If I wanted to decompress a FLAC file and compare the decrompressed WAV file to the originial WAV file, what's the best way to compare and see if any quality was lost? Would compareing the CRC values be a good way?

if you wanted to do that, create checksums for both files and compare them. they should be identical though as FLAC is a lossless codec.
you could also look here.

Whats a good program to find the checksum of a file? I have EAC but it doesn't get the checksum of a wav file on a hard drive, just the cd itself.

any programm that calculates checksums using e.g. MD5 or SHA-1 are good enough for this purpose.
on Windows, digestIT is very simple to use.

Inside a FLAC file there is a MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data, which can be compared against the decoded FLAC file to check for corruption... That is being done whenever you decode a FLAC file to WAV, or if you use the FLAC test function. Here is a program which can check a hole tree of FLAC files and generate a report :

FLACTester :
http://www.vuplayer.com/other.htm

-Martin.

* shntool will compare pcm wave data between ANY supported format (flac, shn, ape, etc)
* wavcmp (written by frank klemm) will compare 2 different files and output the difference to stderr

...and probably foobar2000, and a lot of other programs


later

FLAC should be lossless quality-wise, but (generally) not data-wise:

Read "I compressed a WAVE file to FLAC, then decompressed to WAVE, and the two weren't identical. Why?" here:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/faq.html#tools__wave_flac_wave

You can always use the wav compare function in EAC.

I've explained how you can do exactly that here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=36042

Microsoft's FCIV is free and can compute SHA1 or MD5 sums. No GUI however, so not an option if you're not comfortable with console utilities. To compare the actual audio data (FCIV and other hashing tools will compare the entire files including metadata and headers, meaning the audio data could be the same and still get a negative result) you can use the bitcompare component of foobar2000.

I personally use fsum, it's very fast:
http://www.slavasoft.com/fsum/