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Topic: Can someone explain a question to a newby and new to files? (Read 3325 times) previous topic - next topic
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Can someone explain a question to a newby and new to files?

I have some music that I downloaded from amazon many years ago. I tried to do a quick convert to flac on the foobar player. But it says doing so could actually increase the file in size. Which I know  would not be better. I thought flac was better than mp3. Please be nice Im really new and am having a hard time finding an answer.

Can someone explain a question to a newby and new to files?

Reply #1 –
Converting from MP3 to FLAC would not be a good idea.  MP3 is a LOSSY compression method.  Lossy means, part of the data has been permanently removed from the file.  When you convert to FLAC, you'll get a bigger file, but you won't get that data back.  Once lossy compression removes data, there is no way to really get it back.

To make FLACs from these files, you'd probably need to buy a CD and rip it, or find an online music store that sells lossles music and re-buy the album.

Can someone explain a question to a newby and new to files?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: apastuszak on
Converting from MP3 to FLAC would not be a good idea.  MP3 is a LOSSY compression method.  Lossy means, part of the data has been permanently removed from the file.  When you convert to FLAC, you'll get a bigger file, but you won't get that data back.  Once lossy compression removes data, there is no way to really get it back.

To make FLACs from these files, you'd probably need to buy a CD and rip it, or find an online music store that sells lossles music and re-buy the album.




Makes alot of sense!  Thank you!
 

Can someone explain a question to a newby and new to files?

Reply #3 –
Although you might have resolved your initial doubts, something in your sentence indicates that you miss some background, so this post attempts to give you more information about this topic.

As it has been said, MP3 is a lossy compressor, and FLAC is a lossless compressor and apastuszak gave the basic description of it.

You can get more information about the concepts of lossy and lossless by checking the Lossless and Lossy articles on our wiki.

Next, you talk about filesize and less being better, which I would like to address too.

Since all lossless formats retain the exact same information (appart from non-audio data like tags), a smaller file is desiderable, but not always the best option. Lossless codecs use different ways to obtain this reduction, and there are two big groups: those that are symmetric, and those that are asymmetric.
Symmetric codecs take about the same time to encode than to decode, which means that using it on mobile devices would drain the battery faster or when converting to other formats, they would be slower.
Asymmetric codecs take more time to encode than to decode, or better said, they are faster at decoding.
Finally, on lossless codecs, it is nicer to have a well supported codec, although it should not be a problem to convert it to another lossless codec in the future if that is needed.

On the other hand, when talking about lossy encoding, generally a smaller size indicates a lower quality, but this depends a lot on the format choosen and also by the exact implementation or parameters used.
For example, having a 96kbps Opus file is preferable to having a 96kbps MP3 file, but then, a 256kbps AAC file is preferable to a 96kbps Opus file when talking about quality. (If the best implementation was used in all those cases)
On the other hand, a 96kbps file might be preferable to a 256kbps one if you are listening to a stream on a mobile phone over the mobile network (not wifi), and you might need to opt for MP3 instead of Opus because the device might not support Opus.

So as you see, the preferences about size and format, when talking about lossy or lossless are not the same, and more importantly, with lossy, you cannot recover what the encoder discarded, so changing a file from one lossy format to another (generally called transcoding) is not recommended, if it can be avoided.


Edit: One last thing that I forgot to say: Lossless codecs require a higher bitrate (bigger size) than lossy codecs. (Obviouly, it takes more data to retain the exact audio than what it takes to make an approximation of that audio).