Hey fellow audiophiles. I just want to know if I should go through with converting 390 albums in WMAL to FLAC. I'm thinking of switching to Foobar because I don't have a Zune anymore and the Zune software takes up a good amount of resources. OR should I just stay as is and convert any new audio to WMAL forever? Need some input please.
Is there a problem just using your existing WMALs with Foobar? It handles them reasonably as far as I can tell. Conversion of new material is up to you at that point. Since lossless is lossless and foobar can handle WMAL, the only reason for converting to something else would be for some metadata disadvantage of WMAL (or maybe for some slight filesize advantage that probably isn't worth it).
I'm kind of an OCD freak and would want an all FLAC library. I didn't know Foobar supported WMAL. Foobar here I come then.
There's nothing "wrong" with WMA Lossless per se.
I may suggest that you'll (possibly) get the best results using a secure ripper (take your pick) now that you're archiving as FLAC.
If you really feel the need to convert those files you can use a batch converter. I'm assuming you wouldn't want to go through 390 albums individually.
If I were doing it, I'd keep the 390 albums as they are, unless the need arises ( i.e. iPod purchase, in which case I'd convert to ALAC, lossy aac/m4a, or mp3..Now for future rips, I would rip to flac..
Jm2cents..
As an entire offtopic recommendation, but to suplement the advice of using a secure ripper, you can verify your current rips against the AccurateRip database using CUETools.
N.B. foobar2000 makes it easy to batch convert formats
WMAL actually gives better compression ratios than FLAC level 8 most of the time. If you're not bothered about a few MB here per album, you might as well leave them as they are. If in the future you need to have them in FLAC format (for a portable media player, for example) then you can just do a batch convert in Foobar overnight.
Do future rips in FLAC unless you're using other programs that don't support it.
FlaCUDA usually provides better compression results than FLAC -8 as well
WMAL actually gives better compression ratios than FLAC level 8 most of the time.
I could of sworn that this was the case. But right now in my tests FLAC level 8 actually beat out WMA by a few megabytes.
Hasn't FLAC stopped being updated since 2007?
Hasn't FLAC stopped being updated since 2007?
Yes, libFLAC versions 1.2.1, 1.2.0 and 1.1.4 were all from 2007, and 1.1.4 from February 13th was the last that improved compression.
But right now in my tests FLAC level 8 actually beat out WMA by a few megabytes.
I use Win7 and I noticed this too. Slightly worse compression ratio, but compression and decompression are significantly faster than in WinXP+WMP11.
But right now in my tests FLAC level 8 actually beat out WMA by a few megabytes.
I use Win7 and I noticed this too. Slightly worse compression ratio, but compression and decompression are significantly faster than in WinXP+WMP11.
I meant to say better compression ratio than on Winxp in the past.
Does anyone know if the Microsoft Expression encoder adds a lot of padding/metadata?