Something that's been bugging me about FLAC... Options

[TempestGarden]

So, I have been using FLAC for many, many years now and I have ripped countless CDs and encoded them to FLAC for archive purposes as well as general listening. In all these years, something has been bothering me that I don't understand about this codec and I have decided to post here and see if I can get an answer to this nagging question. Not sure why I waited this long to bring this up, but anyways, here goes...

As you all know, FLAC has various "compression" settings which you can select when encoding the file (which never made sense to me since this is supposed to be a lossless codec). Now I understand that these "compression" levels have been likened to how WinZip compresses a file. I sorta get the analogy but there is something else here that still doesn't make sense to me. To illustrate my question/point better, I did a little experiment and listed my results below. I ripped the same exact song at 4 different "compression" levels and the resulting bitrate that I got for each rip is listed as well.

(Uncompressed) - 1412 kbps
Level 0 - 986 kbps
Level 5 (default) - 933 kbps
Level 8 - 931 kbps

So, based on these results, here is what is bothering me. Between the uncompressed setting and the level 8 setting, there is a loss of almost 500 kbps of data. In my mind, that is quite a substantial amount. I totally understand that whatever setting you chose will ultimately affect the end result bitrate of the file. I get that. What makes no sense to me at all though, is how a file (at level 8 setting) can lose almost 500 kbps of data and still be considered "lossless".

How is that possible? What is in those ~500 kbps worth of data that is getting shaved off? I just don't understand how you can be losing this much data and still have the resulting file be considered lossless. Maybe it's too technical of an answer for me to understand but I figured if anyone would be able to answer this for me, the folks on the forum here would.

So, yeah... this has been nagging at me for awhile. Any help to make me understand this better would be greatly appreciated.

Oh and btw.... Merry Christmas!

This post has been edited by TempestGarden: Dec 25 2011, 21:25