Just got foobar2000, the special edition, and was wondering if there is a way to burn audio cds directly from flac or shn instead of converting them to wave? (is this a good idea or is the wave conversion necessary?)

I just want the shows that I rip to CD to sound as clear as possible.
Thanks

To create a CD that would play in a Standard CD player, you would have to convert to wave first. The only way you could burn FLAC/SHN directly to a CD would be in DATA mode and you would need a hardware player that could decode these files at playback time.

ahhh I see. I wasn't sure if foobar made it possible somehow to do this. Thanks for your insight, guess I'll just keep converting to wave... Oh another general question. So does playing directly from FLAC and SHN more clear than after you convert it to wave?

Example... which has a more pure/full sound. Playing the FLAC or SHN file through foobar2000.... or converting those files to wave and then playing them (I cant tell much difference but there prob is some)

..and Shorten and FLAC are both lossless so they will sound as clear as the source. You lose no quality lossless>wav>lossless...ad naseum. (Hence "Lossless").

The only possible way to loss any quality would be in bad software design, such as early versions of Nero 5.5 that would delete samples of a track that wasn't split exactly on a sector boundry.

Edit:

Any software that plays back audio files decodes to wav. (essentially this is all your soundcard will understand).

Hmmmm then I hope Im not loosing anything through a poor conversion program. I currently use DMB power amp because of its useability... just right click on file and convert to whatever format you want. But I just discovered foobar that will play flac and SHN and let me tell you something you already know.... It kicks the bejesus out of winamp when it comes to quality!

anybody else use dmb power amp to convert files? It was one of the few free converters I found when searching

You can burn FLAC and SHN directly to an audio CD using Nero, if you have the right plug-ins (which you can download from http://neroplugins.cd-rw.org/).

Good luck!

Nero does this by converting the FLAC/SHN files into WAV before burning the resulting data on to the resulting audio CD. The only difference is that Nero does it in realtime while burning (AFAIK). Basically Nero just makes the decoding of the FLAC/SHN files invisible to the end user.

Ahhh I see, so really, I am not "missing" anything. It all needs to be converted to wave in the process of making an audio cd. Thanks again for your help

Yes, that is correct, but you don't have to convert the files yourself and thus it will save you time. Furthermore, if you want to you use CD-text, I think Nero will use the artist/title/etc tags of your lossless files for that purpose (those tags will be most probably lost when you convert to WAV manually).

Actually, you should say audio data is converted to PCM before burning. WAV is just a format which can contain PCM data.

http://www.burrrn.net/

Burrrn is a better audio burning option than nero imo, i use nero for other thing btw.

You might save time using Nero, however in the end it's a per user choice. I have Nero but I still decode to WAV using foobar to take advantage of my replaygain tags. AFAIK Nero still cannot reproduce an album gain using it's normalization feature. Also you can use foobar2000's diskwriter plugin to output wav files with a naming scheme that Nero will automatically parse and turn into CD-Text.



Well for the purpose of this discussion I didn't think it was necessary to get that technical. The OP just wanted to know if it was necessary to convert to wav first.

Hm, haven't really thought of that, but replaygain may be a good reason to decode to WAV first!