Is it advisable to convert APE/ALAC to FLAC? How will the size change?, [TOS #6: was "APE/ALAC to FLAC conversion?"] Options

[SoberWarlock]

APE is known for it's great compression and ALAC is pretty much the same as FLAC except it's not open source and is owned by apple. Is it smart to convert these two codecs to FLAC? Will APES compression size be the same or enlarge when converted to FLAC? I would rather stick to one lossless format which is FLAC because there really isn't much problems with it and it is definitely future proof.

[Porcus]

I would rather stick to one lossless format which is FLAC because there really isn't much problems with it and it is definitely future proof.

That's why I chose FLAC in the first place.

Anyway, according to http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...omparison_Table , you should expect your APE files to expand by some five percent (depending on settings) and your ALACs to stay about the same in size. Furthermore, you should expect decoding to take less CPU power (not that it matters much these days anyway), and better ReplayGain support.

If you use foobar2000, you can decode HDCD on-the-fly with the appropriate component, but not for all file formats. FLAC has been OK for a long time, and the new version will handle ALAC too. Not APE though.