As I understand it, there is no “no compression”. FLAC is always compressed, even when the compression level is 0.
1 Like
True.
Athlon XP 2400 … 
Let’s be glad that there is no need to update the Wiki page 
Thanks to all the replies here I now know a whole lot more about FLAC files than I did a few hours ago.
Part of me finds it very interesting & another part of me says ‘why couldn’t music have remained simple, a lump of plastic on a turntable’, like this -
My first record player, a Christmas present from mum & dad in 1960, when I was 5. Came with 2 multi coloured Roy Rogers 7" records that I played to death until 1963 when I discovered the Beatles!
Yes, this really was where it all started for me…I always thought it would have sounded much better with a separate power supply…
4 Likes
There is an uncompressed level of FLAC. You can use it in DBpoweramp, although not all apps use it. It’s not the same as compression level 0, which (perhaps counterintuitively) does not mean that there is no compression.
Nice bit of kit, and … “Happy trails to you … Until, we meet, again …”
Why pay for extra bits that are only used for ultrasonics you can not hear anyway?
Best case is you get 4 bits lower noise floor (no DAC give you more than 20 bits - even if it can read 24-bit data).
Actually that’s a misunderstanding, the level of compression has no affect on decoding on the streamer. It’s the encoding stage where it takes longer and more cpu, decompression is the same for all levels.
2 Likes
Camera raw files are compressed as they don’t encode each colour channel in full normally 50% green and 25% each for red and blue. You can still reproduce full RGB from this though. Same system is used in video systems as well. Our eyes are more sensitive to changes in contrast then colour As a result they are considerably smaller as a result. When you demosaic raw files back to full RGB you get full colour encoding back for each bit so they are larger.
I was interested by this, so thought worth having a test of my own. I took a Tubular Bells wav file of 271MB (the largest I had) and compressed using flac with 0 and 8 compression, using a 12 year old Mac to ensure we get to see if there is any big differences. I then decompressed it 3 times as shown below:
Uncompressing 0 (143MB)
real 0m5.746s
user 0m3.888s
sys 0m1.021s
u+s: 4.909
real 0m11.893s
user 0m3.877s
sys 0m1.087s
u+s: 4.964
real 0m5.713s
user 0m3.904s
sys 0m1.008s
u+s: 4.912
Uncompressing 8 (132MB)
real 0m6.730s
user 0m4.521s
sys 0m1.047s
u+s: 5.568
real 0m6.277s
user 0m4.555s
sys 0m0.970s
u+s: 5.525
real 0m6.358s
user 0m4.583s
sys 0m0.990s
u+s: 5.525
Now you need to ignore “real” times, as they are effected by other processes running on a device, so we just need to look at user and sys times which are higher for the higher compressed files by about 10%. So this appears to differ from Wikipedia, unless there description was meant to be more generally speaking.
Clearly with better CPU’s and better network players with bigger buffers, this may not be noticed hence my previous comment of “Better Players should have minimal impact”
Incidentally, compressing times were vastly different, as you might expect.
To compare qualities, Sound Liaison have a free sampler with 11 different formats
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.