FLAC is lossless and more like a ZIP file -- it comes out sounding the same when it is unzipped. Firstly, you only need to pay once for a FLAC album. For the record, the best ripping script I’ve ever used is abcde (a better cd encoder). It might only save 10-15MB per album, over alot of cd’s that can add up. Nevertheless, above is still a great article and before the firmware upgrade, this worked brilliantly. I am looking at purchasing a portable media player, one of the Chinese ones like the Xduoo X3, D9 or NiNTAUS X10 for high-quality audio on the go. Ripping to WAV seems pointless to me, since FLAC decodes directly back into WAV. Even if one can get a 400 GB SD card it still takes a lot of space so every single bit tends to be important. I hence recommend FLAC-4. Previously the only way to get "lossless" files was via the uncompressed CD formats CDA or WAV, but neither is as space-efficient as FLAC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. In your case, you may be right with the FLAC level 0. I do a lot of audio work as I have a recording studio.
Just repeating others compliments, but thanks again for your valuable info. MP3 is a lossy format, which means parts of the music are shaved off to reduce the file size to a more compact level.
With a streaming service, you'd need to pony up for a subscription fee for the rest of your life or lose access to your carefully curated music collection. These days, I’m just using the CLI for encoding WAV files into FLAC. I figure that it only takes a couple minutes at most, and it only has to be done once. To me, it wasn’t necessarily about the quality (seeing as *all* FLAC compression levels result in a lossless file). I assume decode times have a similar trend to encode times? So, regardless of the compression level that is chosen, FLAC will always decode into the exact uncompressed audio track (bit for bit). If you do a blind test, the difference will go away. Below you will find information about the two songs used as tests, and the results (in sortable tables): Song 1: My guess is that the ratio is better in the second song because of actual song itself. If correct, would that mean that someone like me, who keeps several applications and browser tabs open at once, could possibly benefit from using compression level 0, since it would mean whatever media application I am using would need less time making files “ready-to-go”? Though streaming services may come and go, and even the long-term prospects of Spotify are not assured, a FLAC file is like a CD: once you buy it or rip it, it's yours forever (barring storage catastrophes). Currently, almost every record label is on board with the format, and consumers can buy lossless music from both major and indie acts for the same price as the iTunes Store. Synonymous with -l 8 -b 4096 -M -r 4. —————————- Pretty transient. I had forgotten about abcde. I personally don’t like any of the streaming services as I would rather own the music and store it locally (preferably in hi-res, but at least CD quality). If you’re running an old Pentium 4 or something like that, then you may see some substantial difference when decoding. Editors' note, October 28, 2018: This article was originally published in October 2012 and has been updated with new information. Despite its age and its clunky UI, Exact Audio Copy is the best available and I use it because of that, but there are other good options. And Flash memory won’t be affordable much above 1TB in the near future. What if your music player doesn't have apps or network capability? I used Asunder (which is a GTK ripper) for the bulk of my music, but the CLI ripper that you mentioned seems interesting. And then of course, streaming has come on big time in the last few years so some people don’t even store stuff locally any more.
Play Time : 04:20
Regardless,
I’m glad that the post helped you with your decision regarding compression levels. But regardless of whether you are using 16- or 24-bit quality files, FLAC is here to stay. You can’t encode flac into flac – such encoding would require the player to decode the file twice.
I’m glad that you found the post useful, and good luck with the ripping. Length: 23’08” (1388 seconds) Again, though, with any modern processor (which would be the bottleneck for decoding/playback), I think that you will see very little difference.
I’ve never had to use these options and get true stereo separation with my FLAC files when playing them through my main system at home. Regardless of the compression level that you choose for FLAC, you’ll be able to convert it back into WAV or uncompressed audio. Meanwhile, Deezer Elite is another service that offers lossless streaming but currently only to users of Sonos.
I’m not too concerned, but I’ll see if I can get a converter to put them all at FLAC 4 for the final deployment – cost viability of microSD cards tops off at 128GB or 200GB as of mid-2017, so IMO as powerful as phones are nowadays that extra bit of space is worth the trade compared to FLAC 3. Actually, a CD is going to be 10MB per minute of program, so a one-hour CD would be approx. A higher compression rate (resulting in a smaller file-size) means it will take more time when ripping/encoding?
Album: New Dawn There are two main ways to get your FLAC files legally: ripping from CD or purchasing from a digital store. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.1 20141125, 3. The only difference is the amount of processing power to encode/decode, and the corresponding file size. FLAC is an open-source file format which offers true-CD quality rips at half the size. For your questions: 1. Song: A Change of Seasons Bits per Sample : 16 It's "bits of data per second". Also, all copies of CD to FLAC I do with compression level 8. I decided to go with compression level 3 for mine, and have begun ripping everything. if you add more and more music to your library, i would consider compressing at the maximum compression setting. The AIMP converter is perfect for doing the conversion since it maintains the metadata and the covers. Thank you, Jon, for sharing your experience here! But in that case the ripping software would have shown some errors. The Google Home Max supports both streaming and downloaded FLAC files via Chromecast. FLAC files are available for roughly the same price as the equivalent MP3 in online stores and sound much better. Play Time : 04:20 Everything on bandcamp is choose-your-own format though, so I get FLACs there. Good extension of it. Given that it’s lossless, I know you shouldn’t hear any difference – but I did (I wasn’t even listening for anything – it was purely incidental) – I was listening to a particular CD and thought something was different – better even – and when I checked the date on my files, I noticed it was one of my re-rips. I agree with many of your points. So if you compress something, even losslessly, it's at a lower bitrate. Maybe or maybe not. My phone (HTC M9) has a very respectable sound chip and a remarkably good music player, plus a microSD with support for up to 2TB(!! On modern systems, the difference in processing power needed for decoding should be negligible. Thanks for your question. I’ve been going through my family’s CD collections lately, re-ripping them as FLAC rather than the inconsistent-level mp3s they were originally put into. . Time wise it makes almost no difference, the default of 5 took maybe 1 second per song, 8 takes maybe 3 seconds. I use M4A to play music on my cell phone. Probably not. 2. Hard drives are not going to surpass much beyond the current 2TB disk size. The two in particular that I have seen problems are: 1) my mobile from an older microSD card, and 2) a completely obsolete host with an AMD K6-III (yes, I know that’s from 1999, but it still works). Great info! When I did my tests, I used my main equipment at home as well as a DAC and headphones. Stars including Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Deadmau5 and Kanye West called for a fairer deal at the launch of Jay Z's Tidal streaming service. I started ripping them all at 320k or VBR0 maybe 8 to 10 years ago but that’s still not great quality. A .WAV file occupies approx 10MB per 1 minute of audio, so your compression ratio is approx 50% with FLAC but you do have the advantage it is a lossless format. WMA, and live with the minor artifacts. Thanks! DECODED AUDIO WILL NOT BE They are two separate flags, so I don’t think that there’s a problem here with abcde’s encoding. I have yet to test whether my car’s sound system is good enough to warrant it though. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.2 20170101.
