Re: FLAC (hifi and beatles related)
brandon
42 Posts
As far as I know, FLAC is lossless and about half the size of a wav file. If my Ipod and/or Microwave supported it, I'd start messing with it. These Sgt Pepper Multitrack Sessions were encoded with FLAC (but taken from another recording that wasn't so crispy).- brandon
Comments
http://www.beatlerev.podomatic.com/
The cool thing about FLAC, from what I've heard, is that its compression is content dependent. So if your compressing a dance track that has the same kick sound on ever beat for 10 minutes, it will be a smaller file than a 10 minute classical track which has much greater variation.
As far as I know there isn't one, since most people who use FLAC are either using the FLAC's as is or converting to WAV to burn to CD. So just use FLAC Frontend to decode to WAV, and whatever program you use to encode to MP3. It's an extra step, but better than nothing.
easy cd-da can do that. anything to anything with that baby.
Without getting too technical, it pretty much cuts the size in half, and does so in a way that is similar to using VBR for MP3's. So if a stereo WAV file is 5:00 long and is about 50mb, the FLAC will be *around* 25mb or so, depending on what's going on in the song at any given time. If it's a classical piece, with various quiet moments and silence, it will be a bit lower. Overall volume level is an issue too, and it will take that to account. If something from a CD has a peak level of 80, it will encode it exactly like that, although users can tweak FLAC files during the encoding process to do something else, the "Replaygain" option. If you peak the level to 99 or 100 percent before encoding, it will be a few megabytes higher than the original file at 80%.
As for mono, a 5 minute song can be about 13mb, depending on if it's a mono WAV file or a stereo file that recorded something in mono, because you have to keep in mind that while the record was mono, you're still recording surface noise in stereo. Best thing to do after doing a transfer is to convert the stereo WAV to mono, save, then encode to FLAC, and the size will be 25 percent of the original WAV.
Plus, it's lossless compression, so in terms of editing and making your own mixes or podcasts, it's better to work from a lossless source than from MP3's.
Another benefit of encoding to FLAC is if you're doing a track with someone, and they're using the same program you're using. For example, if I'm doing a track with Jesse Dangerously, I can either send him the entire instrumental I did for him, or send the session files as a zip or RAR file. He can then decode it, plug it in, then do his track. He then sends me back his vocal track as a FLAC, a new session file with his vocals plus anything else he may have added (i.e. any effects, background vocals, sound effects, etc) and I can add that in on my end. While you *can* do that with MP3's, with faster upload and download speeds it's better to do that with quality in mind opposed to taking shortcuts and end up with something that sounds not as good.
There we go. I've never used that one but that's good too know too.
It converts using the LAME encoder and allows you to enter the LAME variable switches
depending on the size/quality of MP3 that you want (eg: --alt-preset-extreme).
Also, you might want to consider using Rockbox on your iPod.
It's a totally seperate OS to the apple one and includes support for many formats
including FLAC. It also has lots of other features that the normal Apple OS doesn't
have (be warned though, that it takes some tweaking to set it up properly).
Finally, if you use Foobar as your media playing on the PC then
I believe there is a FLAC to MP3 conversion plugin floating around on the net
somewhere.
you better be pretty damn tech savvy if you mess with this. rockbox fucked my shit aaalll up last year. i had to re-format my ipod, so be weary.