Hi guys

I'm going to extract my loseless music in WAV (so I can split albums and convert them in lossy), but Foobar gives me 2 options for WAV: PCM fixed point and PCM 32bit floating-point. Anybody could tell me the difference? Whiche one should I use?

Thanks in advice

Use whatever they were encoded as (16 bit fixed point if they're from CD).

I don't know how they were encoded.

Anyway, is it nothing wrong if I'll use 32bit floating point? Will I have the same audio quality of original WAV?

You don't know if they're from CD or not?

I think so, I have bought albums on Magnatune.com.

Look at the file's properties in foobar2000. If bits per sample is 32bit float, use it. If not, just use 16bit integer.

And of course, you can use foobar2000 to convert from lossless to lossy. No need to convert to WAV that way.

Magnatunes FLACs are 16-bit fixed.

Thank you guys.

So "PCM fixed point" is 16bit fixed?

Oops.

Use WAV (PCM, fixed-point)

Select [V] Keep lossless sources at original bit depth

Dither: never, or only lossy sources

Unselect [ ] Use DSP [ ] Don't reset DSP between files [ ] Use ReplayGain

Thank you very much, I'm going to do some test.

Music ripped from CD is ALWAYS 16 bit fixed-point.
If somebody at the online musical store was upsampling it to 32 bits, I'd call him an idiot.

What if the music store had access to the digital masters?

Also you can decompress FLACs with standart (console) coder-decoder and compare by content with decoded by fb2k.

Hmm... maybe 32 bit music downloads will be the next wave in hi-fi audio? That'd be nice, because, in theory, the quality could surpass the limitations of CD and even DVD audio. Not that you'd really want to wait for a 15GB download for your favorite artist's new album...

I'm projecting that stuff like this won't happen until we have Gigabit downstream into all our homes.

Then it wasn't called upsampling, I think.

That depends: is a 32bit FLAC much bigger than a 16bit FLAC? I don't know it myself, but that would be interesting to know.

- Lyx

edit: however, i think that it wouldn't be of much use. 16bit is enough for listening - and thats what most people do with music. Multichannel is something much more interesting in terms of usability for the enduser.