FLAC is lossless and more like a ZIP file -- it comes out sounding the same when it is unzipped. Firstly, you only need to pay once for a FLAC album. For the record, the best ripping script I’ve ever used is abcde (a better cd encoder). It might only save 10-15MB per album, over alot of cd’s that can add up. Nevertheless, above is still a great article and before the firmware upgrade, this worked brilliantly. I am looking at purchasing a portable media player, one of the Chinese ones like the Xduoo X3, D9 or NiNTAUS X10 for high-quality audio on the go. Ripping to WAV seems pointless to me, since FLAC decodes directly back into WAV. Even if one can get a 400 GB SD card it still takes a lot of space so every single bit tends to be important. I hence recommend FLAC-4. Previously the only way to get "lossless" files was via the uncompressed CD formats CDA or WAV, but neither is as space-efficient as FLAC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. In your case, you may be right with the FLAC level 0. I do a lot of audio work as I have a recording studio.
Just repeating others compliments, but thanks again for your valuable info. MP3 is a lossy format, which means parts of the music are shaved off to reduce the file size to a more compact level.
With a streaming service, you'd need to pony up for a subscription fee for the rest of your life or lose access to your carefully curated music collection. These days, I’m just using the CLI for encoding WAV files into FLAC. I figure that it only takes a couple minutes at most, and it only has to be done once. To me, it wasn’t necessarily about the quality (seeing as *all* FLAC compression levels result in a lossless file). I assume decode times have a similar trend to encode times? So, regardless of the compression level that is chosen, FLAC will always decode into the exact uncompressed audio track (bit for bit). If you do a blind test, the difference will go away. Below you will find information about the two songs used as tests, and the results (in sortable tables): Song 1: My guess is that the ratio is better in the second song because of actual song itself. If correct, would that mean that someone like me, who keeps several applications and browser tabs open at once, could possibly benefit from using compression level 0, since it would mean whatever media application I am using would need less time making files “ready-to-go”? Though streaming services may come and go, and even the long-term prospects of Spotify are not assured, a FLAC file is like a CD: once you buy it or rip it, it's yours forever (barring storage catastrophes). Currently, almost every record label is on board with the format, and consumers can buy lossless music from both major and indie acts for the same price as the iTunes Store. Synonymous with -l 8 -b 4096 -M -r 4. —————————- Pretty transient. I had forgotten about abcde. I personally don’t like any of the streaming services as I would rather own the music and store it locally (preferably in hi-res, but at least CD quality). If you’re running an old Pentium 4 or something like that, then you may see some substantial difference when decoding. Editors' note, October 28, 2018: This article was originally published in October 2012 and has been updated with new information. Despite its age and its clunky UI, Exact Audio Copy is the best available and I use it because of that, but there are other good options. And Flash memory won’t be affordable much above 1TB in the near future. What if your music player doesn't have apps or network capability? I used Asunder (which is a GTK ripper) for the bulk of my music, but the CLI ripper that you mentioned seems interesting. And then of course, streaming has come on big time in the last few years so some people don’t even store stuff locally any more.
Play Time : 04:20
Regardless,
I’m glad that the post helped you with your decision regarding compression levels. But regardless of whether you are using 16- or 24-bit quality files, FLAC is here to stay. You can’t encode flac into flac – such encoding would require the player to decode the file twice.
I’m glad that you found the post useful, and good luck with the ripping. Length: 23’08” (1388 seconds) Again, though, with any modern processor (which would be the bottleneck for decoding/playback), I think that you will see very little difference.
I’ve never had to use these options and get true stereo separation with my FLAC files when playing them through my main system at home. Regardless of the compression level that you choose for FLAC, you’ll be able to convert it back into WAV or uncompressed audio. Meanwhile, Deezer Elite is another service that offers lossless streaming but currently only to users of Sonos.
I’m not too concerned, but I’ll see if I can get a converter to put them all at FLAC 4 for the final deployment – cost viability of microSD cards tops off at 128GB or 200GB as of mid-2017, so IMO as powerful as phones are nowadays that extra bit of space is worth the trade compared to FLAC 3. Actually, a CD is going to be 10MB per minute of program, so a one-hour CD would be approx. A higher compression rate (resulting in a smaller file-size) means it will take more time when ripping/encoding?
Album: New Dawn There are two main ways to get your FLAC files legally: ripping from CD or purchasing from a digital store. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.1 20141125, 3. The only difference is the amount of processing power to encode/decode, and the corresponding file size. FLAC is an open-source file format which offers true-CD quality rips at half the size. For your questions: 1. Song: A Change of Seasons Bits per Sample : 16 It's "bits of data per second". Also, all copies of CD to FLAC I do with compression level 8. I decided to go with compression level 3 for mine, and have begun ripping everything. if you add more and more music to your library, i would consider compressing at the maximum compression setting. The AIMP converter is perfect for doing the conversion since it maintains the metadata and the covers. Thank you, Jon, for sharing your experience here! But in that case the ripping software would have shown some errors. The Google Home Max supports both streaming and downloaded FLAC files via Chromecast. FLAC files are available for roughly the same price as the equivalent MP3 in online stores and sound much better. Play Time : 04:20 Everything on bandcamp is choose-your-own format though, so I get FLACs there. Good extension of it. Given that it’s lossless, I know you shouldn’t hear any difference – but I did (I wasn’t even listening for anything – it was purely incidental) – I was listening to a particular CD and thought something was different – better even – and when I checked the date on my files, I noticed it was one of my re-rips. I agree with many of your points. So if you compress something, even losslessly, it's at a lower bitrate. Maybe or maybe not. My phone (HTC M9) has a very respectable sound chip and a remarkably good music player, plus a microSD with support for up to 2TB(!! On modern systems, the difference in processing power needed for decoding should be negligible. Thanks for your question. I’ve been going through my family’s CD collections lately, re-ripping them as FLAC rather than the inconsistent-level mp3s they were originally put into. . Time wise it makes almost no difference, the default of 5 took maybe 1 second per song, 8 takes maybe 3 seconds. I use M4A to play music on my cell phone. Probably not. 2. Hard drives are not going to surpass much beyond the current 2TB disk size. The two in particular that I have seen problems are: 1) my mobile from an older microSD card, and 2) a completely obsolete host with an AMD K6-III (yes, I know that’s from 1999, but it still works). Great info! When I did my tests, I used my main equipment at home as well as a DAC and headphones. Stars including Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Deadmau5 and Kanye West called for a fairer deal at the launch of Jay Z's Tidal streaming service. I started ripping them all at 320k or VBR0 maybe 8 to 10 years ago but that’s still not great quality. A .WAV file occupies approx 10MB per 1 minute of audio, so your compression ratio is approx 50% with FLAC but you do have the advantage it is a lossless format. WMA, and live with the minor artifacts. Thanks! DECODED AUDIO WILL NOT BE They are two separate flags, so I don’t think that there’s a problem here with abcde’s encoding. I have yet to test whether my car’s sound system is good enough to warrant it though. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.2 20170101.
