Lossless MP3?

[Sonnie Parker]

Is there such a thing as lossless mp3? Someone mentioned it elsewhere and I've never heard of it.

I know there is CD Quality mp3, but I did not think it was lossless, but instead just a higher bit rate.

Curious... trying to keep my ID Tags... but would like lossless.

 

[Grayson Dere]

Great question, Sonnie! I actually wondered about this myself in the past but never really dug around to find out. It seems, though, that MP3 is only
a lossy format according to this description I found about MP3 technology. It's a good read.
Supposedly MP3s can can sound like a CD but it's not going to be lossless.


Source: https://alness.gnomio.com/pluginfile.php/258/mod_resource/content/1/On-line%20Resources/Multimedia/3%20Digitised%20Sound%20Data/mp3_lossy_compression.html


"MP3 is a lossy audio compression format. Its full title is MPEG-IAudio Layer 3, or MP3 for short. MP3 is a very popular way of storing audio data. It samples audio data by using a lossy technique that cuts out parts of the sound that the human ear can't hear. Once it has lost this inaudible data, it then applies a further compression technique, called Huffman encoding, to make the file even smaller."

 

[DanDan]

Yes there is. No loss of data or sound obviously, but half the file size. https://www.cnet.com/news/what-is-flac-the-high-def-mp3-explained/

 

[Sonnie Parker]

Florian with Mp3Tag just let me know the same thing... that his program will tag FLAC files. I had no idea.

See https://www.mp3tag.de/en/#formats for a complete list.

I love that program by the way... allows me to fix the incorrect images/covers that are displayed.

Although I'm not sure if my RAM truck will read FLAC. Of course I can also tag WAV files as well... which I did not know.

 

[ddude003]

SoX (Sound eXchange) is a nice utility that slices and dices some of your favorite music file types... Converts from one file type to another... Can upsample and downsample... Can filter... And many other trix... Kind of a Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs... There are even some mods out there that will increase the number of Taps into the millions as well as extend the frequency of the Flac encoder up to full 20 bit sample rates that many modern DACs support up to 768kHz... SoX also supports the latest LAME MP3 encoder for all those MP3 fans out there...

It looks like Mp3Tag supports metadata for both MP3 and Flac...

 

[Sonnie Parker]

I've used EAC (Exact Audio Copy) for years now. Their latest version will compress directly to FLAC, so I pulled out a stack of CD's last night and started adding them to my USB thumb drive, and they play just fine in my RAM truck.

 

[billrobbo]

My Toyota 86/Subaru BRZ will play just about any format so I rip everything to FLAC since USB sticks are so cheap these days.

 

[TheMaddScientist]

I love FLAC. I use it for just about everything. As a musician, I get exposed to a lot of bit resolutions and data rates. FLAC has always handled everything I threw at it, from CD quality (44.1kHz, 16bit) up to studio quality (96kHz, 24bit and more). Unfortunately, neither my 2015 Toyota Avalon nor my 2015 Honda Fit will not play FLACs. I use FFmpeg Batch AV Converter for Windows conversion to MP3, Sound Converter if I happen to be in Linux.

Note that Monkey's Audio, while not as widely usable, is also lossless, takes up less space, and is supported by MP3Tag.