Better quality=lossless.
You won't have to worry about it anymore since from 1 lossless format you can go to whatever other lossless format becomes the standard in the future. But yes, FLAC is a good choice for now. Not playable on everything, but still the most "playable" lossless format .wav excluded.
Bonus: a descent DAC and speakers and you're good for hi-res audio as well.

I agree, FLAC is only thing worth considering beyond 320kbps MP3. This is the first time I've heard of a device incapable of playing "high in flac quality" – it seems to me you should either look for an upgrade for whatever software you're using on your PS2, or just stop playing music on your PS2 – which is a very strange use for a PS2. (In fact, I'd have to wonder if whatever setup you're using that incorporates a PS2 would be capable of making ordinary CD audio sound substantially better than 320kpbs MP3.)

My ps2 is modified and hooked to my tv and sound bar in my living room, so when i have guest over i play music from it and its not just for music I play games on it from the internal 1TB HDD, but yea when I try the highest quality flac the song is like 100MB and my ps2 will not play it.

Will flac work on win98 systems are is that to much for the processor?

A subband codec like MPC might do well, but embedded device support isn't as robust as OGG, FLAC, or AAC.

i just ogg everything ~160-240kbps, and if it's a small usb stick I just do some extreme Opus'ing at 60kbps (and obviously since Opus is too new, it's not going to play everywhere but computers)

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

but yea when I try the highest quality flac the song is like 100MB and my ps2 will not play it.

What do you mean by "highest quality flac", anyway? FLAC is lossless and by definition there are no gradients in quality – a FLAC compressed with the highest possible compression will be completely indiscernible from an uncompressed WAV, unless something has gone wrong somewhere.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Will flac work on win98 systems are is that to much for the processor?

I wasn't aware FLAC was particularly processor-intensive.

It remains that you're unlikely to hear any difference between FLAC and 320 kbps. There are many people who will rant about this for hours.
https://warmleftovers.com/2012/08/05/no-flac- … -its-important/

I've had no trouble with FLAC on my AM5x86...

Having music in FLAC's more about the satisfaction of having unadulterated guaranteed-loss-free sound, rather than some silly audiophile myearsarebetterthanyours pissing contests. I've never had the desire to go for 320kbps MP3s, especially with mp3's other issues like the end gap that destroys album-oriented music, and the soon-expiring patent issues

I thought MP3 is old and things have moved on to AAC and other codecs?

MP3 is old, but it still works excellently in exactly the way it was intended to.

I have my entire collection on CD's of course (for archiving), but digitally they are all 256 kbps MP3s.

I have to crank an MP3 file to 224 kbps to hear absolutely no difference between that and the original lossless CD recording, so I thought 256 would be a good number just to be sure.

When you say your "entire collection", what is its origin? Did you rip it from CD yourself, download it, record it, etc?

If you ripped from CD (or recorded from vinyl) direct @ 44/16 and encoded those at 320kbps, you're going to hear any difference if you switch to a lossless format. 320 is "transparent" for just about everything.

Downloads are another story - some dodgy places (even ones selling 'legit' tracks, not just pirates) advertise 320k downloads but transcode that from whatever the hell they have - sometimes even converting a low-bitrate file *up* to high-bitrate. Obviously that's going to sound like a shit sandwich. Unfortunately it's really hard to tell who does that.

Bandcamp is fairly reputable and I believe their standard is to upload lossless files and then the site encodes them downwards for distribution. Soundcloud is more hit and miss, some artists themselves upload as mp3s (including me, on any tracks I made before I knew what the hell I was doing!) and the site transcodes them all to hell. Usually if you hit the download link you get the exactly file the artist uploaded but it's not always consistent. And then you get 3rd party download gates or click-throughs or whatever doing who-knows-what to the music.

3rd party "compilations", torrents, pirates, etc. - assume they don't know or care how to encode properly at best, or are deliberately misleading at worst. Sometimes you get lucky, usually not.

Rendering out tracker music or game music is an entirely different can of worms - don't get me started on all the ways that can go wrong.

Tl;dr if you're already at 320 the source of your music is gonna make way more difference in quality than the compressor/encoding format.