FLAC is lossless and more like a ZIP file -- it comes out sounding the same when it is unzipped. Firstly, you only need to pay once for a FLAC album. For the record, the best ripping script I’ve ever used is abcde (a better cd encoder). It might only save 10-15MB per album, over alot of cd’s that can add up. Nevertheless, above is still a great article and before the firmware upgrade, this worked brilliantly. I am looking at purchasing a portable media player, one of the Chinese ones like the Xduoo X3, D9 or NiNTAUS X10 for high-quality audio on the go. Ripping to WAV seems pointless to me, since FLAC decodes directly back into WAV. Even if one can get a 400 GB SD card it still takes a lot of space so every single bit tends to be important. I hence recommend FLAC-4. Previously the only way to get "lossless" files was via the uncompressed CD formats CDA or WAV, but neither is as space-efficient as FLAC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. In your case, you may be right with the FLAC level 0. I do a lot of audio work as I have a recording studio.
Just repeating others compliments, but thanks again for your valuable info. MP3 is a lossy format, which means parts of the music are shaved off to reduce the file size to a more compact level.
With a streaming service, you'd need to pony up for a subscription fee for the rest of your life or lose access to your carefully curated music collection. These days, I’m just using the CLI for encoding WAV files into FLAC. I figure that it only takes a couple minutes at most, and it only has to be done once. To me, it wasn’t necessarily about the quality (seeing as *all* FLAC compression levels result in a lossless file). I assume decode times have a similar trend to encode times? So, regardless of the compression level that is chosen, FLAC will always decode into the exact uncompressed audio track (bit for bit). If you do a blind test, the difference will go away. Below you will find information about the two songs used as tests, and the results (in sortable tables): Song 1: My guess is that the ratio is better in the second song because of actual song itself. If correct, would that mean that someone like me, who keeps several applications and browser tabs open at once, could possibly benefit from using compression level 0, since it would mean whatever media application I am using would need less time making files “ready-to-go”? Though streaming services may come and go, and even the long-term prospects of Spotify are not assured, a FLAC file is like a CD: once you buy it or rip it, it's yours forever (barring storage catastrophes). Currently, almost every record label is on board with the format, and consumers can buy lossless music from both major and indie acts for the same price as the iTunes Store. Synonymous with -l 8 -b 4096 -M -r 4. —————————- Pretty transient. I had forgotten about abcde. I personally don’t like any of the streaming services as I would rather own the music and store it locally (preferably in hi-res, but at least CD quality). If you’re running an old Pentium 4 or something like that, then you may see some substantial difference when decoding. Editors' note, October 28, 2018: This article was originally published in October 2012 and has been updated with new information. Despite its age and its clunky UI, Exact Audio Copy is the best available and I use it because of that, but there are other good options. And Flash memory won’t be affordable much above 1TB in the near future. What if your music player doesn't have apps or network capability? I used Asunder (which is a GTK ripper) for the bulk of my music, but the CLI ripper that you mentioned seems interesting. And then of course, streaming has come on big time in the last few years so some people don’t even store stuff locally any more.
Play Time : 04:20
Regardless,
I’m glad that the post helped you with your decision regarding compression levels. But regardless of whether you are using 16- or 24-bit quality files, FLAC is here to stay. You can’t encode flac into flac – such encoding would require the player to decode the file twice.
I’m glad that you found the post useful, and good luck with the ripping. Length: 23’08” (1388 seconds) Again, though, with any modern processor (which would be the bottleneck for decoding/playback), I think that you will see very little difference.
I’ve never had to use these options and get true stereo separation with my FLAC files when playing them through my main system at home. Regardless of the compression level that you choose for FLAC, you’ll be able to convert it back into WAV or uncompressed audio. Meanwhile, Deezer Elite is another service that offers lossless streaming but currently only to users of Sonos.
I’m not too concerned, but I’ll see if I can get a converter to put them all at FLAC 4 for the final deployment – cost viability of microSD cards tops off at 128GB or 200GB as of mid-2017, so IMO as powerful as phones are nowadays that extra bit of space is worth the trade compared to FLAC 3. Actually, a CD is going to be 10MB per minute of program, so a one-hour CD would be approx. A higher compression rate (resulting in a smaller file-size) means it will take more time when ripping/encoding?
