"Lossless" means that the amount of compression applied to the file does not result in any loss of original information. Ie, musical content. "Lossy" means that the amount of compression applied to the file does result in the loss of original musical content. FLAC is a type (codec?) of Lossless. mp3 is a type of Lossy. As I understand it.
Originally Posted by moecurlythanu
A minor thing to note is that Apple uses their own lossless codec called ALAC (or Apple Lossless as it's called in iTunes). Pretty much the same thing as FLAC, except Apple just doesn't let you use FLAC in their ecosystem. The catch with lossless audio is it doesn't really compress down in size that much. A CD album in my experience compresses to about 350MB which is pretty big in comparison to mp3s and would fill up an iPod's storage pretty quick. And you could upgrade iPod Classics with larger drives (iflash makes adapters for this) which could hold your whole CD shelf and more in lossless, it is a kind of invasive modification (having to remove the back and fiddle with tiny ribbon wires, not for the faint of heart). I have an Astell&Kern (iRiver) with my whole library in FLAC on a microSD card, it's pretty nice to have what pretty much is a portable hi-fi with a binder full of hundreds of CDs in my pocket without being held at the whim of an internet connection or streaming service availability.
Lossy codecs strip away parts of the music human ears tend not to notice is missing. Likewise lossy photo codecs like Jpeg, and video codecs like Mpeg 1 thru 4, WMV, et cetera strip away parts of the image human eyes tend not to notice is missing. Lossless audio, video and photo codecs leave all the information in the original completely intact.
Flac works very much like data compression codecs such as zip, rar, 7z, etc. The difference is data codecs require error correction to compensate for any errors. Flac has no error correction, enabling it to compress even smaller than zip or rar. In audio if a 14 is changed to a 12, that's close enough. In data 12 is just plain wrong, and such errors will corrupt the entire file. The errors occurring in Flac files are the same types of errors occurring on audio CDs. The reason an audio CD can hold 800MB of music, while a data CD can only hold 700MB is 100MB is set aside for error correction on the data CD.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
I have a new computer question for Ya’ll. I have a laptop with a CD / DVD included. A few weeks ago, it stopped working so I bought an external CD / DVD device. It has worked great for ripping CDs onto my laptop, which it is mainly what I use it for. But today I was trying to burn a playlist onto a blank CD for a friend and I can’t get it to work. When I try to burn to a blank CD it seems to not recognize the external device and want me to insert a blank CD into the device in my laptop that is not working. I played around with it but can’t figure out how to recognize the external device to burn onto a blank CD. Any help would be appreciated.
Silly question - but the external you purchased is a player and a burner? If not a burner, it would default to the one it knows (internal)
Death inspires me like a dog inspires a rabbit
I would go into the bios ( press F2 when booting before the windows twirly thing ) of the laptop and turn off the internal dvd.
On the Vostro I have it is under Advanced => System Configuration => Module Bay. Highlight that and press enter and choose disable. To the right when highlighted there should be a notice that Module Bay (Optical Drive). It is easily reversible by choosing enable. Windows figures it out.
If you don't want to do the bios thing you can go into Device Manager by right clicking the little window icon in the lower left and choosing Device Manager.
You should see DVD/CD-Rom drives, you can expand the list, highlight the internal one, right click and choose disable. It can be re-enabled the same way.
That should remove conflicts with the external unit, if it is writable cd/dvd. They are not always both.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-- Aristotle
Nostalgia, you know, ain't what it used to be. Furthermore, they tells me, it never was.
“A Man Who Does Not Read Has No Appreciable Advantage Over the Man Who Cannot Read” - Mark Twain
Another silly question: how old is the disc to which you're trying to burn? Try another brand and/or age of disc to rule out the media itself as the culprit. Also, make sure it's *NOT* one of those Music CD-Rs. Many CD burners don't like them.
EDIT: CD-Rs have always had a limited pre-burn shelf life. As improving technology led to quality improvements, that self life has extended over the years. Meaning the older the disc, the more likely it's well past its shelf life. The shelf life also depended/depends on the specific brand. Some were/are better than others.
Last edited by progmatist; 11-04-2022 at 04:54 PM.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
Citation? I've never heard that before. I have some CD-RWs that are 5 years old -- don't use them much -- and they still work when I need one.
I tried the 2nd suggestion and disabled the internal drive. It worked! Thanks!
Not silly at all. I assumed it was a player and a burner, but once I thought about it did not know for sure.
If it claims to be a DVD-RW, it ought to be W capable.
CD-RWs are a different animal. They're written by actually melting the substrate. So they can be erased and rewritten by remelting the substrate. And many players which can play CD-Rs without a problem don't like CD-RWs.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
CD-RW's often work properly only in the drive that wrote them.
Likewise if you write a disk and don't finalize it. Reads ok in that system , but until it's finalized no where else ( reliably ).
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-- Aristotle
Nostalgia, you know, ain't what it used to be. Furthermore, they tells me, it never was.
“A Man Who Does Not Read Has No Appreciable Advantage Over the Man Who Cannot Read” - Mark Twain
Any recommendations for a good, free program (PC) to convert WAV to MP3? I used to have something...
https://www.freac.org/
LAME will convert file from and to many different formats--but you have to use the dreaded command line unless there's a GUI somewhere that can drive it.
^^ The freeac rcarlberg suggested uses LAME as an encoder. With a nice GUI. Many GUI apps use LAME under the hood, as well as ffmpeg. The command line utility ffmpeg even uses LAME to encode MP3s.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
Winamp. They just released a new version.
^ Thanks. I ended up using one of those online converters. Maybe not a great idea, but, oh well…
^^ The only thing online converters do is turn your web browser into a local converter. Same with photos, videos, PDF files, et cetera, et cetera. Your files are not being uploaded to the cloud. They're being processed locally.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
I have a new question that someone here might be able to answer?
I bought tickets for Umphrey’s McGee through Ticketmaster for later this week. They are mobile tickets. I can get to them fine on my phone, but when I try to get to them on my laptop I get a message saying “Ooops…….something went wrong”. When I try to go to My Account, I just get a blank page. I can sign onto the website and it recognizes my name, but I can’t get any tickets that I have purchased on the laptop.
The reason I want to get to them on my laptop is that I want to transfer two of the tickets. I can do it on my phone, but I prefer to do it on my laptop as it is a bit less clunky.
Anyone know of a reason why I can get to my account on my phone, but not on my laptop?
Thanks in advance.
Just guessing, but it sounds like maybe a security setting. You might have Ticketmaster blocked as a spam generator (which they often are...)
https://help.ticketmaster.com/s/arti...language=en_US
I have not changed any settings that I know. I can get to the web site and log in, but when I click on "My Tickets" I get the "Ooops" message. Is there a way to unblock it if that is the case?
Maybe TM only allows one online device to access online tickets, to prevent duplication?
I'm totally guessing of course.
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