Start with FLAC and then compress down to any other format you need. But don't try turning a compressed format like MP3 into a FLAC as that won't gain you anything but a larger file size. All the compression artifacts inherent in lossy codecs will still be there. You'll have a perfectly lossless representation of a completely lossy audio stream which is not what you want.

1) Create FLACs from WAVs
2) Make MP3s or OGGs or whatever smaller formats from those FLACs

I have FLAC backups of all my music and MP3 alternatives for my phone. I always used to use OGG over MP3 but MP3 has gotten better. Despite OGG being more standard now, there are still devices out there that work better with MP3 than OGG. My phone, for instance, puts random annoying pauses in music when playing back OGG files sometimes. Don't know why. FLAC and MP3 work fine, but then FLACs are big and I can fit more with MP3 so that's what I use.

Keep the MP3s and upgrade your speakers instead. You won't hear a difference going from 320K MP3 to FLAC, but you'll have multiple eargasms as soon as you ditch that soundbar and get a set of real speakers.

Jorpho wrote:

What do you mean by "highest quality flac", anyway? FLAC is lossless and by definition there are no gradients in quality – a FL […]
Show full quote

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

but yea when I try the highest quality flac the song is like 100MB and my ps2 will not play it.

What do you mean by "highest quality flac", anyway? FLAC is lossless and by definition there are no gradients in quality – a FLAC compressed with the highest possible compression will be completely indiscernible from an uncompressed WAV, unless something has gone wrong somewhere.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Will flac work on win98 systems are is that to much for the processor?

I wasn't aware FLAC was particularly processor-intensive.

It remains that you're unlikely to hear any difference between FLAC and 320 kbps. There are many people who will rant about this for hours.
https://warmleftovers.com/2012/08/05/no-flac- … -its-important/

I use dbpoweramp to convert

i just download a flac ripped version of a day to remember to compare to my mp3 320 kbps and i don't really here a difference maybe like a 3% better quality in the flac.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Keep the MP3s and upgrade your speakers instead. You won't hear a difference going from 320K MP3 to FLAC, but you'll have multiple eargasms as soon as you ditch that soundbar and get a set of real speakers.

Headphones provide a more controlled listening experience 😀

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

I use dbpoweramp to convert

Right, so that's compression level, not "quality" level.
https://www.dbpoweramp.com/Help/dMC/flac.htm

Still, 100 MB for a FLAC is huge. Is it a 20-minute music file or something?

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

maybe like a 3% better quality in the flac.

I'm amazed you can quantify a 3% difference. :p

leileilol wrote:

Having music in FLAC's more about the satisfaction of having unadulterated guaranteed-loss-free sound, rather than some silly audiophile myearsarebetterthanyours pissing contests. I've never had the desire to go for 320kbps MP3s, especially with mp3's other issues like the end gap that destroys album-oriented music, and the soon-expiring patent issues

Not trying to force my opinion in any way, but I totally disagree with this.
It all comes down to the speakers when you're trying to hear quality of a music file type. I assure you I walk into a bar (with a known/descent sound system) and tell right away id the DJ is playing crappy mp3s <320 or a lossless format. Again I'm not doing any claims about my ears been better that anybody's else. Using good speakers, let's say some ~500euro quality studio monitors and a ~100euro DAC, you can tell the big difference between a compressed and an uncompressed file when played side by side. It's not imposed, there's really a big difference. OK, from some small computer speakers youtube might even sound better that a WAV for many people but that's another story.

The thing is that keeping music in a compressed format permanently destroys it. And I'm not even talking about anything less than a 320 MP3s, going lower completely destroys the music. You can't ever go back again and that's the main problem for me. So I recommend keeping your music in a lossless format and if you need to play it on some device that can't handle it (eg. most car stereos currently used), convert and make a copy of it.

This is apparently a very sensitive point, so I'll say it once more: I'm not an "audiophile" spending thousands for better cables pretending that I can hear any difference out of them. But lossless music sounding a lot better on the correct equipment is not subjective at all, it's a fact.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

i just download a flac ripped version of a day to remember to compare to my mp3 320 kbps and i don't really here a difference maybe like a 3% better quality in the flac.

Listen with earphones and put on some metal. Metal is one of those genres that benefits from a lossless format.

WAV. plain and simple, works on just about everything.