[fishtankfish]

I use FLAC frontend to encode into .flac and i have one question about the settings. You can set the encoding level from 1 to 8, and naturally 8 produces the largest files. Anyway, if FLAC is lossless how can there be different sizes of files, that seems to imply compression?

what is up?

 

[jagorev]

Think of it as zip compression for music (.wav) files. You don't lose any data, but the file size gets compressed.

 

[fishtankfish]

so whats a recommended setting?

i have it on 7.

 

[binkgle]

8 actually produces the s,allest size (highest compression). takes longer to encode and a bit more cpu power to decode, but either way it's pretty easy on the cpu (i've foobar play a flac -8 file, with firefox, two ms word documents open, and i'm background stuff like anti-virus, and i've only got ~5% cpu load).

 

[fishtankfish]

Quote:

Originally Posted by binkgle 8 actually produces the s,allest size (highest compression). takes longer to encode and a bit more cpu power to decode, but either way it's pretty easy on the cpu (i've foobar play a flac -8 file, with firefox, two ms word documents open, and i'm background stuff like anti-virus, and i've only got ~5% cpu load).

Ok, so theres no difference in playback quality?

 

[jagorev]

I've tried the various settings, and I don't notice any appreciable decrease in file size after 5. 8 is usually almost the same file size as 5, but takes an exponentially longer period of time to encode. So I stick with 5.

EDIT: There should be no difference in playback quality between uncompressed .wav (CD-audio) files and any setting of FLAC compression. It's bit-perfect when decoded by the player.

I would bet that portable players are happier with lower compression settings.

 

[binkgle]

i think the iaudio x5 (afaik, the only dap that can play flac) can only deal with -1 and -2 flac files.

in general for me, when i rip with flac, it takes less time to encode a flac -8 song than it takes to rip the next song, so the extra encoding time doesn't really affect me. as i have a relatively small hd for flac ripping (only ~74 GB, i need a storage drive

) i need any extra space that i can take, so i'll take even the small size difference.

 

[Revliskciuq]

Unless you need portable support, you should try WavPack. It encodes faster than FLAC and has better compression. Monkey's Audio has the best compression of all the lossless formats, but it's somewhat feature lacking.

 

[nspindel]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jagorev I would bet that portable players are happier with lower compression settings.

Nope, just the opposite. The less compression, the bigger the files are. That means more disk reads in order to render the same song than if heavy compression were used. The more the player has to hit the hard drive, the more battery it uses. The higher the compression, the longer the battery will last.

 

[kyrie]

Quote:

Nope, just the opposite. The less compression, the bigger the files are. That means more disk reads in order to render the same song than if heavy compression were used. The more the player has to hit the hard drive, the more battery it uses. The higher the compression, the longer the battery will last.

Actually, current portables have very limited CPU speed, so they're demonstrably much happier with lower compression settings (in other words, it'll skip on higher compression settings because it can't decode the music quickly enough). It's not about the battery.

 

[nspindel]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kyrie Actually, current portables have very limited CPU speed, so they're demonstrably much happier with lower compression settings (in other words, it'll skip on higher compression settings because it can't decode the music quickly enough). It's not about the battery.

Huh??? So you telling me that an iPod will perform better playing wav files than playing 128 kbps mp3? You're just wrong. And it certainly is about battery. There are actually several threads on here with plenty of info on this one. Lossless codecs are known to seriously decrease the amount of time a battery charge will last. That's just a fact. I'm not arguing against lossless codecs, read my sig, my whole collection is flac. But if I have an iRiver and Rockbox it so it can play flac, it's simply a known fact that the battery will not last as long as if I were to load mp3's on there.

 

[mkozlows]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nspindel Huh??? So you telling me that an iPod will perform better playing wav files than playing 128 kbps mp3?

No, he's telling you that a portable player playing a FLAC file will work better if you use a lower compression setting, because its CPU isn't powerful enough to easily decode higher compression settings (or possibly because the FLAC implementation isn't robust enough; I'm not really sure). The Rio Karma, one of the few portable players that played FLAC, only would play up to Level 2 compression; it simply couldn't handle anything higher.

 

[cire]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kyrie It's not about the battery.

i would think its still also about the battery. less for the processor to decode would also mean less stress and load on it, which makes it drain less power from the battery.

 

[jagorev]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nspindel Huh??? So you telling me that an iPod will perform better playing wav files than playing 128 kbps mp3?

Wrong comparison, since mp3 isn't the same data by any means. However, I think that a DAP's little CPU will perform better playing a wav file than a FLAC level 8 compressed version of that same wav. In the case of FLAC compression, it has to do a lot more work the higher the compression, so level 2 or 3 is the most that a DAP can usually handle. FLAC level 8 will undoubtedly cause real slowdowns and skipping for any current DAPs (I don't know of any that can handle it).

In both lossy and lossless, battery life should go down with higher bitrates. However, when comparing different levels of lossless, lower compression levels are more efficient cpu-wise.

 

[sgrossklass]

AFAIK FLAC decoding always takes pretty much the same amount of computing time regardless of compression setting used. This does have a big influence on encoding time though. That's the chosen tradeoff in terms of effort, and the reason why there is any support for it in portables at all.
http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html
As for why lossless formats are more taxing on battery, that's quite simple for the most part: The harddrive has to operate more frequently. (You pretty much need a harddrive based player for plain size reasons.) In case of a 2.5" drive, that's a part that'll consume maybe 1.2 W in idle and 2 W or more during access, which is quite a lot in relation to the other components in the player.