Re: Best way to convert HD audio (24-Bit / 96 KHz) into mp3 /aac
Reply #20 – 2021-03-15 11:11:19
@Porcus I guess if someone only has a minimal amount of those 24-bit/96 files then keeping them to be extra safe probably won't hurt. but it seems just switching from 24/96 to 16/44.1 shaves off a pretty good amount of storage space on each album (hundreds of MB off the top of my head (or at least significantly lowers the storage space needed per album)). but I guess if potentially saving some odd GB of storage space does not matter to people then I can easily understand your line of thinking since your on the side of caution since you don't even want to consider the risk of anything happening to the original lossless files and want to ensure they are as good as can be. like you can always count on going back to those 24/96 files as a original source to play around with. also... sure, I get that technically converting 24/96 to 16/44.1 is not a lossless operation. but, if I understand it correctly, the sound quality is still higher than what would matter to any human after the 24/96 to 16/44.1 conversion. hence, it's basically a lossless operation to our ears and one can treat the 16/44.1 converted files as a source they can always go back to in order to convert from lossless to lossy files. pretty much just like they had the original Audio CD that was 16/44.1 straight up. so in my mind I would rather just convert to 16/44.1 and dump the hi-rez (24/96) audio files due not only to storage space savings, of which there is a worthwhile amount (IMO), but with a standard 16/44.1 setup it's nice and easy to convert to your typical lossy file since the 16/44.1 is standard Audio CD which we have had for a long time now and simply won't get outdated which is another reason I do it. because if it was something that would matter down the road, it might be worth keeping the 24/96 files. but since we can't hear the difference, I definitely opt for the storage space savings and makes things easier converting to lossy files to. I also use FLAC 8 (but going with the default of FLAC 5 in Foobar2000 can't be a bad choice either). I tend to be of the mindset that I would rather save a little storage space and sacrifice the slight conversion speed drop. but it seems when it comes to say FLAC 5 (seems to be default in Foobar2000) vs FLAC 8 (highest compression for FLAC) that we are talking minimal, if not negligible differences, in the big picture as a person can't really make a bad choice with either one as the difference is simply not large enough either way (be it for saving a slight amount of storage space or slightly increasing conversion speed to lossy) for one choice to be clearly superior to the other. but I get that some people in favor of FLAC 5 over FLAC 8 might argue that in the long term, especially if you convert your lossless files to lossy here and there, that the slight sacrifice in storage space might be worth it to save a little extra time. but all-in-all, it's likely negligible either way especially with any decent CPU over say the last decade or so. hell, I can imagine with some of the more recent CPU's (with quite a few cores/threads (I am still on a CPU that was released in 2012 (i.e. i5-3550(4core/4thread)) although I only had that CPU since last year as I got it used for $20 which was a solid upgrade over my i3-2120 (2 core/4 thread) that I was using) that it probably takes more time just starting the conversion and putting FLAC files into the proper folders etc then it does for the actual conversion time itself which is quick unless someone has a boatload of FLAC's to make, and even then, it's not going to be anything too time consuming based strictly on CPU processing time with any half-way decent CPU as, like I was saying, will fly through the conversion quickly enough. but speaking of a boatload of FLAC's... I have been somewhat tweaking some of my FLAC collection so that instead of keeping full albums, I just keep the songs that stand out for me as this helps raise the general quality of my collection on average. still, I tend to keep the full albums in FLAC for at least for the bulk of what I got but sort of make a custom list in Foobar2000 to remove the songs I don't care about all that much as this way when I convert to lossy, the lossy files I use take up that much less space and I can spend more time just listening to songs that stand out for me etc, sort of trimming-the-fat. this helps keep my FLAC collection at a bit more reasonable/efficient size. I especially 'trimmed-the-fat' on some music I used to listen to years ago (that I keep around for old-times sake etc) that won't grow in size anymore and I went through it a while back to remove the junk to separate the gems from stuff I pretty much won't listen to anymore which cut back on how many GB's the FLAC need quite a bit. ill stop babbling now