Forgive what is probably the ultimate noob question, but when Foobar converts APE to FLAC (or maybe anything else?) does it take it back to WAV before doing it?
I'm also curious to know if there's any technical 'loss of quality' (rather than audible, which i assume there wouldn't be) when it is converted to FLAC. I presume it would be no different to the WAV being converted to both a FLAC and APE separately - ie. there's a difference because they're different codecs - not because it's been decompressed and then recompressed.
It's a very simple question, and it's probably been answered elsewhere with different wording, but i couldn't find it.
Cheers.
btw - i've only just set up Foobar and after being initially daunted - i think it's an amazing program: This conversion facility just blows me away. Brilliant!
when Foobar converts APE to FLAC (or maybe anything else?) does it take it back to WAV before doing it?
Any application that appears to convert directly between two formats must actually perform an intermediate decompression (in RAM) to PCM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-code_modulation). (WAV files are simply PCM streams with a header, stored on disk rather than in RAM.)
I'm also curious to know if there's any technical 'loss of quality' (rather than audible, which i assume there wouldn't be) when it is converted to FLAC.
None whatsoever. Lossless formats are so named for a reason. Please do some basic research on lossless data compression (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_data_compression).
I presume it would be no different to the WAV being converted to both a FLAC and APE separately
Decoding two lossless files that were compressed from the same original audio file will give identical results, yes.
ie. there's a difference because they're different codecs - not because it's been decompressed and then recompressed.
Again, there would be no difference. Lossless means without loss, i.e. identical.
It's a very simple question, and it's probably been answered elsewhere with different wording, but i couldn't find it.
Yes, countless times. I don't understand how so many people can fail to understand the simple concept of lossless compression. The clue's in the name.