by nohitter151 » Thu Mar 25, 2010 3:02 pm
Absolutextasi wrote:would WAV be the equivalent to FLAC? I mean it's nice that Flac is lossless, but once you convert it, it not loseless anymore right or do I just not understand the purpose of FLAC? I definitely downloaded a number of Flac files and they're incredible big, but they don't play. And I definitely wouldn't to keep them so I convert them. Once I convert them to 320 or 192 they are immediately half the size. Doesn't this mean they are no longer lossless? Someone please explain this to me because I'm getting a headache really fast and I feel like this is really important for me to know.
Thanks,
Mikey
Yes, FLAC is a lossless audio format, so it's equivalent to WAV files. Its advantages over WAV audio is that FLAC files are compressed so they are usually about half the file size of an equivalent wav file while offering the exact same audio quality. It also has better, more standardized metadata (with vorbis comments). If you convert them to a lossy format like mp3, wma, m4a, ogg, etc. then yes, they are no longer lossless.
[quote="Absolutextasi"]would WAV be the equivalent to FLAC? I mean it's nice that Flac is lossless, but once you convert it, it not loseless anymore right or do I just not understand the purpose of FLAC? I definitely downloaded a number of Flac files and they're incredible big, but they don't play. And I definitely wouldn't to keep them so I convert them. Once I convert them to 320 or 192 they are immediately half the size. Doesn't this mean they are no longer lossless? Someone please explain this to me because I'm getting a headache really fast and I feel like this is really important for me to know.
Thanks,
Mikey[/quote]
Yes, FLAC is a lossless audio format, so it's equivalent to WAV files. Its advantages over WAV audio is that FLAC files are compressed so they are usually about half the file size of an equivalent wav file while offering the exact same audio quality. It also has better, more standardized metadata (with vorbis comments). If you convert them to a lossy format like mp3, wma, m4a, ogg, etc. then yes, they are no longer lossless.