Shn, flac & mp3: what are your opinions?

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cheaps
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Shn, flac & mp3: what are your opinions?

Post by cheaps »

Can someone explain why shn & flac are so popular for sharing live recordings?

I just started getting in to this, and I am having trouble understanding why you would want to download (or upload for that matter) a 1 GB concert if you could have a similar sounding format for 100 MB ?

I know that shn is lossless but if you are recording a live show with various extraneous noises (e.g. people talking) then why does it matter? In any case isnt a high bit rate mp3 potentially going to be very close to CD quality?

Perhaps there is more to this than just the audio format? :?
mbv
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Post by mbv »

I only got into downloading shn's and flac's a couple of months ago through sharingthegroove. when I first found that site, I just thought it was a bunch of jam bands and shit, then I dug a little deeper, found an early Cure gig and luckily I just got cable so I could download it. it took a few hours but what the hell, it would of cost £15 from a market stall.
i love mp3 as a format, without Napster I wouldn't have got into 10% of the stuff I'm listening to now. I used to read reviews and interviews, people would say such and such a band were good, so you fire up Napster do a search and voila!
as far as mp3 vs SHN/flac goes, it's all about quality, do you want the best sounding recording you can get, or can you do without the apparently unnoticible frequency drop in sake of file size?
You pay's your money and you takes your choice.
"Hot damn! Let us rumble, keep going and don't slow down ... lets have a little fun ..."
- Hunter S Thompson
Zenchan
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Post by Zenchan »

To be honest, I think there's a certain amount of technology snobbery going on when it comes to things like SHN. All of a sudden all the people using SHN decry MP3s as "near unlistenable", despite the fact they happily traded them for years. Now that they have a superior format, they automatically want to rubbish the old format. Take a look at certain forums on sharingthegroove to see what I mean.
SpaceLine
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Post by SpaceLine »

i have a mixed view on this, and look at mp3's as both good and bad.
because of their small size they are great for sharing and for people with slow internet connections. also great for portable players.

they do not sound as good as uncompressed audio, but this depends more on your playback system and personal preference than anything else. some people swear they sound fine, others swear they sound like shit. i don't mind them, but if i play an mp3 on my home stereo i can most definitely hear the difference and my stereo is not that hot.

the main, and to me most important, reason why many tapers do not like their shows converted to mp3 is because some people who download them will burn them to cdr and then start trading them and passing them off as original, loseless format. i could get really technical but that's beside the point, if you don't believe me i can point you to places that explain all this in depth. the gist of it is that it costs a great deal of money, time and effort to record a show and therefore it is important to the taper that the best representation of his/her work is kept as good as possible. in a few years the size and speed will be a moot point and we'll all have the best quality.

if you download a show in shn format and convert it to mp3 for your own use or to share it with your friends that is fine. but if you convert it to mp3 and then put it up on soulseek or kazaa someone, somewhere is going to burn this to cd and pass it off as a quality recording, which it is not. sorry for the novel, hope that makes it seem more reasonable to you and less of a snobbish issue.
mh
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Post by mh »

I like MP3s for much the same reasons as Spaceline. Portability is key here, and being able to fit an entire show on a USB memory stick is definitely a plus.

As for the sound, again I'm with Spaceline, on any hi-fi you will always notice the difference. Any CD burned from MP3s sounds dull, flat and grey to me, the sparkle is gone. If you're just going to play them on your PC speakers, you probably won't hear a thing wrong.

Having said that, MP3 is a very widely supported standard, whereas shn, flac and all the others need additional software to be installed.
peng2112
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Post by peng2112 »

I personally think that a properly encoded mp3 just cant be beaten, for the sheer portability and quality.
SpaceLine
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Post by SpaceLine »

What is your logic behind this? I am very curious because I see so many people hanging onto mp3 and I don't get it. as i said above, i get it if you only have 56k and you only play files on a small portable mp3 gadget, otherwise i fail to see the logic.

Do you agree with the statement that mp3's are compressed and therefore they do not sound as good as wav files? I am not saying they sound bad, I am only saying they are not as good.

"sheer portability" - for the time being maybe. there are at least 2 players currently available that are hard drive based and have 20gb or larger drives that will play wav files. i have used an iRiver IHP-120 for this, it is almost exactly the same size as the ubiquitous iPod. this had a 20gb hard drive in it. i could fit about 15 entire spiritualized concert recordings onto this in wav format. 15 full shows, that's over 200 songs.

i fully realize that i could have fit many, many more mp3's on this, but that isn't many people's goal(quantity over quality). hard drives are getting bigger while they get physically smaller. wavs are already being compressed to shn and flac in a lossless manner and this will also only get better. 5 years ago i had an 8 gig hard drive in my desktop computer and it was considered large...
cheaps
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Post by cheaps »

Thanks for all those comments. There seems to be a real division between the audiophiles and everyone else!

I didnt see anyone address why quality matters that much if its mainly being used for live concerts which, lets face it, are not normally going to be top quality.

To react on the issue of portability: Spaceline says he would be happy to carry 200 songs in 20 GB. That would not cut it for me. I want to be able to carry ALL my music with me. I currently have a 20 GB Jukebox3 that is already full of MP3s!

