Digital Audio Formats?

As a whole, I'd say that "people who consume digital music" would not understand what either FLAC or LAME mean.

I can't imagine anyone refusing to buy MP3s unless they're LAME encoded. It's the "MP3" bit that counts, followed by bitrate.

I can certainly imagine people refusing to buy FLACs due to compatibility issues / lack of understanding.

FLAC seems to be becoming the standard though i find it annoying to have to convert it to 320 MP3 anyway

i will be the first to admit that LAME MP3 probably doesn't mean what i think it means (or does it?!)

i tend to just listen to downloaded music on my iPod

serious listening is strictly vinyl and cd

hint said:

I can certainly imagine people refusing to buy FLACs due to compatibility issues / lack of understanding.

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This is why I don't buy them. Also, they are more expensive.

I buy 320 mp3's. They are cheaper and I store all of my tunes on a laptop with a 250GB hard drive so Wavs are too big.

320's sound good to me on club systems and on Genelec monitors.

Really and truly the best route is to offer everything.

the hive mind has previously passed judgement on this question here:
http://dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=8384

In terms of ease of use for the layman consumer, mp3 wins this particular format war hands down. I'm not sure if Serato supports FLAC playback, but it certainly didn't in the past, and programs like iTunes don't pllay FLAC either. If two of your 'industry standard' applications don't support it, you'd be daft to go with it if it was a choice of one or the other.

My opinion though is that if a FLAC release was well priced I'd go for that over mp3 any day. Conversion is a lot quicker than recording a track from vinyl, and I'd still have a full quality version of the track should I ever need it.


Just my $0.02

Any mp3 file is most certainly easier since everything from OS-bundled software and most portable music players will play it, and most people don't look into encoding beyond what they'd do when they rip a CD. Some people will look at bitrate, and you're going to see a want for the V0/320kbps files, especially among individuals who are used to downloading on private torrent trackers, with what seems like a preference for the V0/V1 files among the majority of downloaders.

I, for one, will download FLAC if it's a release that I feel is worth "keeping," in that it's something I'm buying where I'd be tempted to buy the CD or vinyl release but it's not a realistic purchase for price or availability reasons. FLAC can be really, really easily converted to Apple Lossless (easily played on all Apple portable audio players, iTunes, and others) or mp3 but as I said, most people don't care to take that step.

Its worth pointing out for the people who are worried about the compatibility of the FLAC format that a FLAC file can be 'unzipped' to get the original WAV file - since it is lossless compression, unlike mp3, where audio quality is lost in the compression (sorry if that is stating the obvious).

My only annoyance with FLAC is that apart from digital-tunes.net, every online store charges a much higher fee for a flac version of a release compared to the mp3. In many cases when it comes to an album purchase, its only a few £££ more to get the actual CD.