Album: New Dawn There are two main ways to get your FLAC files legally: ripping from CD or purchasing from a digital store. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.1 20141125, 3. The only difference is the amount of processing power to encode/decode, and the corresponding file size. FLAC is an open-source file format which offers true-CD quality rips at half the size. For your questions: 1. Song: A Change of Seasons Bits per Sample : 16 It's "bits of data per second". Also, all copies of CD to FLAC I do with compression level 8. I decided to go with compression level 3 for mine, and have begun ripping everything. if you add more and more music to your library, i would consider compressing at the maximum compression setting. The AIMP converter is perfect for doing the conversion since it maintains the metadata and the covers. Thank you, Jon, for sharing your experience here! But in that case the ripping software would have shown some errors. The Google Home Max supports both streaming and downloaded FLAC files via Chromecast. FLAC files are available for roughly the same price as the equivalent MP3 in online stores and sound much better. Play Time : 04:20 Everything on bandcamp is choose-your-own format though, so I get FLACs there. Good extension of it. Given that it’s lossless, I know you shouldn’t hear any difference – but I did (I wasn’t even listening for anything – it was purely incidental) – I was listening to a particular CD and thought something was different – better even – and when I checked the date on my files, I noticed it was one of my re-rips. I agree with many of your points. So if you compress something, even losslessly, it's at a lower bitrate. Maybe or maybe not. My phone (HTC M9) has a very respectable sound chip and a remarkably good music player, plus a microSD with support for up to 2TB(!! On modern systems, the difference in processing power needed for decoding should be negligible. Thanks for your question. I’ve been going through my family’s CD collections lately, re-ripping them as FLAC rather than the inconsistent-level mp3s they were originally put into. . Time wise it makes almost no difference, the default of 5 took maybe 1 second per song, 8 takes maybe 3 seconds. I use M4A to play music on my cell phone. Probably not. 2. Hard drives are not going to surpass much beyond the current 2TB disk size. The two in particular that I have seen problems are: 1) my mobile from an older microSD card, and 2) a completely obsolete host with an AMD K6-III (yes, I know that’s from 1999, but it still works). Great info! When I did my tests, I used my main equipment at home as well as a DAC and headphones. Stars including Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Deadmau5 and Kanye West called for a fairer deal at the launch of Jay Z's Tidal streaming service. I started ripping them all at 320k or VBR0 maybe 8 to 10 years ago but that’s still not great quality. A .WAV file occupies approx 10MB per 1 minute of audio, so your compression ratio is approx 50% with FLAC but you do have the advantage it is a lossless format. WMA, and live with the minor artifacts. Thanks! DECODED AUDIO WILL NOT BE They are two separate flags, so I don’t think that there’s a problem here with abcde’s encoding. I have yet to test whether my car’s sound system is good enough to warrant it though. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.2 20170101.
FLAC is lossless and more like a ZIP file -- it comes out sounding the same when it is unzipped. Firstly, you only need to pay once for a FLAC album. For the record, the best ripping script I’ve ever used is abcde (a better cd encoder). It might only save 10-15MB per album, over alot of cd’s that can add up. Nevertheless, above is still a great article and before the firmware upgrade, this worked brilliantly. I am looking at purchasing a portable media player, one of the Chinese ones like the Xduoo X3, D9 or NiNTAUS X10 for high-quality audio on the go. Ripping to WAV seems pointless to me, since FLAC decodes directly back into WAV. Even if one can get a 400 GB SD card it still takes a lot of space so every single bit tends to be important. I hence recommend FLAC-4. Previously the only way to get "lossless" files was via the uncompressed CD formats CDA or WAV, but neither is as space-efficient as FLAC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. In your case, you may be right with the FLAC level 0. I do a lot of audio work as I have a recording studio.
Just repeating others compliments, but thanks again for your valuable info. MP3 is a lossy format, which means parts of the music are shaved off to reduce the file size to a more compact level.
With a streaming service, you'd need to pony up for a subscription fee for the rest of your life or lose access to your carefully curated music collection. These days, I’m just using the CLI for encoding WAV files into FLAC. I figure that it only takes a couple minutes at most, and it only has to be done once. To me, it wasn’t necessarily about the quality (seeing as *all* FLAC compression levels result in a lossless file). I assume decode times have a similar trend to encode times? So, regardless of the compression level that is chosen, FLAC will always decode into the exact uncompressed audio track (bit for bit). If you do a blind test, the difference will go away. Below you will find information about the two songs used as tests, and the results (in sortable tables): Song 1: My guess is that the ratio is better in the second song because of actual song itself. If correct, would that mean that someone like me, who keeps several applications and browser tabs open at once, could possibly benefit from using compression level 0, since it would mean whatever media application I am using would need less time making files “ready-to-go”? Though streaming services may come and go, and even the long-term prospects of Spotify are not assured, a FLAC file is like a CD: once you buy it or rip it, it's yours forever (barring storage catastrophes). Currently, almost every record label is on board with the format, and consumers can buy lossless music from both major and indie acts for the same price as the iTunes Store. Synonymous with -l 8 -b 4096 -M -r 4. —————————- Pretty transient. I had forgotten about abcde. I personally don’t like any of the streaming services as I would rather own the music and store it locally (preferably in hi-res, but at least CD quality). If you’re running an old Pentium 4 or something like that, then you may see some substantial difference when decoding. Editors' note, October 28, 2018: This article was originally published in October 2012 and has been updated with new information. Despite its age and its clunky UI, Exact Audio Copy is the best available and I use it because of that, but there are other good options. And Flash memory won’t be affordable much above 1TB in the near future. What if your music player doesn't have apps or network capability? I used Asunder (which is a GTK ripper) for the bulk of my music, but the CLI ripper that you mentioned seems interesting. And then of course, streaming has come on big time in the last few years so some people don’t even store stuff locally any more.
Play Time : 04:20
Regardless,
I’m glad that the post helped you with your decision regarding compression levels. But regardless of whether you are using 16- or 24-bit quality files, FLAC is here to stay. You can’t encode flac into flac – such encoding would require the player to decode the file twice.
I’m glad that you found the post useful, and good luck with the ripping. Length: 23’08” (1388 seconds) Again, though, with any modern processor (which would be the bottleneck for decoding/playback), I think that you will see very little difference.
I’ve never had to use these options and get true stereo separation with my FLAC files when playing them through my main system at home. Regardless of the compression level that you choose for FLAC, you’ll be able to convert it back into WAV or uncompressed audio. Meanwhile, Deezer Elite is another service that offers lossless streaming but currently only to users of Sonos.
I’m not too concerned, but I’ll see if I can get a converter to put them all at FLAC 4 for the final deployment – cost viability of microSD cards tops off at 128GB or 200GB as of mid-2017, so IMO as powerful as phones are nowadays that extra bit of space is worth the trade compared to FLAC 3. Actually, a CD is going to be 10MB per minute of program, so a one-hour CD would be approx. A higher compression rate (resulting in a smaller file-size) means it will take more time when ripping/encoding?
