I have been accumulating a large collection of flac files for a number of years now, and as a result my library is a hodgepodge of different flac encoder versions and compression rates. as it is growing beyond 250GB i'm wondering if it is worth transcoding the lot to the latest version of the encoder (with -8 compression)?
i'm not expecting masses of saved space but maybe a gigabyte or two?
Well, the nice thing about FLAC is that all of your files are lossless. I don't really see any benefit in transcoding to the latest version of FLAC unless you encountered some problems with your older files. You are going to have to decide if a 1-2GB savings is worth it. This means that your library will decrease from 250GB to 248GB. Is that worth the amount of time and effort in setting up your computer to transcode? Is 0.8% of a difference enough for this? You are the only one who is going to have to decide if this is right for you.
Just not worth the effort, if you ask me (Unless your'e going with another format).
If you intend going from Flac to Flac again,
sometimes youd get even bigger files , depending on what mode was used and the encoder.
Flac -6 is the sweet spot for me with all 3 size vs enc speed vs dec factors taken into account.
Well, its no bother to set my computer up for transcoding. my server is capable of doing it i just tell it which files to transcode and what to transcode them to and it does it when its not busy.
i think a couple of giga bytes should be worth it, thats another 3-6 albums before i need to consider upgrading my backup drive. and the different encoders has been bugging me for a while(probably OCD or something).
i'll set it up to transcode and see what pops out in the morning.
EDIT: saved 5 Gigabytes. more than i was expecting and now everything is nice and neat and only has one encoder.