Lossless file formats

Music Talk
21

Bet you paid a pretty penny

22


This is the only model that legitimately exists to my knowledge.

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23

yep pricey though

24

There are diminishing returns anyway, level 6 offers almost the same compression as level 8 and encodes at more or less the same speed as level 5.

25

I just use level 5, and that works well for me

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26

tbh i mostly just use FLACs because its nice to think i have a higher quality source and its not a waste of space

even if i dont hear a difference

27

There is 0 reason to ever use uncompressed lossless. You waste a ton of space for 0 gain in sound quality.
If the album you are trying to buy is only available in WAV, the only difference if it were available in FLAC is size.

FLAC doesn’t change anything to the original data.
Check the hash of a WAV file, compress it to FLAC, and decompress it and you will have the exact same hash as the original WAV.

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28

But let’s wait a bit for comments “but you hear there is difference, it sound different” or did we have few already?

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29

@MadGman One

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30

Uncompressed can be helpful for audio editing, but not playback, so unless you are editing audio no real reason

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31

Ripping a standard CD to WAV is like ripping a DVD to 1080P. It can’t sound better just because it is bigger. FLAC is definitely the way to go.

I will say, I built a large FLAC collection that I rarely use because Tidal / Qobuz / Amazon Music / Deezer / Spotify are so much easier. It may make sense to let them do the conversion for you.

Dont sleep on CDs though; for the same nostalgia as vinyl or cassette. Or, depending on how old you are “retro”.

32

CDs basically contain wav files. A standard, lossless, non-compressed CD rip will be a 16-bit 44.1KHz wav file. True, if you try to rip a CD to anything higher than that you’re just adding unnecessary data to the file. But, that’s not what most CD rips are.

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33

Keeping in mind that most people are not very technical and can do various… funny things. Could say mistakes as well. Like they might rip a cd in 128 kbps and think it’s now the same as the original cd and be very happy.
Might even share their real experiences of cd ripping online.

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34

True. I misspoke. Ripping 16 bit CD to 24 bit WAV.

35

CDs, unless you break them in half, will outlast a crashed HDD or bankrupt streaming service.

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