Album: New Dawn There are two main ways to get your FLAC files legally: ripping from CD or purchasing from a digital store. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.1 20141125, 3. The only difference is the amount of processing power to encode/decode, and the corresponding file size. FLAC is an open-source file format which offers true-CD quality rips at half the size. For your questions: 1. Song: A Change of Seasons Bits per Sample : 16 It's "bits of data per second". Also, all copies of CD to FLAC I do with compression level 8. I decided to go with compression level 3 for mine, and have begun ripping everything. if you add more and more music to your library, i would consider compressing at the maximum compression setting. The AIMP converter is perfect for doing the conversion since it maintains the metadata and the covers. Thank you, Jon, for sharing your experience here! But in that case the ripping software would have shown some errors. The Google Home Max supports both streaming and downloaded FLAC files via Chromecast. FLAC files are available for roughly the same price as the equivalent MP3 in online stores and sound much better. Play Time : 04:20 Everything on bandcamp is choose-your-own format though, so I get FLACs there. Good extension of it. Given that it’s lossless, I know you shouldn’t hear any difference – but I did (I wasn’t even listening for anything – it was purely incidental) – I was listening to a particular CD and thought something was different – better even – and when I checked the date on my files, I noticed it was one of my re-rips. I agree with many of your points. So if you compress something, even losslessly, it's at a lower bitrate. Maybe or maybe not. My phone (HTC M9) has a very respectable sound chip and a remarkably good music player, plus a microSD with support for up to 2TB(!! On modern systems, the difference in processing power needed for decoding should be negligible. Thanks for your question. I’ve been going through my family’s CD collections lately, re-ripping them as FLAC rather than the inconsistent-level mp3s they were originally put into. . Time wise it makes almost no difference, the default of 5 took maybe 1 second per song, 8 takes maybe 3 seconds. I use M4A to play music on my cell phone. Probably not. 2. Hard drives are not going to surpass much beyond the current 2TB disk size. The two in particular that I have seen problems are: 1) my mobile from an older microSD card, and 2) a completely obsolete host with an AMD K6-III (yes, I know that’s from 1999, but it still works). Great info! When I did my tests, I used my main equipment at home as well as a DAC and headphones. Stars including Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Deadmau5 and Kanye West called for a fairer deal at the launch of Jay Z's Tidal streaming service. I started ripping them all at 320k or VBR0 maybe 8 to 10 years ago but that’s still not great quality. A .WAV file occupies approx 10MB per 1 minute of audio, so your compression ratio is approx 50% with FLAC but you do have the advantage it is a lossless format. WMA, and live with the minor artifacts. Thanks! DECODED AUDIO WILL NOT BE They are two separate flags, so I don’t think that there’s a problem here with abcde’s encoding. I have yet to test whether my car’s sound system is good enough to warrant it though. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.2 20170101.
FLAC is lossless and more like a ZIP file -- it comes out sounding the same when it is unzipped. Firstly, you only need to pay once for a FLAC album. For the record, the best ripping script I’ve ever used is abcde (a better cd encoder). It might only save 10-15MB per album, over alot of cd’s that can add up. Nevertheless, above is still a great article and before the firmware upgrade, this worked brilliantly. I am looking at purchasing a portable media player, one of the Chinese ones like the Xduoo X3, D9 or NiNTAUS X10 for high-quality audio on the go. Ripping to WAV seems pointless to me, since FLAC decodes directly back into WAV. Even if one can get a 400 GB SD card it still takes a lot of space so every single bit tends to be important. I hence recommend FLAC-4. Previously the only way to get "lossless" files was via the uncompressed CD formats CDA or WAV, but neither is as space-efficient as FLAC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. In your case, you may be right with the FLAC level 0. I do a lot of audio work as I have a recording studio.
Just repeating others compliments, but thanks again for your valuable info. MP3 is a lossy format, which means parts of the music are shaved off to reduce the file size to a more compact level.
With a streaming service, you'd need to pony up for a subscription fee for the rest of your life or lose access to your carefully curated music collection. These days, I’m just using the CLI for encoding WAV files into FLAC. I figure that it only takes a couple minutes at most, and it only has to be done once. To me, it wasn’t necessarily about the quality (seeing as *all* FLAC compression levels result in a lossless file). I assume decode times have a similar trend to encode times? So, regardless of the compression level that is chosen, FLAC will always decode into the exact uncompressed audio track (bit for bit). If you do a blind test, the difference will go away. Below you will find information about the two songs used as tests, and the results (in sortable tables): Song 1: My guess is that the ratio is better in the second song because of actual song itself. If correct, would that mean that someone like me, who keeps several applications and browser tabs open at once, could possibly benefit from using compression level 0, since it would mean whatever media application I am using would need less time making files “ready-to-go”? Though streaming services may come and go, and even the long-term prospects of Spotify are not assured, a FLAC file is like a CD: once you buy it or rip it, it's yours forever (barring storage catastrophes). Currently, almost every record label is on board with the format, and consumers can buy lossless music from both major and indie acts for the same price as the iTunes Store. Synonymous with -l 8 -b 4096 -M -r 4. —————————- Pretty transient. I had forgotten about abcde. I personally don’t like any of the streaming services as I would rather own the music and store it locally (preferably in hi-res, but at least CD quality). If you’re running an old Pentium 4 or something like that, then you may see some substantial difference when decoding. Editors' note, October 28, 2018: This article was originally published in October 2012 and has been updated with new information. Despite its age and its clunky UI, Exact Audio Copy is the best available and I use it because of that, but there are other good options. And Flash memory won’t be affordable much above 1TB in the near future. What if your music player doesn't have apps or network capability? I used Asunder (which is a GTK ripper) for the bulk of my music, but the CLI ripper that you mentioned seems interesting. And then of course, streaming has come on big time in the last few years so some people don’t even store stuff locally any more.
Play Time : 04:20
Regardless,
I’m glad that the post helped you with your decision regarding compression levels. But regardless of whether you are using 16- or 24-bit quality files, FLAC is here to stay. You can’t encode flac into flac – such encoding would require the player to decode the file twice.
I’m glad that you found the post useful, and good luck with the ripping. Length: 23’08” (1388 seconds) Again, though, with any modern processor (which would be the bottleneck for decoding/playback), I think that you will see very little difference.
I’ve never had to use these options and get true stereo separation with my FLAC files when playing them through my main system at home. Regardless of the compression level that you choose for FLAC, you’ll be able to convert it back into WAV or uncompressed audio. Meanwhile, Deezer Elite is another service that offers lossless streaming but currently only to users of Sonos.
I’m not too concerned, but I’ll see if I can get a converter to put them all at FLAC 4 for the final deployment – cost viability of microSD cards tops off at 128GB or 200GB as of mid-2017, so IMO as powerful as phones are nowadays that extra bit of space is worth the trade compared to FLAC 3. Actually, a CD is going to be 10MB per minute of program, so a one-hour CD would be approx. A higher compression rate (resulting in a smaller file-size) means it will take more time when ripping/encoding?
