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Have you seen Gotham?

Ah. Ok. Well, in that case, I’ve got an idea.

And, being honest here, I’ve learned this in the last few minutes, but apparently MP4 can technically only hold a certain number of different kinds of audio. There are some not-to-spec ways to put things like uncompressed WAV or FLAC into an MP4, but a lot of tools don’t support that.

I just did some tests with FFMPEG and was not able to embed FLAC or WAV (pcm_s16le or pcm_s24le) into an M4A container, but I was able to embed ALAC into an M4A file with the following command:

ffmpeg -i zelda_25th_symphony_01.flac -acodec alac zelda_25th_symphony_01.m4a

And mpv is able to play the resulting M4A file just fine.

So, it seems like what you’re going for is doable, at least depending which tool you use. But FFMPEG can do it. Whether your player of choice can play it is another question, but it definitely seems worth a try.

Oh, by the way, the M4A file is a tiny bit larger than the FLAC file:

tootsweet@computer /tmp $ ls -lah zelda*
-rw-r--r--. 1 tootsweet tootsweet 43M Nov  8 11:16 zelda_25th_symphony_01.flac
-rw-r--r--. 1 tootsweet tootsweet 44M Nov  8 11:40 zelda_25th_symphony_01.m4a
tootsweet@computer /tmp $ ls -la zelda*
-rw-r--r--. 1 tootsweet tootsweet 44481504 Nov  8 11:16 zelda_25th_symphony_01.flac
-rw-r--r--. 1 tootsweet tootsweet 45660506 Nov  8 11:40 zelda_25th_symphony_01.m4a
tootsweet@computer /tmp $

(Username and computer hostname changed to protect the guilty.)

MP4 is a “container format” designed for having multiple media streams (typically video, audio, and subtitles) in one file. Despite the name, it’s not the successor to MP3. The fact that a file is an MP4 doesn’t tell you what compression was used to compress whatever audio (or other) streams might happen to be in the file. You can make an MP4 file with a single FLAC audio stream in it. Or an MP4 file with a single MP3 or OGV or Speex stream in it. And the size of an MP4 can vary wildly based on what codecs were used to compress whatever streams might be in it. An .m4a file is just an MP4 file with a different extension intended to indicate that that particular MP4 file only has audio in it.

But anyway, to your question, the thing with lossless compression like FLAC is that it gives better fidelity at the cost of larger file sizes. Not as large as uncompressed audio files like WAVE files, but much larger typically than lossy-compressed formats like MP3, OGV, Speex, Opus, AAC, WMA, etc.

If you’re wanting to keep the same level of fidelity (that is, lossless), your options are basically (and being honest here, I got this list with like 30 seconds of googling) FLAC, ALAC, Ape, and WavePack. I’ve seen a couple of mentions that Ape may be a very tiny bit better than FLAC, but at the cost of much more computational complexity (e.g. more CPU usage). And WavePack might (I’m not sure) be a tiny bit better in some fairly narrow cases. ALAC seems mostly agreed to be inferior to FLAC in almost every way.

So, you could play with other lossless formats and see if you could shave a tiny bit off of your file sizes relative to FLAC, but the chances you’ll get a significant savings over FLAC without using a lossy format is are basically nil. And other lossless formats are likely to be more computationally intensive and less supported by hardware and software.

And this isn’t just because FLAC is not as good as it could be. Lossless compression is inherently going to give you bigger file sizes than lossy. FLAC has a certain amount of information it has to pack into a stream and, being lossless, it’s not allowed to strategically thow away part of that information to achieve a “balance” of fidelity versus file size the way lossy formats do. (Lossy formats mostly prioritize for discarding things that the human ear isn’t likely to hear like frequencies above or below the range of human hearing.) There’s only so much a compression algorithm can do to reduce file size within those constraints. And honestly, FLAC is really good at compressing efficiently within those constraints.

Now, all that said, I think most FLAC encoders offer the option of tuning the tradeoff between compression efficiency and CPU usage when decoding. If you wanted smaller FLAC files, again, the savings aren’t likely to be huge, but you could just up the compression level to 11 and let your CPU do a lot of extra work during playback just to save hard drive space. How to tune that compression-level parameter would depend what software you’re using to do the encoding. FFMPEG, for instance, has a compression level parameter.

I hate when blarn eat showegh whale snert. Every time, yargh hugh mort B.

The only part I don’t understand is why part of it is in Morse code.

https://zombo.com/

My mother is constantly googling things and reading me the AI overview. And I know LLMs make shit up all the time, and I don’t want AI hallucinations to infect my brain and slowly fuck up my worldview. So I always have to drop everything and go confirm the claims from the AI overview. And I’ve caught plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations. (One I remember: she googled for when the East Wing of the White House was originally built and the AI overview told her the year of a major renovation, claiming it was the year it was built, but it had been built much earlier.)

The horrors persist, but so do $5 single-topping hot and ready-to-go.

Nope. I reply to bots quite frequently. I’m often the only commenter in the thread, but if I have something to say about what the bot posted, I’ll comment.

Often my comments are to make fun of blockchain or LLMs. But if the Hacker News bot posts a link to a blog post on underwater beekeeping and I have an opinion, I’ll post whatever I think adds to the conversation.

Nice try, Danny Ocean.

That sounds like exactly the sort of thing therapy is for. I’m no kind of expert, but it’s very likely there’s a lot of deeper things keeping you from developing achieving the kind of skills you’re wanting. And it sounds very much like it’s a problem in your life that’s causing you a lot of anxiety and pain. I think if there’s any way you can do talk therapy, that’s the place to start.

Wow. Huge topic. And it depends on a ton of things. And I definitely don’t feel like I’ve got it all figured out myself.

If you’re young and just for the first time having to manage your own affairs rather than depend on parents to help with that, then self-help kind of stuff might well be a fine place to start. (Just avoid Jordan Peterson.) If you’re older and feel like you’ve had the time needed to develop those skills and still don’t have them, it’s likely there’s something deeper going on that might benefit from therapy.

I personally cared for my ailing grandmother for a long time. And that shit’s hard work, and takes a lot of time. In the process, I let a lot of things go by the wayside like yardwork, home repair, and organization. Now that she has passed, I find myself with a lot of remedial work to catch up on. I feel like I’m making progress. It’s frustrating and slow, but it is progressing and that’s the important part.

Clearly they were smarter than we are.

Send help.

Every time you see a Grimreaper thread, I want you all to remember…

I just did the “fall back” thing for daylight saving’s time and the dog started getting insistent an hour early.

I explained that this way, it’s still light out on my drive home and it saves money on lighting, but she wouldn’t hear it.

I can definitely see a lot of good applications for this way of doing things.

It does seem like I often run across “error handling” code that literally just catches a bunch of different exception types and throws a new exception with the same content from the caught error just reworded, adding literally zero helpful information in the process.

It’s definitely the case that sometimes the exact sort of crash you’d get if you didn’t handle errors is exactly the best sort of exception output the program could do given its particular use case and target audience. Or at least it might be best to let the error be handled much further away in the call stack.

Behold: The current state of LLMs. The pinnacle of human achievement.

Well, 50% is “at least 15%”.

Samhain, the night when !witchymemes@lemmy.world leaks into other communities. And I’m here for it.