Question WAV or Flac

mtenga

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Hard drive died so I have to rip my CD collection again. Last time I did Flac but the devices I'll be streaming to support both. Any advantage to one format over the other?
 
FLAC saves a little space as it uses a lossless audio compression, and is what I would use.
 
FLAC saves a little space as it uses a lossless audio compression, and is what I would use.
Yeah cheers I've just started it 5 mins ago using FLAC. Dbpoweramp is free on trial and I know it so I'm sticking with what I did before. There was some question about tags and stuff with WAV so not bothering.
 
Yeah cheers I've just started it 5 mins ago using FLAC. Dbpoweramp is free on trial and I know it so I'm sticking with what I did before. There was some question about tags and stuff with WAV so not bothering.
yes you cant use any track names, artists etc with wav. You only have the filename.
 
FLAC also has tags, great for a media library. Especially if you move your collection over to another system.
 
I agree with the others - FLAC is better not just because it saves some space, but more importantly because of the ability to tag files.

It's worth thinking about buying 2 hard drives and copying your music onto the 2nd one (I use a NAS which does this automatically) because hard drive failure seems to be inevitable sooner or later.

I also have all my FLAC files uploaded to Google Play as a 2nd back-up. However, don't rely on this because when you download them you'll fnd Google has converted them all to 320kbps MP3 (although the quality of this is pretty good it's not lossless).
 
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I rip my cd's to Uncompressed Flac files. Files come out either the same size as Wav do or sometimes slightly bigger but both sound the same.
Not sure why Studios are still compressing Flac Albums for HD Tracks and Qobuz
HDD space is cheap nowadays
 
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Download time?
 
I also have all my FLAC files uploaded to Google Play as a 2nd back-up. However, don't rely on this because when you download them you'll fnd Google has converted them all to 320mbps MP3 (although the quality of this is pretty good it's not lossless).

To stop Google converting them it may be better to zip them (with no compression) and store on Google Drive?

Also, that should be 320kbps. It's an easy slip these days! :)
 
To stop Google converting them it may be better to zip them (with no compression) and store on Google Drive?

Also, that should be 320kbps. It's an easy slip these days! :)


You're right - I changed the typo.

The advantage of uploading the files as music rather than zip files on Google drive is that you have limited space on Google drive (unless you're willing to pay for more). Uploading them as music doesn't count towards your storage limit; you can have up to 50,000 tracks for free (as I pointed out to my father recently - that's a real bargain for Wagner and Beethoven fans - their tracks tend to be longer than the average 4 minute pop song!).
 
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I've just done a blind listening test using my wife and a friend as guinea pigs. I used some tracks ripped from CD in compressed FLAC (level 8), uncompressed FLAC and WAV. Using a blind test involving the three file types and the original CDs, my test subjects consistently picked-out uncompressed FLAC and the CD as being equal and best, albeit by a small margin. I used XLD on my MAC to create the files and they were all accurately ripped. In theory, there should be no difference, and I think that some of the perceived differences could well be down to the decompression algorithms on the player that I was using for the test, a Samsung BDF-F6500 blu-ray player. However, the latest XLD update also introduced a later version of the FLAC encoder which I used to create the uncompressed FLACs and WAV files, (I already had the CDs ripped as compressed FLACs using an older version of XLD with and earlier FLAC engine) so that could also have accounted for some of the differences perceived, although that wouldn't be relevant for the WAV files.

As I've only just started ripping my CDs, in readiness (probably) for use with a Sonos Connect in my a/v system, I'm going to (re)rip using uncompressed FLAC. Although there is an increase in disk space usage (for my files, the increase in storage for uncompressed FLACs seems to be ~35%), having [potentially] to negate decompression routines seems like a sensible trade-off if the results of my testing are accurate, which I'm confident that they are given the blind tests. When I listened I slightly preferred the CD playback by a whisker, but couldn't tell that much difference between the other formats though, with perhaps the WAV files sounding slightly brighter. However, given the many limitations of WAV storage, uncompressed FLAC is my friend.

HTH

Regards


Clem
 

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