Album: New Dawn There are two main ways to get your FLAC files legally: ripping from CD or purchasing from a digital store. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.1 20141125, 3. The only difference is the amount of processing power to encode/decode, and the corresponding file size. FLAC is an open-source file format which offers true-CD quality rips at half the size. For your questions: 1. Song: A Change of Seasons Bits per Sample : 16 It's "bits of data per second". Also, all copies of CD to FLAC I do with compression level 8. I decided to go with compression level 3 for mine, and have begun ripping everything. if you add more and more music to your library, i would consider compressing at the maximum compression setting. The AIMP converter is perfect for doing the conversion since it maintains the metadata and the covers. Thank you, Jon, for sharing your experience here! But in that case the ripping software would have shown some errors. The Google Home Max supports both streaming and downloaded FLAC files via Chromecast. FLAC files are available for roughly the same price as the equivalent MP3 in online stores and sound much better. Play Time : 04:20 Everything on bandcamp is choose-your-own format though, so I get FLACs there. Good extension of it. Given that it’s lossless, I know you shouldn’t hear any difference – but I did (I wasn’t even listening for anything – it was purely incidental) – I was listening to a particular CD and thought something was different – better even – and when I checked the date on my files, I noticed it was one of my re-rips. I agree with many of your points. So if you compress something, even losslessly, it's at a lower bitrate. Maybe or maybe not. My phone (HTC M9) has a very respectable sound chip and a remarkably good music player, plus a microSD with support for up to 2TB(!! On modern systems, the difference in processing power needed for decoding should be negligible. Thanks for your question. I’ve been going through my family’s CD collections lately, re-ripping them as FLAC rather than the inconsistent-level mp3s they were originally put into. . Time wise it makes almost no difference, the default of 5 took maybe 1 second per song, 8 takes maybe 3 seconds. I use M4A to play music on my cell phone. Probably not. 2. Hard drives are not going to surpass much beyond the current 2TB disk size. The two in particular that I have seen problems are: 1) my mobile from an older microSD card, and 2) a completely obsolete host with an AMD K6-III (yes, I know that’s from 1999, but it still works). Great info! When I did my tests, I used my main equipment at home as well as a DAC and headphones. Stars including Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Deadmau5 and Kanye West called for a fairer deal at the launch of Jay Z's Tidal streaming service. I started ripping them all at 320k or VBR0 maybe 8 to 10 years ago but that’s still not great quality. A .WAV file occupies approx 10MB per 1 minute of audio, so your compression ratio is approx 50% with FLAC but you do have the advantage it is a lossless format. WMA, and live with the minor artifacts. Thanks! DECODED AUDIO WILL NOT BE They are two separate flags, so I don’t think that there’s a problem here with abcde’s encoding. I have yet to test whether my car’s sound system is good enough to warrant it though. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.2 20170101.
FLAC is lossless and more like a ZIP file -- it comes out sounding the same when it is unzipped. Firstly, you only need to pay once for a FLAC album. For the record, the best ripping script I’ve ever used is abcde (a better cd encoder). It might only save 10-15MB per album, over alot of cd’s that can add up. Nevertheless, above is still a great article and before the firmware upgrade, this worked brilliantly. I am looking at purchasing a portable media player, one of the Chinese ones like the Xduoo X3, D9 or NiNTAUS X10 for high-quality audio on the go. Ripping to WAV seems pointless to me, since FLAC decodes directly back into WAV. Even if one can get a 400 GB SD card it still takes a lot of space so every single bit tends to be important. I hence recommend FLAC-4. Previously the only way to get "lossless" files was via the uncompressed CD formats CDA or WAV, but neither is as space-efficient as FLAC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. In your case, you may be right with the FLAC level 0. I do a lot of audio work as I have a recording studio.
Just repeating others compliments, but thanks again for your valuable info. MP3 is a lossy format, which means parts of the music are shaved off to reduce the file size to a more compact level.
With a streaming service, you'd need to pony up for a subscription fee for the rest of your life or lose access to your carefully curated music collection. These days, I’m just using the CLI for encoding WAV files into FLAC. I figure that it only takes a couple minutes at most, and it only has to be done once. To me, it wasn’t necessarily about the quality (seeing as *all* FLAC compression levels result in a lossless file). I assume decode times have a similar trend to encode times? So, regardless of the compression level that is chosen, FLAC will always decode into the exact uncompressed audio track (bit for bit). If you do a blind test, the difference will go away. Below you will find information about the two songs used as tests, and the results (in sortable tables): Song 1: My guess is that the ratio is better in the second song because of actual song itself. If correct, would that mean that someone like me, who keeps several applications and browser tabs open at once, could possibly benefit from using compression level 0, since it would mean whatever media application I am using would need less time making files “ready-to-go”? Though streaming services may come and go, and even the long-term prospects of Spotify are not assured, a FLAC file is like a CD: once you buy it or rip it, it's yours forever (barring storage catastrophes). Currently, almost every record label is on board with the format, and consumers can buy lossless music from both major and indie acts for the same price as the iTunes Store. Synonymous with -l 8 -b 4096 -M -r 4. —————————- Pretty transient. I had forgotten about abcde. I personally don’t like any of the streaming services as I would rather own the music and store it locally (preferably in hi-res, but at least CD quality). If you’re running an old Pentium 4 or something like that, then you may see some substantial difference when decoding. Editors' note, October 28, 2018: This article was originally published in October 2012 and has been updated with new information. Despite its age and its clunky UI, Exact Audio Copy is the best available and I use it because of that, but there are other good options. And Flash memory won’t be affordable much above 1TB in the near future. What if your music player doesn't have apps or network capability? I used Asunder (which is a GTK ripper) for the bulk of my music, but the CLI ripper that you mentioned seems interesting. And then of course, streaming has come on big time in the last few years so some people don’t even store stuff locally any more.
Play Time : 04:20
Regardless,
I’m glad that the post helped you with your decision regarding compression levels. But regardless of whether you are using 16- or 24-bit quality files, FLAC is here to stay. You can’t encode flac into flac – such encoding would require the player to decode the file twice.
I’m glad that you found the post useful, and good luck with the ripping. Length: 23’08” (1388 seconds) Again, though, with any modern processor (which would be the bottleneck for decoding/playback), I think that you will see very little difference.
