black0ut

joined 2 years ago
[–] black0ut@pawb.social 3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

By your definition, PNG isn't lossless because it's not an exact representation of every single photon of a picture that was taken. You'd need infinity pixels in order to be completely faithful to the "analog" thing that you're trying to picture, in the same way you'd need infinity points to completely translate an analog wave to digital.

When you compress anything with FLAC, you will get the exact same thing you compressed out, so there is no data loss.

Of course, that wave which you compress will not be faithful to the analog thing, but that's just a limitation of digital computers.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 5 points 7 months ago (10 children)

What I meant is yeah, you are right about that, but no, lossless formats aren't called lossless because they don't lose anything to the original, they're called lossless because, after compressing and decompressing, you get the exact same file that you initially compressed.

Another commenter on this post explained it really well.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 5 points 7 months ago (12 children)

When we talk about lossless in the audio encoding world, we aren't comparing directly with the analog wave, as there will always be loss when storing an analog signal in a digital machine. Lossless formats are compared to pure PCM, which is the uncompressed way of representing a waveform in bits.

With audio, every step you take to transform it, capture it, move it or store it, even while working with the analog waveform, degrades it. Even by picking it up with a microphone you're already degrading the waveform. However, generally, the official release CDs or WebDLs are considered the original, lossless, master file. Everything that manages to keep that exact waveform is lossless (FLAC, AIFF, WAV, ALAC...), and everything that distorts it further is considered lossy (MP3, AAC, OPUS...).

Additionally, a "bad transcode" (which is a transcode that involves lossy formats somewhere that isn't the last step) is also considered lossy, for obvious reason. Transcoding FLAC to MP3 to WAV stores the exact same waveform that MP3 made, as it is the lowest common denominator, even though the audio is stored as WAV in its final form.

Transcoding between lossy formats also loses more data, even if the final lossy format can store more bits or is more accurate than the original. This is one of the main problems with lossy codecs. MP3 192kbps to MP3 320kbps will lose information, just like MP3 to AAC. That's why, normally, we use a lossless file and transcode it to every lossy format (FLAC to MP3, then FLAC to AAC...). This way you're not losing more than what the lossy format already loses.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 7 points 7 months ago

I have an extension that lets me block sites from search results. Half the spanish news sites are blocked, because I'm tired of seeing an interesting result, clicking on it, not being able to refuse cookies and having to go back.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 12 points 7 months ago

I've seen, and I have 24bit 96khz files.

They're less common than your average 16bit 42khz, but they do exist.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I've tried myself, and the "loss" is really not that much. You can see it if you zoom, but if you listen to it you can't make out the track it comes from. It sounds more like noise. That was at least on the track I tried this with, maybe in a less compressable track there is more of a difference.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 6 points 8 months ago

I haven't used it yet, nor any other ChatGPT based technology.

The only AI I've used is Google Gemini (pretty similar to ChatGPT), and it's been for completing assignments in a way that makes clear I don't wanna do them, because it's still pretty noticeable when you use AI for anything.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 8 points 8 months ago

Nah they just spend too much money on lawyers so they need them to always be doing something.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 6 points 8 months ago

Dunno why it's down, could be them forgetting to renew the domain or another issue. I don't think that was on purpose.

However, owner and devs are using the downtime to change some infrastructure internally, and that's why it hasn't come back up yet.

ETA for recovery last tuesday was ~a week, so I'm guessing it will be back up soon.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 86 points 9 months ago

It's for boosting Wi-Fi reception, don't worry about it.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The world is gonna roll me

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 2 points 10 months ago

I've gotten the shrek movie to fit in under 25 MiB. You probably can easily fit the whole 4 movies and leave some space for books if you know how to compress video well.

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