[Anthony Campbell]

I'm going to rip my cd's on flac, but there is a lossless encoding level on db poweramp. It's preselected 5, but is it worthwhile setting it to 8 or even Uncompressed?

 

[castleofargh]

this exists for flac in general, it defines how much effort is put into making the file smaller. in practice you don't save much more space but you can waste time with the extra processing required. so it's something you have to think about when you make your decision.
to be clear this does not change the audio data once extracted! you still get lossless audio. think of those settings as one being .zip and another .rar and another.... they all keep all the data but use a different way to stock it.
if you use non default settings with some old DAPs, you might get some bugs. I imagine it's rare nowadays but it's been years since I've ventured outside of the default value so I can't claim anything.
to apply on 1 album it shouldn't matter much, it's when you decide to convert many at once that extra delays pile up and become annoying.

 

[Roseval]

There are people who believe that although both WAV and FLAV are lossless, they do sound different. I’m afraid this has never been reproduced in any blind testing or substantiated by any measurement. Anyway, Uncompressed gives you WAV with the superior tagging options of FLAC.

As castleofargh stated, the “compression” of FLAC is the amount of effort the program may spend to find the best compression. Indeed the differences between 5 and 8 in size are small.
My experience is that regardless your choice, the I/O is the limiting factor, not the processor.

As castleofargh stated, some older devices might have troubles with 8.
With 5 you are save. With 8 you might hit a problem maybe one day.

I rip to 8 for some reason or other and never encountered any problem.

 

[bigshot]

If you are having problems with decoding high bitrate FLAC, your computer would have to be very old. I use ALAC on occasion myself, and I have no problems with it.But my computer is only 8 years old.

 

[Anthony Campbell]

I've ripped a few cds at 5 and they play fine on my Benjie s5, and take up around 100meg or so less space than wav files

 

[Ekul61]

Is there a advantage of using dB power amp over windows media player? which also converts to flax

 

[Anthony Campbell]

I was having problems with some rips on windows media player, both in sound and track information. DB poweramp was recommended to me by some of the folks on here. I like the fact that poweramp displays if any tracks are ripped inaccurately, and it takes information from various sites to obtain the album info. Downside, you have to pay.

 

[Ekul61]

I was having problems with some rips on windows media player, both in sound and track information. DB poweramp was recommended to me by some of the folks on here. I like the fact that poweramp displays if any tracks are ripped inaccurately, and it takes information from various sites to obtain the album info. Downside, you have to pay.

What kind sound issues have you had with WMP. I could be overlooking it.

 

[Anthony Campbell]

On certain songs, Floyds fat old sun and Metallica's carpe diem baby to name a few, during the solos and high notes I could hear some crackling. When ripping with dbpoweramp, the sound was a lot clearer. Also, there was some albums that wma could not find the correct data for, so all I'd get was a load of Chinese writing for some reason, and no album artwork. but as I said with poweramp, it looks for the data from various sites, and is easier to edit too.

 

[bigshot]

The song is probably mastered all the way up to the edge of peak level. Some encoders will increase the volume a nudge and when they do, they push it over the line into clipping. Try doing an overall level reduction by a few dB and then convert to FLAC. I bet that won't crackle.

 

[Roseval]

Some encoders will increase the volume a nudge

That is new to me.
Do you happen to know which ones?
Its a kind of behaviour I don't expect FLAC to do.

 

[bigshot]

I've found that iTunes has a tendency to do this. It's generally only a problem on a small number of titles- usually ones that are severely compressed to sound loud. It's more a fault with the mastering not having any headroom than it is the encoder itself.

 

[Ekul61]

U guys have me wondering if my flac files converted with window med player are sub par

 

[Strangelove424]

Then use a rational means of putting that paranoia to rest. There's a lot of hearsay in the last few posts.

Do you have Audacity? Well, you should, if you don't have it anyway, so go download it if you don't. Put both your original track and encoded track into a new project. Select one track. Apply Effect->Invert to that one track. Play the sum of both tracks, no track muting. If you hear silence there is not any difference. I can almost guarantee you will hear silence. If you do not hear silence, report back.

 

[gregorio]

The song is probably mastered all the way up to the edge of peak level. Some encoders will increase the volume a nudge and when they do, they push it over the line into clipping.

That's news to me too! Lossy encoders oversample as part of the perceptual lossy process and this can cause clipping due to inter-sample peaks but they're not increasing the volume. In fact some slightly reduce the volume in order to avoid inter-sample peaks clipping. However, lossless encoders should never change the volume, if they did, that would be changing the values of the bits and it wouldn't be lossless.

I'm not sure what's causing the reported crackling. Most likely @Anthony Campbell is simply experiencing a different perception of what he's listening to, which is entirely normal/usual when listening to a different rip/format. It could be there is an actual difference, maybe a bug with the windows media player with a certain level of flac compression but that's somewhat less likely. I'd need a lot of convincing that a flac encoder is changing the volume/bit values!

G