I’ve never had to use these options and get true stereo separation with my FLAC files when playing them through my main system at home. Regardless of the compression level that you choose for FLAC, you’ll be able to convert it back into WAV or uncompressed audio. Meanwhile, Deezer Elite is another service that offers lossless streaming but currently only to users of Sonos.
I’m not too concerned, but I’ll see if I can get a converter to put them all at FLAC 4 for the final deployment – cost viability of microSD cards tops off at 128GB or 200GB as of mid-2017, so IMO as powerful as phones are nowadays that extra bit of space is worth the trade compared to FLAC 3. Actually, a CD is going to be 10MB per minute of program, so a one-hour CD would be approx. A higher compression rate (resulting in a smaller file-size) means it will take more time when ripping/encoding?
Album: New Dawn There are two main ways to get your FLAC files legally: ripping from CD or purchasing from a digital store. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.1 20141125, 3. The only difference is the amount of processing power to encode/decode, and the corresponding file size. FLAC is an open-source file format which offers true-CD quality rips at half the size. For your questions: 1. Song: A Change of Seasons Bits per Sample : 16 It's "bits of data per second". Also, all copies of CD to FLAC I do with compression level 8. I decided to go with compression level 3 for mine, and have begun ripping everything. if you add more and more music to your library, i would consider compressing at the maximum compression setting. The AIMP converter is perfect for doing the conversion since it maintains the metadata and the covers. Thank you, Jon, for sharing your experience here! But in that case the ripping software would have shown some errors. The Google Home Max supports both streaming and downloaded FLAC files via Chromecast. FLAC files are available for roughly the same price as the equivalent MP3 in online stores and sound much better. Play Time : 04:20 Everything on bandcamp is choose-your-own format though, so I get FLACs there. Good extension of it. Given that it’s lossless, I know you shouldn’t hear any difference – but I did (I wasn’t even listening for anything – it was purely incidental) – I was listening to a particular CD and thought something was different – better even – and when I checked the date on my files, I noticed it was one of my re-rips. I agree with many of your points. So if you compress something, even losslessly, it's at a lower bitrate. Maybe or maybe not. My phone (HTC M9) has a very respectable sound chip and a remarkably good music player, plus a microSD with support for up to 2TB(!! On modern systems, the difference in processing power needed for decoding should be negligible. Thanks for your question. I’ve been going through my family’s CD collections lately, re-ripping them as FLAC rather than the inconsistent-level mp3s they were originally put into. . Time wise it makes almost no difference, the default of 5 took maybe 1 second per song, 8 takes maybe 3 seconds. I use M4A to play music on my cell phone. Probably not. 2. Hard drives are not going to surpass much beyond the current 2TB disk size. The two in particular that I have seen problems are: 1) my mobile from an older microSD card, and 2) a completely obsolete host with an AMD K6-III (yes, I know that’s from 1999, but it still works). Great info! When I did my tests, I used my main equipment at home as well as a DAC and headphones. Stars including Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Deadmau5 and Kanye West called for a fairer deal at the launch of Jay Z's Tidal streaming service. I started ripping them all at 320k or VBR0 maybe 8 to 10 years ago but that’s still not great quality. A .WAV file occupies approx 10MB per 1 minute of audio, so your compression ratio is approx 50% with FLAC but you do have the advantage it is a lossless format. WMA, and live with the minor artifacts. Thanks! DECODED AUDIO WILL NOT BE They are two separate flags, so I don’t think that there’s a problem here with abcde’s encoding. I have yet to test whether my car’s sound system is good enough to warrant it though. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.2 20170101.
I’ve been compressing them all at 8. I am in the process of rejuvinating older recordings in various formats to compile and burn as an audio CD and as flac is able to accept metadata editing, to include CD text and ISRC code, It seemed to me that converting all to lossless flac prior to burning as a CDA would not need any compression and set it to zero (default was 5). Naim claims the the UnitiServe is the best (and maybe their only) way to get exact rips. Anyway, back to Flac; I would consider your future. I plan to put together the script referenced in “2”. When re-encoding for mobile, my method is to take the FLAC files and turn them into fairly high-quality OGG Vorbis files. It can be tailored to spit out just about any format and it automagically does tagging and the like. Other Reclaiming: Mortgage Fees, Council Tax etc, Pensions, Annuities & Retirement Planning, Report Holiday Deals, Bargains & Special Offers, Martin's Blogs & Appearances & MoneySavingExpert in the News. Uncompressed WAV: 23 seconds to rip – 37.6 MiB resulting file size. ” You replied with this to Tom talking about getting true stereo separation. In terms of mobiles, I’ve got 128GB standard on mine (LG V40 with DAC) and another 128GB in the microsd slot. Here are the best deals already announced, The best Black Friday 2020 deals available now and coming soon, Discuss: What is FLAC? FLAC and/or Apple Lossless, are about 1/2 the size of the original CD making that one-hour CD about 300MB. Thanks for your comments and questions. Hope you enjoy the quality in true stereo separation as intended by the artist. Thank you Zach, excellent article.
That would be my only concern with having that much compression. A typical 128kbps MP3 is 1/10 that, or 60MB. And every physical buy you get there only includes a download, so I love it for being able to get other formats, like vinyl and tapes, and get a perfect FLAC included. FLAC 1.3.0. We often link to other websites, but we can't be responsible for their content. 1. Thanks for your feedback! I see the efficiency of FLAC3 but I think 4 gives that little bit extra of compression, the reason I’m looking at FLAC in the first place, and doesn’t have the diminishing returns of the higher compression. Recently I did some ripping tests using dbPowerAmp. The majority of my systems are in the 10 – 15 year old range, I respect that you actually still have an AMD K6 machine up and running . Length: 3’43” (223 seconds) "FLAC has a place in the future for high-quality audio.
FLAC is lossless and more like a ZIP file -- it comes out sounding the same when it is unzipped. Firstly, you only need to pay once for a FLAC album. For the record, the best ripping script I’ve ever used is abcde (a better cd encoder). It might only save 10-15MB per album, over alot of cd’s that can add up. Nevertheless, above is still a great article and before the firmware upgrade, this worked brilliantly. I am looking at purchasing a portable media player, one of the Chinese ones like the Xduoo X3, D9 or NiNTAUS X10 for high-quality audio on the go. Ripping to WAV seems pointless to me, since FLAC decodes directly back into WAV. Even if one can get a 400 GB SD card it still takes a lot of space so every single bit tends to be important. I hence recommend FLAC-4. Previously the only way to get "lossless" files was via the uncompressed CD formats CDA or WAV, but neither is as space-efficient as FLAC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. In your case, you may be right with the FLAC level 0. I do a lot of audio work as I have a recording studio.
