Won't lossy audio formats (ogg,mp3,etc) become obsolete soon?

[Sporkman]

Well I decided it's finally time to scan our 100-200 CD collection & put it on our home server. Having not done this thing before, I had to decide the format - namely lossy (ogg) or lossless (flac). Of course lossless is preferable, but the cost is greater file size - for regular-length songs, the file size seems to be around 25mb, which seems big...

But then you figure, for 100 CDs, 10 songs each, that's 100 x 10 x 25mb = 25 GB. That's nothing! Our home server has 500GB, and regular-priced USB keys even have at least this much storage space. And storage is continuing to become cheaper and cheaper.

What's the rationale for lossy audio formats continuing to exist going forward?


As an aside, another consideration was whether my wife's Mac would run flac files... I had to download & install "Cog" for it to do that.

[kyle99]

I think the main benefit of lossy formats is to use on portable devices, but of course, you can just keep a flac collecting and convert to ogg/mp3 to put on a player. I think in the next 1-2-3 years, lossy formats WILL become obsolete.

[Firestem4]

Trailing on what the previous poster said, With FLAC, the songs are CD quality. You can always convert it to other formats (eg: ogg) perfectly. Converting mp3 to ogg though is even more lossy because mp3 is a lossy codec itself.

I agree with you OP. As storage increases and prices become cheaper, storing all that information isn't as difficult. (This is a generalization though, as we know data capacity is not linear. The more data we have, the more storage we need. We will always need greater and greater amounts of storage for certain things.) Music however (unless songs start becoming 17minutes a peice) will remain the same.

I recommend that you rip your collection in FLAC. (Also if you don't mind spending a few extra seconds, do it at highest Compression. Compress 1-8 is still the same quality, just takes more to compress at 8 ). This way your music collection 20 years from now can be trans-coded to another format if the need arises, because FLAC is CD quality anyways. =)

[Paqman]

What's the rationale for lossy audio formats continuing to exist going forward?

Storage is one thing, bandwidth is another. 25GB might not be much of a bite out of your storage, but it's a big chunk of time to download. If your content is getting delivered digitally, then the bandwidth is a bigger issue than the storage.

Expanding storage simply relies on replacing discrete hardware, expanding bandwidth relies on improvements in infrastructure. It's a lot easier and cheaper to double the storage in a million computers than it is to double the bandwidth to a million homes. I know in Europe costs for next gen fiber networks are looking at about €1000 per user.

So I don't think compression is going to die out for a good few years yet.

[tubezninja]

I agree with you OP. As storage increases and prices become cheaper, storing all that information isn't as difficult. (This is a generalization though, as we know data capacity is not linear. The more data we have, the more storage we need. We will always need greater and greater amounts of storage for certain things.) Music however (unless songs start becoming 17minutes a peice) will remain the same.

And this is exactly why lossy formats will continue to be popular, even ignoring the bandwidth argument. If storage space really weren't an issue, we wouldn't be bothering with compression at all. Just store your files as raw uncompressed PCM. Why waste energy and CPU cycles? Storage is cheap, right?

The fact is that the more storage one has, the more stuff they're going to want to fit in it. Users are used to their 5 minute songs taking up only a few megs of space, and it's difficult to convince the average listener, who perceives little to no difference between a lossy compressed and a lossless or uncompressed rendition, that they should use their new 2TB hard drive to store media content that takes up more space.

[3rdalbum]

Well I decided it's finally time to scan our 100-200 CD collection & put it on our home server. Having not done this thing before, I had to decide the format - namely lossy (ogg) or lossless (flac). Of course lossless is preferable, but the cost is greater file size - for regular-length songs, the file size seems to be around 25mb, which seems big...

But then you figure, for 100 CDs, 10 songs each, that's 100 x 10 x 25mb = 25 GB. That's nothing! Our home server has 500GB, and regular-priced USB keys even have at least this much storage space. And storage is continuing to become cheaper and cheaper.

Two problems with this:

1. Home servers generally hold lots of video too; your FLAC-compressed audio takes up as much room as twelve compressed movies. I'd rather have the twelve compressed movies! (in fact, I'm deleting some of my audio from my server to make room for more video)

2. Economically, 1TB hard disks make the most sense. The biggest personal hard disk you can buy is 2TB, partly due to the El Torito disk size limit, and partly because a 2TB hard disk is much more expensive than two 1TB hard disks.

I only have room for one 3.5 inch hard disk in my home server... and until the prices come down, it's only going to be a 1TB!

Also, nobody seems to be interested in removing the disk size limit that we're currently nudging against - the workaround is to RAID, but even if you have a RAID-capable controller (I don't) and enough room in your server to have multiple HDDs (I don't) you're still halving the integrity of your data by splitting a filesystem across two disks. Until El Torito is replaced, I don't think we'll see consumer hard disks that exceed 2TB.

[hessiess]

Yes, lossy formats are going to become obsolete with increased storage capacity, but its still going to take a long time to shift the general public away from them.

you're still halving the integrity of your data by splitting a filesystem across two disks.

There are different versions of RAID and what you say is only valid for raid 0. Generally the point of RAID is so that data is not list if a drive fails, not to increase the storage capacity of a singe volume.

If you just want to increase the storage capacity but don't care about recoverability, manually splitting the data across multiple partitions would be a better option. The UNIX single tree file system makes this seamless to do.

[Warpnow]

Some poor assumptions have lead to a few misthoughts in my opinions:

1. Its not the cost of hard drives that matter, but the size OEMs put in computers.

2. The "regularily priced thumb drives" should be based off of prices at places like target, walmart, best buy, ect, who charge over $100 for a 32gb thumb drive.

[blueshiftoverwatch]

Storage space is increasing. But more and more people are relying on downloading services to obtain their music and bandwidth hasn't increased anywhere near as much as storage has. Especially in places where broadband isn't even available.

[Techsnap]

It would be nice, that's for sure, lossy formats are pretty annoying. Also Vinyl is my preferred platform for music.