[Zorlac]

When FLAC releases new versions, would it be wise to re-rip albums using said new version?

((weird question..I know))

 

[Roen]

What difference do you hope to gain?

SQ? No.
File size? Then maybe.

 

[Zorlac]

I wasn't sure there would be a difference. The change notes have a lot of fixes, so was just curious...

https://xiph.org/flac/changelog.html

 

[Muinarc]

With new versions you'll only gain in slightly smaller files sizes and things like encoding/decoding/packing/unpacking efficiency..... and even then they're going to be very small gains. Not worth worrying about really.

 

[aristos_achaion]

I know I'm resurrecting an old thread, but I felt like someone needed to point this out...you can use flac to reencode FLAC files without re-ripping. Since it's a lossless format, there's no quality loss in simply reencoding files, and the encoder will even carry over the original file's metadata unless you specifically override it.

 

[big45-70]

How much of a difference in the file size are you gaining with re-encoding?

 

[aristos_achaion]

I'd actually never tried...testing it out on a few random things from my music library, I did find one 24/48 recording that got about ~10% smaller with reencoding, but that was definitely an outlier...for the most part, for both 24-bit and 16-bit recordings, for both commercial downloads and rips I'd encoded myself, it was <1% improvement if there was any improvement at all. I suppose if a recording was inefficiently compressed to begin with (i.e., with a flac setting less than -8), you'd gain something by reencoding it, but it doesn't look like there's enough gains between versions of flac to warrant reencoding on a regular basis or anything. I was just pointing out that, if you did want to see if a newer version of flac compressed better (it probably won't), it'd be more efficient to just reencode the existing FLAC files than to re-rip the CD.

 

[Maleckii]

So FLAC is supposed to be a bit-for-bit, 100% copy of a PCM stream. The compressed bitstream format has been fixed since the beta versions; you're just getting more decoding options, more metadata options, and better compression ratios in newer versions - as well as a couple of bug fixes. But the audio is the same, and has been for a very long time. The changelog actually mentions very few differences under flac format, even going back really far.