Just repeating others compliments, but thanks again for your valuable info. MP3 is a lossy format, which means parts of the music are shaved off to reduce the file size to a more compact level.
With a streaming service, you'd need to pony up for a subscription fee for the rest of your life or lose access to your carefully curated music collection. These days, I’m just using the CLI for encoding WAV files into FLAC. I figure that it only takes a couple minutes at most, and it only has to be done once. To me, it wasn’t necessarily about the quality (seeing as *all* FLAC compression levels result in a lossless file). I assume decode times have a similar trend to encode times? So, regardless of the compression level that is chosen, FLAC will always decode into the exact uncompressed audio track (bit for bit). If you do a blind test, the difference will go away. Below you will find information about the two songs used as tests, and the results (in sortable tables): Song 1: My guess is that the ratio is better in the second song because of actual song itself. If correct, would that mean that someone like me, who keeps several applications and browser tabs open at once, could possibly benefit from using compression level 0, since it would mean whatever media application I am using would need less time making files “ready-to-go”? Though streaming services may come and go, and even the long-term prospects of Spotify are not assured, a FLAC file is like a CD: once you buy it or rip it, it's yours forever (barring storage catastrophes). Currently, almost every record label is on board with the format, and consumers can buy lossless music from both major and indie acts for the same price as the iTunes Store. Synonymous with -l 8 -b 4096 -M -r 4. —————————- Pretty transient. I had forgotten about abcde. I personally don’t like any of the streaming services as I would rather own the music and store it locally (preferably in hi-res, but at least CD quality). If you’re running an old Pentium 4 or something like that, then you may see some substantial difference when decoding. Editors' note, October 28, 2018: This article was originally published in October 2012 and has been updated with new information. Despite its age and its clunky UI, Exact Audio Copy is the best available and I use it because of that, but there are other good options. And Flash memory won’t be affordable much above 1TB in the near future. What if your music player doesn't have apps or network capability? I used Asunder (which is a GTK ripper) for the bulk of my music, but the CLI ripper that you mentioned seems interesting. And then of course, streaming has come on big time in the last few years so some people don’t even store stuff locally any more.
Play Time : 04:20
Regardless,
I’m glad that the post helped you with your decision regarding compression levels. But regardless of whether you are using 16- or 24-bit quality files, FLAC is here to stay. You can’t encode flac into flac – such encoding would require the player to decode the file twice.
I’m glad that you found the post useful, and good luck with the ripping. Length: 23’08” (1388 seconds) Again, though, with any modern processor (which would be the bottleneck for decoding/playback), I think that you will see very little difference.
I’ve never had to use these options and get true stereo separation with my FLAC files when playing them through my main system at home. Regardless of the compression level that you choose for FLAC, you’ll be able to convert it back into WAV or uncompressed audio. Meanwhile, Deezer Elite is another service that offers lossless streaming but currently only to users of Sonos.
I’m not too concerned, but I’ll see if I can get a converter to put them all at FLAC 4 for the final deployment – cost viability of microSD cards tops off at 128GB or 200GB as of mid-2017, so IMO as powerful as phones are nowadays that extra bit of space is worth the trade compared to FLAC 3. Actually, a CD is going to be 10MB per minute of program, so a one-hour CD would be approx. A higher compression rate (resulting in a smaller file-size) means it will take more time when ripping/encoding?
Album: New Dawn There are two main ways to get your FLAC files legally: ripping from CD or purchasing from a digital store. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.1 20141125, 3. The only difference is the amount of processing power to encode/decode, and the corresponding file size. FLAC is an open-source file format which offers true-CD quality rips at half the size. For your questions: 1. Song: A Change of Seasons Bits per Sample : 16 It's "bits of data per second". Also, all copies of CD to FLAC I do with compression level 8. I decided to go with compression level 3 for mine, and have begun ripping everything. if you add more and more music to your library, i would consider compressing at the maximum compression setting. The AIMP converter is perfect for doing the conversion since it maintains the metadata and the covers. Thank you, Jon, for sharing your experience here! But in that case the ripping software would have shown some errors. The Google Home Max supports both streaming and downloaded FLAC files via Chromecast. FLAC files are available for roughly the same price as the equivalent MP3 in online stores and sound much better. Play Time : 04:20 Everything on bandcamp is choose-your-own format though, so I get FLACs there. Good extension of it. Given that it’s lossless, I know you shouldn’t hear any difference – but I did (I wasn’t even listening for anything – it was purely incidental) – I was listening to a particular CD and thought something was different – better even – and when I checked the date on my files, I noticed it was one of my re-rips. I agree with many of your points. So if you compress something, even losslessly, it's at a lower bitrate. Maybe or maybe not. My phone (HTC M9) has a very respectable sound chip and a remarkably good music player, plus a microSD with support for up to 2TB(!! On modern systems, the difference in processing power needed for decoding should be negligible. Thanks for your question. I’ve been going through my family’s CD collections lately, re-ripping them as FLAC rather than the inconsistent-level mp3s they were originally put into. . Time wise it makes almost no difference, the default of 5 took maybe 1 second per song, 8 takes maybe 3 seconds. I use M4A to play music on my cell phone. Probably not. 2. Hard drives are not going to surpass much beyond the current 2TB disk size. The two in particular that I have seen problems are: 1) my mobile from an older microSD card, and 2) a completely obsolete host with an AMD K6-III (yes, I know that’s from 1999, but it still works). Great info! When I did my tests, I used my main equipment at home as well as a DAC and headphones. Stars including Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Deadmau5 and Kanye West called for a fairer deal at the launch of Jay Z's Tidal streaming service. I started ripping them all at 320k or VBR0 maybe 8 to 10 years ago but that’s still not great quality. A .WAV file occupies approx 10MB per 1 minute of audio, so your compression ratio is approx 50% with FLAC but you do have the advantage it is a lossless format. WMA, and live with the minor artifacts. Thanks! DECODED AUDIO WILL NOT BE They are two separate flags, so I don’t think that there’s a problem here with abcde’s encoding. I have yet to test whether my car’s sound system is good enough to warrant it though. Production Info : reference libFLAC 1.3.2 20170101.
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