a sauna tent would fix meFeb 26
Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
Show threadKate
@eal playing wav files from a ramdisk gave best sound
then moved on to memory play, initially SQ was worse.
found that a function called memcpy was the culprit, most memory players use memcpy and this is one of the reasons why memory play sounds worse ie digital sounding. Fortunately there is an optimised version of memcpy, using this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy. the other thing I did was to close the file after reading into the buffer.
also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better.
Also making the loop a while x > 0 and decrementing the counter at the end using --x helps (1 cpu tick). Does a while loop sound better than a for loop ? there's something to ponder.
Feb 26 at 3:15pmWeb