As scary as movie posters come, nothing should be scarier in this technological generation, than the MP3. Designed to sacrifice quality for convenience, a large new generation of kids have grown up without appreciating audio quality.

What is an MP3? (from Wikipedia)
MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 , more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players.

The use in MP3 of a lossy compression algorithm is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio for most listeners. An MP3 file that is created using the setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file that is about 1/11th^{[note 1]} the size of the CD file created from the original audio source. An MP3 file can also be constructed at higher or lower bit rates, with higher or lower resulting quality.

“Still sound faithful” is the true statement to be worried about. Since many of the new music listeners are born into the “MP3 Generation”, they do not know the true nature of music. It is not their fault (if they ever saw a LP, they might believe it is a frisbee), it is just a product of corporate capitalism. Since the MP3 is “easy to ship & distribute”, due to its small file size, consumers can get product easily, thus continuing the business cycle. If you’ve only been exposed to an MP3, you would be appalled at what true music sounds like.

Solution: FLAC or Analog

The MP3 is a lossy digital format, thus loosing quality. A common characteristic of the MP3 is how all the music is “mushed together”, elevating drums sounds and phasing out the low frequencies, such as the bass guitar. In order to solve this issue there are two solutions besides apathy: Analog Recordings & FLAC.

Analog recordings, such as 45″ and LPs, are a great source of audio quality because, when live music is recorded, the whole stream of frequencies is “captured”, and can be easily “reproduced” due to the large size of their products.

(photo: http://starguitarx.deviantart.com/art/record-104848831)

FLAC, on the other hand is a digital solution, that can easily be played on your PC, Ipod or and other MP3.

What is FLAC? (from Wikipedia)

Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is a file format for lossless audio data compression, primarily authored by Josh Coalson.

FLAC reduces bandwidth and storage requirements without sacrificing the integrity of the audio source. A digital audio recording (such as a CD track) encoded to FLAC can be decompressed into an identical copy of the audio data. Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced to 50–60% of their original size.^[2] During compression, FLAC does not lose quality from the audio stream, a notable characteristic of lossy compression formats such as MP3, AAC, and Vorbis.

Although there aren’t many MP3 players which dedicate themselves to FLAC, but there is often a firmware solution. If you have a rooted Android phone, you can easily install the Cyanogen ROM, which enables FLAC support. Like “fat free ice cream”, the MP3, is just a tease.

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