On Monday 04 September 2006 10:46, John Andersen wrote:
But Flac is no better than storing in WAV which is how its on the CDs, is it?
Well, it's better in that it's free as in free, with a publicly specified format, a comprehensive testsuite etc. Also, the data on a CD is uncompressed, whereas FLAC compression typically compressed by 50% or more, depending on the content. I don't know how well this compares to WAV lossless compression.
I've converted some MP3 files to ogg with mpg321-->oggenc and found that my old tin ears can't really detect any degradation as long as I use ogg encode quality high enough to at least match the bitrate of the original mp3. (usually this means ogg quality=4 for 128bitrate and quality=5 for 160bitrate mp3s)
There is still loss happing, I just can;t hear it, plus, my music is not so demanding...
:) ... Fair enough, it's horses for courses. I use lossy formats for the car, which is a somewhat sub-optimal listening environment, and lossless for listening to on the HiFi at home (and as a convenient parent format for generating lossily compressed versions).
I usually save no file space with this scheme, so I give up that feature of ogg to prevent creeping loss.
A footnote is that FLAC audio may be stored in an OGG container, just to confuse matters further ;)