What the Smallest Bit rate achived that is lossless, I was on the FLAC website and I couldent find a ratio any where.

here

That's highly dependent on the music you compress. On some very simple samples bitrate of few kbps can be achieved.

-Eugene

yep. solo piano or other solo instruments can compress 1/4 easily (well with APE they can so I'm assuming FLAC is reasonably close)

Of thats the case it sounds to me to be a little bit like ATRAC

ATRAC is lossy. If it sounds like lossless on some music this simply means that it's transparent for a given tune at the given bitrate.

-Eugene

With FLAC you do not specify a bitrate like with some lossy codecs. It's more like specifying a quality with Vorbis or MPC, except with FLAC the quality is always "lossless" and the resulting bitrate is roughly proportional to the amount of information in the original signal. You cannot control the bitrate and the result can be from around 100% of the input rate (if you are encoding noise), down to almost 0 (encoding silence).

Josh

I figure I'll take a stab at *answering* the question

General music tends to end up between 50-70% of the original size, if you don't mind the speed of compression/decompression being slow, you can keep it close to the 50% end of things