Greetings. I’m curious about average FLAC compression ratios: mine seem to be high (poor compression)

PREAMBLE
Here’s what I am working to achieve:
Lossless archival/playback of 400+ CDs with additional Lossy encodes for portable player (Nomad Zen)

SETUP
I am ripping separate tracks to FLAC from EAC using Mareo with these parameters:
--best --replay-gain
I have EAC remove leading and trailing silent blocks which I find preferential for most playback situations

QUESTION
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I have not encoded many songs to FLAC, but in general my encoding ratio falls between 0.62 to 0.69 of the original size. This seems high when compared to the numbers from the FLAC website and my overall impression of others’ results.
So I’m looking for some good estimates of the compression ratios of your FLAC archives, and to find out if the compression ratios I’m experiencing seem plausible given my setup.
For clarity: please use the ratio or percent of the FLAC file size (0.XX or XX%) to the WAV file size(1.00 or 100%) to help stem confusion.
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THANKS
I apologize if this topic has already been put to bed. I searched the forums extensively but was unable to find a specific answer to my question. Thanks in advance for your insight.

This depends mostly on what you listen to. If you're trying to flac modern pop albums with a lot of compression, metal or electronic music, you're going to end up in the 0.60-0.70 range. Classical usually ends up around 0.50, but again that depends on whether you are compressing a solo violin sonata or Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand. The best compression I get is usually on soft ambient music - about 0.40 or so.

So I think you are seeing normal results based on the music you are encoding.

--jth

I've compared Monkey and Flac on 300 classical CD. Average ratio for MAC is ~0.41, and flac -defaut was 5 % bigger (must be around 0.43).

I have ~1000 FLAC files with an average at ~0.60 (850kbps).
They are mostly Trance and Ambient, but also some Pop tracks. Max is 0.81 (1150kbps) and Min is 0.26 (372kbps).

So I think its safe to say that your tracks is within the "normal" compression range!

Solaris

to quote the optimfrog-website:


I use lossless flac for most of my quality music (90%)... only when the input has lower quality like heavily compressed music or loud noisy music, I use MPC-Q7, because then soundquality does not suffer that much by going lossy AND I the albums don´t become so big on the filespace.

A couple of nights ago I encoded a good subset of my collection (121 CDs worth, rock/pop music of varying vintage) using flac -4 and got a ratio of 64.22%. Eyeballing Hans Heijden's graphs, I'd expect another 0.5% if I had used flac -8, but I might still be waiting for the compression to finish. So I think your numbers are in line. As others have mentioned, you can expect better ratios on classical music and worse ratios on newer, more overly-compressed pop CDs.

--John

I guess the jig is up, I've been archiving mostly Rock/pop type music.

Thank you for everyone who posted their ratios, it was very helpful for my undersanding. I have now encoded some CD's with less compressed music and have witnessed ratios ~0.50.

I would definetly say that my ratios are normal and I can make some pretty good estimates on my file space needs.

Thanks again!