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a) time it takes to compress/decompress; b) the amount of disk space it takes up; and c) the CPU load needed for compr/decompr
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A and C aren't true for the decoding: FLAC searches for functions to replace the signal with a perfectly matching formula to re-calculate the signal at runtime. The higher setting means the FLAC encoder searches longer for a match, deviations when decoding are negliable most of the time.
As a grossly simplified example, consider these calculations:
100-97
10-7
3-0
Of course the last one takes the least amount of space to represent an outcome of 3. By selecting the 8 setting FLAC simply tries longer to find the best formula, but that does not mean the calculation needed at runtime actually takes longer to generate the signal.