MP3s? What year is it? Why isn't this thing using FLAC?

[Victoria]

Jesus Christ Valve, get your ♥♥♥♥ together. Who the hell is still using MP3? A garbage lossy audio format invented 20 years ago for transmission of audio files over dial-up. I think we can do a little better than that here in the year 2014, can't we?

Lossless audio or nothing. If I didn't care about audio fidelity I wouldn't be using Steam. I'd be a console peasant.

[ennui]

Publicado originalmente por Blackbird:

I'm not some audiophile that cares about sound quality I wouldn't notice anyway and my speakers are mediocre, but I don't see any reason to use MP3 when FLAC is available. It's like using AVI instead of MKV or JPG instead of PNG. Just support it already

And here he is, the famous Sir-Ididn'treadanyoftheotherposts!
Telling anybody or thing to "just do it already" is absurd, by the same logic, I should get results from saying this:

"I'm not some hardcore gamer that cares about game quality
I wouldn't notice anyway and my taste is mediocre, but I don't see any reason to sell Episode 1 when Episode 2 is available. It's like keeping Portal instead of Portal 2 or Counter Strike instead of Counter Strike Global Offensive. Just sell HL3 already"

MP3 and FLAC aren't in direct competition here. If FLAC gets in, that doesn't mean mp3 is going to be removed, and if FLAC had gotten in first, that doesn't mean that MP3 would replace it. There are a multitude of reasons to use MP3 over FLAC, as well; namely file size, irellevance of enhanced quality to a majority of users, commonality on the service that it's to be supported in (There are maybe 3 game soundtracks on steam that download FLAC files), usage by the developers themselves (you'll notice that developers generally start out making things that work with the stuff they like) and relevancy in the face of other unreleased features, such as a friggin' seekbar.

I reiterate that FLAC is a good filetype, but isn't especially suited for what was designed as a barebones basic music player for the general steam community. If FLAC was the dominating go-to filetype, you'd be damn sure there'd be more people here complaining about how it's not in here.

[DNR3]

tta anyone?

[Ashmore [目隠しダ]]

Publicado originalmente por Hatespookwich:

Publicado originalmente por Blackbird:

I'm not some audiophile that cares about sound quality I wouldn't notice anyway and my speakers are mediocre, but I don't see any reason to use MP3 when FLAC is available. It's like using AVI instead of MKV or JPG instead of PNG. Just support it already

And here he is, the famous Sir-Ididn'treadanyoftheotherposts!
Telling anybody or thing to "just do it already" is absurd, by the same logic, I should get results from saying this:

"I'm not some hardcore gamer that cares about game quality
I wouldn't notice anyway and my taste is mediocre, but I don't see any reason to sell Episode 1 when Episode 2 is available. It's like keeping Portal instead of Portal 2 or Counter Strike instead of Counter Strike Global Offensive. Just sell HL3 already"

MP3 and FLAC aren't in direct competition here. If FLAC gets in, that doesn't mean mp3 is going to be removed, and if FLAC had gotten in first, that doesn't mean that MP3 would replace it. There are a multitude of reasons to use MP3 over FLAC, as well; namely file size, irellevance of enhanced quality to a majority of users, commonality on the service that it's to be supported in (There are maybe 3 game soundtracks on steam that download FLAC files), usage by the developers themselves (you'll notice that developers generally start out making things that work with the stuff they like) and relevancy in the face of other unreleased features, such as a friggin' seekbar.

I reiterate that FLAC is a good filetype, but isn't especially suited for what was designed as a barebones basic music player for the general steam community. If FLAC was the dominating go-to filetype, you'd be damn sure there'd be more people here complaining about how it's not in here.

