How to get best quality in FLAC ?
Reply #2 – 2012-08-19 18:26:14
I tried ripping an audio CD to FLAC using foobar but then I found out that bitrate was decreased to 1096kbps. Does that means FLAC is somewhat lossy? This needs a sticky so that this doesn't come up again and again: Bit rate is a measure of file size, not audio quality. Your FLAC files are lossless, as you can test by decoding them back to WAV/PCM and bit-comparing them to the original source WAV/PCM.I would prefer my audio collection in FLAC but will converting FLACs to ALAC preserve audio quality?? Size does not matter for me. Audio quality is my top priority. Both formats are lossless (see above), and the resulting files for both codecs have about the same size. ALAC is slightly more demanding during encoding and decoding, though this is negligible unless you want to use it on portable devices where battery lifetime matters.And what is 24-bit/192kHz format? Can I upgrade my audio quality to 24bit/96khz or 24-bit/192kHz format? You cannot magically create real information out of nothing. CD audio has 16bit/44100Hz, there is nothing to be gained by increasing any of those properties. While going from 16 to 24 bit will at least not harm you, upsampling to a higher sample rate might affect audio fidelity, though this is likely inaudible. In addition, the resulting files are of course no longer bit-identical to the CD, and just waste precious HD space. Also, 24bit/192kHz offers no audible quality benefit over CD audio, anyway (see lvqcl's link ).