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Convert wav to flac or not?

post #1 of 7
10/28/11 at 4:37pm
Thread Starter 

My test: 

original file.wav audio CD = 92.3 MB, 1411 kbps

Conversion:

1. Audio CD Extractor (= sound juicer)

file_1.flac = 54.4 MB, 831 kbps

 

2. ffmpeg without parameters

file_2.flac = 54.3 MB, 830 kbps

 

3. ffmpeg with bitrate param set to -b 1411K

file_3.flac = 54.3 MB, 830 kbps

 

Did the conversion to FLAC degrade the original WAV file when all three conversions reduced bitrate from 1411 to 830 ?

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post #2 of 7
10/28/11 at 4:40pm

No. . . go google it. 

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post #3 of 7
10/28/11 at 8:35pm

If you're unconvinced, open up the .wav and .flac in an audio editing program like Audacity and compare the two.  A lossless audio format decodes back into the exact same information as the original (well the tags/metadata and such may be a bit different, but I'm talking about the audio data itself)...since it's lossless.

 

It's like creating a .zip or .rar compressed archive.  You get file compression without altering the data.

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post #4 of 7
10/29/11 at 8:56am
Thread Starter 

Thanks for the advice. You are right. I converted the FLAC file back to WAV. The converted wav file is identical with the original CD wav file.

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post #5 of 7
10/29/11 at 9:15am

Yeah, a lossless file is a lossless file. They're  supposed to stay completely true to the original recording, so you probably won't hear much of a difference.

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post #6 of 7
10/29/11 at 1:37pm

And you can ignore the bitrate pretty much, its just the file size divided by the track length, where the size is reduced by its compression.

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post #7 of 7
10/30/11 at 7:28am

I've got plenty of hard drive space, so ripping CD's to wav is what I've been doing up to now. But these rips in wav do not carry some of the meta-data which could be associated with the rip if it were converted to flac or ALAC. So, today, I convert CD's and hi-rez flac downloads to ALAC, since my iTunes library supports ALAC but not flac.

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