Yeah, not so many Steam Soundtrack are in FLAC. But does it really matter? Steam Music isn't thought to be used as your Game Soundtrack Player. Since you can add your personnal music by adding folder, it's more meant to be your Music Player when you play something on Steam but want your own music, instead of the game music. Having different format supported is always a nice touch and is something needed to make a Music Player successful. Hell, all my playlist isn't in mp3. I have some .wav, some .mp3, some .ogg, some .m4a, some .flac so yeah, more file supported would be really great even if FLAC or other format are sometimes quite big.

[ennui]

Publicado originalmente por Ashmore 目隠しダ:

Publicado originalmente por Hatespookwich:

I SAID THINGS HERE AND IT WAS HUGE SO I'M DOING THIS

Yeah, not so many Steam Soundtrack are in FLAC. But does it really matter? Steam Music isn't thought to be used as your Game Soundtrack Player. Since you can add your personnal music by adding folder, it's more meant to be your Music Player when you play something on Steam but want your own music, instead of the game music. Having different format supported is always a nice touch and is something needed to make a Music Player successful. Hell, all my playlist isn't in mp3. I have some .wav, some .mp3, some .ogg, some .m4a, some .flac so yeah, more file supported would be really great even if FLAC or other format are sometimes quite big.

It does matter, because when you first launch steam music those soundtracks are immediately added to the steam music library. It's meant for all music, but my point was that Valve was starting out on a file format that was not only common outside of steam, but also common WITHIN steam

[Star-X]

VGMStream should be supported natively tbh. That would effectively kill any reason to continue using Winamp if it was actually added.

[bloody.albatross]

Publicado originalmente por Hatespookwich:

Also, has it been confirmed that these libraries are present in non-linux copies of Steam?

I don't have a Windows installation with Steam anymore, but I can remember to have seen a libavcodec.dll or ffmpeg.dll or whatever they called it in my last Windows Steam installation. The steam runtime is a Linux/Steam OS thing as far as I know.

[sasha5K]

I never cared for FLAC, MP3 is just fine

[PorcusGrunzus]

Most still use MP3 and thats fine.
Im using it too but I keep Flac files for encoding my MP3 files.
Cant hear a difference between MP3 CBR 320 / VBR V0 and Flac.
And I dont believe people who do.
Thats the same sort of people who say that vinyls sound better because of their cracking and this trash.

[noa]

mp3 and flac have different purposes, there is absolutely zero point in comparing these. also while mp3 has a bit crude design because the decoders had to be compatible with mp2/mp1, it's still technically a very interesting format and achieves (depending on the psychoacoustic model of the encoder of course) perfectly fine files for everyday use.
if you use flac, it's not about hearing a difference between it and for example V0 files from lame (or cbr 320). Hell personally I probably wouldn't even be able to distinguish V2 files (always depends on the certain song/genre of course). But that's not the point here. The point is people chose to use flac files as a means of archiving their music library digitally. if I buy a CD I want to rip it once to flac and then it can dust somewhere on my shelf. with the flac I have a perfect representation of every audio sample of this CD, and I can use it anytime to compress it into other formats (ogg, mp3, aac, whatever floats my boat) and which I do for certain purposes. for example I only need one music archive (preferably of course back-upped), but what I mean is I don't need flac files on any of my other devices that I use to listen to music with. because there is no real reason. at least I wouldn't be able to distinguish between flac files and v0 mp3's anyway, so I save precious space by converting them beforehand. I can do this converting of course only because I have a nice flac copy in my music archive. I'm not really a fan of converting from a lossy format into another lossy format (or the same with different encoder settings) as that is definitely something that audibly makes the sound quality worse.
so why should steam music support flac format? after all, if it's main plus point is that you can use it to perfectly archive your music, why don't I just make another music folder with my whole library converted to mp3? well, that is definitely a possibility, but of course it's a bit redundant to have the same music twice on the same machine, and there's no reason for steam music to not support flac.
is flac encumbered by patents like mp3 or aac? no. it's a free audio codec anybody can use without having to pay any royalties and whose decoder (and encoder, too of course) source code is freely available on the net. is it mature? yes, it is very mature. it has been in development since around 2001 if my memory serves me right, and since then there haven't really been any problems with any version of the reference libraby. (I say reference because you're of course free to write your own or modify it.)
of course what also should be considered is the popularity of the codec. in my mind it's important to support at least one lossless audio codec, but why should steam at least choose flac here? (there are many others around... alac, wav, ape etc.)
flac is supported by the highest amount of hardware devices compared to other lossless codecs, many music online stores let you directly download flac files, and it also supported best across music software. for an example of what I'm speaking about look at this: https://xiph.org/flac/links.html
I hope that clears some questions some people may have had. Of course in the end it comes down to personal preference, but I want to encourage people to try out flac if they never used it before. if you want to convert wav files to flac, you can use one of the many gui programs that come with built-in codecs, and I think ffmpeg should also support it, but of course you can also just use the reference implementation, a windows build of it (if you don't want to compile it yourself) you can find here: http://www.rarewares.org/lossless.php#flac-bundle
have a nice day!

