.

 

[JSt0rm]

As for audio lossy compression. Despite what many audio snobs claim, most fail double blind tests of AAC (@128kbs) vs lossless. Thats still a huge bandwidth saver.

The untrained ear is untrained. Most people who are passive about these things would fail such tests. People who live and breath sound can here/describe the nuances.

 

[WildW]

The untrained ear is untrained. Most people who are passive about these things would fail such tests. People who live and breath sound can here/describe the nuances.

So, ignorance really is bliss.

 

[sdifox]

Ever watch videos on youtube? That is why lossy compression is still around.

As for audio lossy compression. Despite what many audio snobs claim, most fail double blind tests of AAC (@128kbs) vs lossless. Thats still a huge bandwidth saver.

I have not listened to AAC128, I should give it a try.

I will of course pipe it though my sound system, CD then AAC and see how it goes. I suspect they will be close.

I use 192VBR mp3 myself.