TLD SOUNDTRACK DLC

[eduuC21]

I was thinking about buying the dlc soundtrack but i dont quite understand how it works
if i buy the dlc the musics will play in game while i am playing the game or the musics will stay in my steam library and i can listen to them only when i am online on steam?

[Lodis]

you will get a folder "soundtrack" inside your installation folder of TLD... there you will have the soundtrack as mp3 music files. Therefore you don't have to be online if you want to listen to them.

[Lodis]

hmmm while we are at this subject @ Dr. Dro : why is flac better than mp3 ? (no offense) it seems that i am some kind of prehistoric music listener :D (converts every flac into wma)

[Lodis]

Originally posted by Dr. Dro:

Originally posted by Lodis:

hmmm while we are at this subject @ Dr. Dro : why is flac better than mp3 ? (no offense) it seems that i am some kind of prehistoric music listener :D (converts every flac into wma)

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. To understand why it's great (other than the fact that it is a royalty free), you must understand the difference between lossy and lossless. I'll try to ELI5, but some of it will inevitably come as fancy.

Uncompressed audio (such as PCM, usually in .wav extension), invariably contains the full amount of 0s and 1s irrespective of what's actually recorded in them. Uncompressed audio is always lossless, but it is very, very inefficient in terms of storage, requiring absurd amounts of space. Indeed, audio CDs use uncompressed audio and this is why music from original label CDs usually have very good audio quality, they're mastered directly from the studio source.

The reason files encoded in lossy codecs such as MP3, AAC or WMA (both standard and WMA Professional) are very small is that they essentially delete all unused bits from the audio band and then apply heavy compression, completely deleting parts of the audio that are on the very low and very high bands of the frequency spectrum in order to reduce the amount of data stored. The lower the bit rate, the more data will be inevitably chopped off to meet a size target. This means that when comparing both formats for the same song, you will notice that the lossless one may feel richer and you will also notice purer audio and even some extra instruments you may have never noticed were there (chopped off by compression - very common with cymbals etc).

mp3 was developed at a company called Fraunhofer over 25 years ago, and despite reaching almost universal popularity and compatibility over time, it is a very rudimentary lossy format when compared to modern lossy formats like HE-AAC which use very advanced techniques like spectral band replication and parametric stereo in an attempt to drastically improve the output quality at the same bit rate.

FLAC, Apple Lossless (ALAC), WMA Lossless etc. are all intended to replicate the perfect audio quality afforded by a raw source, but by cutting all the blank data whenever possible to save storage space, except that it will never harm the bits that contain actual audio recorded. A lossless codec will generally contain 99,99% or higher fidelity to the original bit exact uncompressed source, but at substantially lower bit rates - a CD-quality FLAC will usually have ~600-800 Kbps, while uncompressed CD audio runs at 1,41 Mbps, at an always constant bit rate.

It's also one of the reasons why you should never convert from a lossy format to another, data was already lost when encoding from uncompressed or lossless into lossy, and you'll only lose even more as you convert away the detail on your music.

Of course, 320k mp3 is usually good enough for most people to hear, as your ability to listen to higher and lower pitches deteriorate with age, and also with the quality of your audio equipment. Cheap earplugs won't have as much definition as a studio-grade headset, for example, nor will cheap motherboard-embedded audio meet the reproduction quality of a dedicated audio card or external DAC.

.... ok now i understand why there are so many flac files out there thx Dr. Dro :D still i appreciate programs which change "strange" formats into wma and mp3......because i still use a mp3 player to listen to my music XDD