hi, maybe a nopb/stoopid question but is there any difference between encoding flac using -5 (stanard) and -8 compression settingds? ie. does this just change encoding time and file size or does -8 encode at higher quality?!

i presume not as its lossLESS, but want to make sure b4 i rip everything with -5.

There is no difference in quality, because it is Lossless, just like you said. It's just the filesize and encoding AND decoding time that changes.

Edit [to be read after kjoonlee's statement]: Since there is no big difference in the decoding time between -1 and -8 I'll have to admit that my statement is kind of silly. But fact is: The time difference does exist! Even if it's just 1/1000 of a second or less.

(And please: Spelling my name correctly can't be that complicated )

Regards

- Realityfreak

Higher-"quality" lossless encoding just means smaller compression, which can take longer to encode.

Congrats on a stoopid/noob question! If I remember correctly this was also my first HA question! There will be no difference in quality. As you said it is lossless. The only difference will be the encode/decode times and the file size, but they should all be minimal.

the difference between -8 and -5 is quite marginal at the cost of longer compressing times. -5 to me is right on, encodes/decodes quite fast

wow, thanks for all the replies! soooo quick, and confirmed wat i believed to be true!.

Cheers people!

Matt

hm, opposite to what Realyfreak said, the decoding time of flac -8 is the same like for flac default (= flac -5), ie. very fast.
Only encoding time is longer with -8, for smaller filesizes. Though -8 is still quick, eg. practical ok even for old P3 PCs.

You have in Wavpack 3 different modes, the -x extra mode, which compresses even better than flac -8, but takes some time (still usable at old P3's), but decompresses very fast, comparable flac.
The other is the -h high mode, which decompresses ca. half speed of normal/extra wavpack and flac, but compresses faster than wavpack -x, and results to a little betetr compression than even the -x mode.

Decoding time for FLAC is the same at all compression levels.

IIRC decoding time was a teensy bit higher for -8, compared to -1. The supersecretonlyfortestingundocumentedblahblahblah option made decoding considerably slower.

edit: It seems my memory is faulty.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=26859