Any encoders which will 'accept but crop' too high resolution , ... so that the user will notice that not all formats are equal? Options

[Porcus]

Q: Will all (at least all widely used) 'lossless' audio encoders abort with the appropriate error message if the user tries to feed unsupported audio? Or is there any which will discard channels, downsample, crop bits or just produce nonsense?


The reason why I ask, is that this forum fairly often gets the n00b question of whether 'lossless' is indeed lossless -- and get no more than a simple 'Yes' (or 'Yes, thread closed'). The devil in the detail is hardly ever mentioned, and most users will anyway never encounter that mismatch. But if the situation is 'in the few instances where the usual answer is inadequate, the encoder will warn the users rather than eating audio information', it would certainly be A Good Thing.

[Porcus]

Even though I originally asked about encoders, I do think that decoding is highly on-topic as well -- if you do get differences when transcoding it does not really matter which of the steps is the culprit.

As for fb2k specifics: Recall that the wiki warns the user against the LA fb2k plugin: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_Audio .



BTW, I don't mind spinning this thread off with metadata discussions, but I suppose that it is fairly well known that you cannot safely throw unicode chars into [enter even text file formats here]. (I do think that the 'this couldn't be audible!' argument belongs to the lossies department and not to this thread, though.)