[NeptNutz]

Remember the first time you heard a CD of your favorite album ... and it sucked?

Then, remember when you heard an mp3 of your favorite album and you thought, "This sounds horrible! I wish I had my CD."

And then, remember when you stopped caring about music because it didn't sound like music anymore; just a bunch of 8-bit dog $hit?

Yeah, me too!

[PorcusGrunzus]

Publicado originalmente por NeptNutz:

Remember the first time you heard a CD of your favorite album ... and it sucked?

Then, remember when you heard an mp3 of your favorite album and you thought, "This sounds horrible! I wish I had my CD."

And then, remember when you stopped caring about music because it didn't sound like music anymore; just a bunch of 8-bit dog $hit?

Yeah, me too!

Im sorry for guys like you who cant enjoy music anymore.
Im fine with Flac and MP3 CBR 320Kbits and love music.
Actually I think its even better than some years ago.
Better mastering and crystal clear audio, in the normal case.
Sure that you wont get this with a MP3 CBR 128Kbits lol.

[AJay]

FLACs are one of the best codecs to use on the PC, it's mainly for archiving and you can use them to convert to other formats for other devices, but why use even more disk space to have mp3s for steam? Don't exactly want two copies of songs in different codecs even though had drives are getting dirt cheap now.

As for people believing there is no difference between FLAC and MP3 and others, that may be true because of your hardware. You can only really tell the difference with a decent sound card and a good pair of headphones (Not beats -_-). Mothercards have a simple on board soundcard good enough for general use.

Either way, it's always better to keep FLAC files handy on the computer and can use to convert to other formats, always keep good quality MP3s or AACs by doing this.

[PorcusGrunzus]

Publicado originalmente por Chamilsaan:

FLACs are one of the best codecs to use on the PC, it's mainly for archiving and you can use them to convert to other formats for other devices, but why use even more disk space to have mp3s for steam? Don't exactly want two copies of songs in different codecs even though had drives are getting dirt cheap now.

As for people believing there is no difference between FLAC and MP3 and others, that may be true because of your hardware. You can only really tell the difference with a decent sound card and a good pair of headphones (Not beats -_-). Mothercards have a simple on board soundcard good enough for general use.

Either way, it's always better to keep FLAC files handy on the computer and can use to convert to other formats, always keep good quality MP3s or AACs by doing this.

I have a HiFi device. My computer has a ASUS Xonar DX soundcard and my speakers are good too + Subwoofer. Cant really hear a difference between Flac and MP3 CBR 320/VBR V0. If you can you are either very skilled or imagine it. Actually there shouldnt be a way for Human ears to notice this difference.

[Emilio Gomez]

FLAC is lossless, meaning a BIG FILE and SLOW DOWNLOAD, for something that in most cases comes free with your game either from Steam or from a third-party provider like Humble Bundle. MP3 or M4A is fine, dude. Also, Valve, make the Half-Life soundtrack available for HL Source. Peace out!

[🅸🆅🅰🅽]

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