Finally I cant agree its an issue of bandwidth. I have fast broadband but still dont want to wait to download a GB if it ends up being about the same quality as an MP3 file that would have been <= 100 MB.
twentysixdollars
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Post by twentysixdollars »

I have resisted commenting on this topic, but I suppose I'll throw my thoughts in for now. I was initially very averse to Mp3: the frequency response is very limited, CD-burnt Mp3s sound dull and tinny, even at high bitrates, and bass response is highly compromised at any bitrate lower than 256. But like it or not they're here to stay: an Mp3 file is incrediblly compact and portable, yes, but the primary appeal is the download speed, which is astonishing compared to WAV format. As an early adapter to the internet, I found that Mp3 was a terrific gimmick for distributing bootlegs from the start; I wouldn't want to pay for the opportunity to listen to them, but distributing live shows, for example, provided a fairly good facsimile of generally substandard original sources. Mp3 is about as good as an old cassette most of the time. Even as hard discs get bigger it seems unlikely that download speeds will improve drastically to make downloading SHN and FLAC files, which require additional codecs to play anyway. Huge size, slow download time, limited compatibility...does anyone sincerely believe these lossless formats will ever overtake Mp3? Anyone using a portable device other than a CD player is clearly no audiophile anyway.
Phillipo
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Storage.

Post by Phillipo »

I've got a 60 GB Zen, and I would much rather get 16000 mp3s there than 300 .shn files.

I understand that tapers want their original quality retained wherever possible, but I don't see that mp3 is *that* bad compared to the loss-less formats.
SpaceLine
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Post by SpaceLine »

Huge size, slow download time, limited compatibility...does anyone sincerely believe these lossless formats will ever overtake Mp3? Anyone using a portable device other than a CD player is clearly no audiophile anyway.
sorry 26, you're way, way off here. you make it sound as if size, speed and compatibility are stuck where they are forever. you truly don't think a lossless format will EVER overtake mp3? you want to buy my 8 track? only $26 for you, on special :lol:

comment about the portable cd is incorrect, last i checked 44.1khz cd files aren't better than 48khz wavs. i've played them on a device much smaller than a portable cd. costs under 300. i think some portable's even support flacs and shns with firmware. this is here now, not in the future.

don't mean to jump on you but you at least have some reasons for liking mp3 other than "3000 songs" and i can understand your viewpoint even though i think it's similar to me telling you about velvet underground(you're talking out your...). that is going to be moot soon anyway. i'll put it another way: what is enough? how many songs is enough? 25,000? doesn't matter what number you pick, sooner rather than later there will be a portable device that will play cd or better quality audio files and it will hold so many you will die before you hear them all.
twentysixdollars
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Post by twentysixdollars »

SpaceLine wrote: sorry 26, you're way, way off here. you make it sound as if size, speed and compatibility are stuck where they are forever.
No, but I do believe connection and download speeds are stuck where they are for the time being, maybe for ten or twenty years. And assuming the alternate formats we're discussing don't get a lot slimmer a lot quicker, I really don't expect them to take off. I realize I wasn't very clear on this point.
comment about the portable cd is incorrect, last i checked 44.1khz cd files aren't better than 48khz wavs. i've played them on a device much smaller than a portable cd. costs under 300. i think some portable's even support flacs and shns with firmware. this is here now, not in the future.
Again, this isn't what I meant either. When I indicated that portable audio consumers who don't use CDs aren't audiophiles, I didn't mean that CD players are any better than, say, formats with higher sampling rates. Perhaps I shouldn't have included them in the example, but many audiophiles listen to CDs; what I meant is, few people expect top-quality audio from portable applications. So using big, lossless files when small, lossy ones will do is a little silly when the difference in quality will not be too detectable in most outdoor applications.

On the same note, I have never heard of a portable CD player that played FLAC or SHN files. I don't know about minidiscs or portable hard discs like the old 'jukebox' mp3 players, but I don't like them anyway.
don't mean to jump on you but you at least have some reasons for liking mp3 other than "3000 songs" and i can understand your viewpoint even though i think it's similar to me telling you about velvet underground(you're talking out your...).
Again, I don't 'like' Mp3s; I think they provide a lot of performance for a small file, but ultimately I think they do music (recordings, that is, not the industry, although I think that too) more harm than good, and as a general rule I don't listen to them. But I can understand how they're practical for applications such as sound bytes or live recordings, where audiophile quality is not an issue.

Out of curiosity, what do you think about the VU?
JBonghit
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Post by JBonghit »

Mp3's are great for checking out a band you have never heard. They're small and quick to download and helps people find new music. Other than that, they're crap. Sound quality is decent but not something you want to trade with.

Shn/Flac/etc are the only way to go. Since many live shows are old, you want to preserve the sound quality and for that you need a lossless compression. Think about the person who went to the gig with his/her recording gear and took the time to make a nice recording of the show. Do you want to have that reduced to mp3 so it's easier to download? It goes against the idea of trading shows.

I can understand if you don't have cable/dsl because the downloads will take weeks to finish, but in terms of quality you can't beat shn or flac.
mh
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Post by mh »

Lossless compression formats will always be needed for the more specialised requirements of trading, etc, but I still say that the advantage of MP3 is sheer portability, by which I mean that you can open it with anything
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