[khaos974]

Why? There is absolutely no audible difference between FLAC and WAV. Absolutely none. They contain the exact same data.
 
 
keanex wasn't exactly right when he said FLAC is a variable bitrate. It's not variable like MP3 can be. Case in point, if you play a variable MP3 in Foobar you can watch the bitrate change, but FLAC bitrate doesn't change. It compresses audio data much like a ZIP file. You can unzip a FLAC into a WAV at any time, and it will contain the exact same bits and exact same bitrate. Do you lose text file data when you place it in a ZIP? No, and you don't lose data when you place a WAV into a FLAC. There is no reason to use WAV if your players support FLAC.
 
The only conceivable "audible" difference is FLAC playback is harder on the CPU because it has to unzip it, which can cause extra jitter. The task is so trivial, even for tiny little DAPs like the Clip+, that a human will never, ever hear it. I believe it's actually easier on the CPU than lossy codecs are.

Actually, strictly speaking, FLAC is VBR like MP3, each the music is still hack into chunks before being compressed, and each chunks is compressed at a different level depending on the complexity of the music. While you only see the average bitrate while playing, it's indeed a VBR format.

 

[cjl]

Quote:

That's not a half bad idea. I'm going to try it.
 
Using the track "Hunter" by Bjork, with default ZIP settings in 7zip:
 
FLAC unzipped: 29,351,064 bytes
WAV unzipped: 45,036,140 bytes
 
FLAC zipped: 29,351,230 bytes (LOL, bigger!)
WAV zipped: 43,741,075 bytes
 
I think it's safe to say that lossless compression is very efficient! It makes sense; lossless compression is designed for a single file type, regular compression has to work well with everything.

 
That's fascinating - I'm surprised the zipping didn't work better. Out of curiosity, if you go to the .7z file format with LZMA2 compression on "Ultra" settings, how well does the wav zip? I would have thought the generic compression algorithm would do better, given how well FLAC and WMA lossless work, but it doesn't appear to have worked very well at all in this case (although default settings zip isn't a terribly good compression algorithm anyways - it's more optimized for low processing requirements than optimum file size). The fact that the FLAC file grew when compressed does support the idea that FLAC is a very efficient compression algorithm though - when a file is already compressed, it contains very close to randomized data, so further compression is impossible. In this case, the additional file information needed to decompress the file added more than the compression was able to save, hence the larger ending file.
 
 

 

[ILikeMusic]

Quote:

 What surprises me though, is that most users here will praise FLAC, a variable bit rate, while condemning LAME V0, a variable bit rate. 

The variable bit rate factor really has no part in the quality debate, the important factor is that one format is 'lossy' (in that it alters the original) and the other is bit-identical to the original during reproduction. Whether the bit rate happens to be variable or not does not enter in to the quality equation when comparing the two formats.
 

 

[keanex]

It does matter as many users will claim 320 is superior because it's CBR over V0, while no one here could ever ABX 320 from V0 and I will bet my Ad900 on that. If you're going lossy you might as well do it smart. V0-V4, depending on the listener, will be more than transparent especially for travelling. 

 

[Freeze]

Quote:

Wav will never be a better audio format for listening than FLAC.

Not true. I have an alpine f1 status head unit in my car and it reads dvd-r data discs with wav on them but it cannot read flac
 
so therefore wav is better than flac which produces silence

 

[keanex]

You shouldn't be burning them as data discs, there's your first problem.

 

[Freeze]

alpine f1 head unit DOES NOT SUPPORT FLAC it will never read flac no matter what i do
 
it will read mp3's on a dvd-r and it will read wav on a dvd-r  i use wav and still fit like 100 songs per disc

 

[Freeze]

if u knew about the alpine f1 system you'd know it beats even many many top quality home systems in sq
 
the head unit reads the cd digitally transfers it to a special dsp that has its own dac and 175 band eq then sends it to amp

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

alpine f1 head unit DOES NOT SUPPORT FLAC it will never read flac no matter what i do
 
it will read mp3's on a dvd-r and it will read wav on a dvd-r  i use wav and still fit like 100 songs per disc

Obviously he didn't mean FLAC is better even for the components/programs that can't read it. And even if you need to use WAV on your discs, if you rip into FLAC you can convert back to WAV effortlessly. There's still no reason to keep WAV around.
 
ooh, it beats home systems? Do you have any measurements or specs?

 

[Freeze]

too much time wasted to have to convert always.  i keep everything as wav. I have 6.5TB of local storage its not a problem. I even raid 1 mirror my data to protect against loss.
 
google alpine f1 status and ull see the incredible quality it has.   i've put over 15 grand into audio in my car and installed it all myself i know what im talkin about

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

too much time wasted to have to convert always.

It takes about a second per song. It's not like encoding to lossy.

 

[Freeze]

the sad part is i spent more on the audio system then i did for the actual car, its my sickness
 
alpines dsp boosts and cuts frequencies on the 175 band eq in real time based on the changing acoustics in the car as you accelerate and slow down to keep everything perfectly even and it does this in real time using mics placed throughout the car. it does really complex time correction calculations everything real time to give flat frequency response thats almost impossible to get in a car. thats why i said it can compare to top quality home systems and beat many of them

 

[JamesMcProgger]

does wav support ID tags? last time I checked it didnt. that makes the whole difference for me. and if you dont care about tags you could rip .iso of the CD's / DVDA's, at least it would keep the whole album as 1 file.

 

[Freeze]

the way i do it is i have artists and cd's in folders and the ttile of the wav is the artist track number and song name
 
then i have them sorted by filepath it workout just fine

 

[uelover]

Just use AIFF. Uncompressed lossless with support for artworks and ID tags =)