FLAC Encoder Settings - - - oh dearly dearly me !

FLAC is lossless.
There is no relationship between the compression ratio and the sound quality because the content is lossless all of the time.
The compression factor only say about how much time (computer resources) FLAC might use to calculate the best possible compression.
0=no time so no compression
8= maximum time so maximum compression.
5= commonly used value as the best compromise between the use of resources and compression.

 

A simple test: take a track you have already ripped to 5 but this time rip it using 8.
You will notice a small decrease in file size.

Rip it using 0 and compare 0, 5 and 8 in a (unsighted) listening test.
Highly unlikely you will hear any difference at all..

it is impossible to hear a difference for there is none.

 

stick with level 5 compression.

level 6 or higher will take much longer but will only save you some few kilobytes.

 

one more time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless

"Lossless data compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data"

what would this mean?

there is no difference that's why it is impossible to hear a difference. 

end of discussion

I've had that same concern. A lot of my music was ripped at level 8 FLAC, of there is no quality increase do you guys recommend putting it to level 5? I can rerip everything.

Quote:

Nothing is lost during compression, the file is decompressed on the fly and delivered to your ears at its original, uncompressed bit rate. The higher the compression rate, the longer it takes to open the file, although with the current hardware it really doesn't matter.

I used to do level 8 on everything, and then the Squeezebox Touch entered my life and it taught me that Level 5 uses less processor resources to decode. So I now do level 5 on everything.  I am amused that someone believes they can hear a difference between Level whatever and level whatever. To that person I would offer a special magic frog figurine that can scientifically be proven to remove money from your supply while offering mysterious musical enhancement. Now only $1499.00.

Thanks, didn't know that. Speaking of FLAC, I am going to buy a new laptop, any suggestions for one that cones with a good sound card?

Regardless of the compression level, the audio data remains absolutely the same, anyway it is reconverted to raw audio data during playback. If you really want to check, compress at level 1, 5, 8 and then reconvert to wav and compare the resulting audio data: absolutely identical!

As to how FLAC achieves different levels of compression while maintaining the same data?The gist of it is that compression works by finding the redundant data within a file and exploiting this redundancy to write the exact same information with fewer words, now there are different algorithms for finding redundant information, the more effective ones are also more calculation-heavy, trading file space for heavier CPU load, that's how different level of compression exist. But in the end, FLAC is lossles, with exactly mean that the information is strictly the same for the compressed file (regardless of the compression level) and the original file.

Finally with modern CPUs, level 8 compression is far far from being to CPU intensive to use.

just helping to beat the dead horse with a stick, but flac is lossless. the only difference between encoding "levels" is the amount of space the file takes up. bitwise, it is a 100% perfect representation of the data that was on the CD.