I have a quick question about something I have been doing for awhile but never really thought about whether it was actually a good idea to do in the first place.

Sometimes I want to compress my FLAC files to mp3 "on the fly" and I do so with a program called BonkEnc. I never really asked though... is this a good idea to do this?? I mean, FLAC is lossless, so even though I am technically "transcoding" I don't think there is any quality loss issue associated with doing this, is there? Besides the obvious loss by compressing them to mp3, but I mean by the "transcoding" I am doing here.

If this is not a problem, would it be a better idea to convert them to WAV files first and then compress those to mp3?

Thanks.

Don't worry.
The flac file is decoded internally, either to an audio stream (maybe in floating point format) or to an intermediate wav file, depending on the program you're using (dunno which way BonkEnc does it).

The advantage of letting the software do this for you is that it keeps all your tags (at least foobars transcoding tool does).

The opportunity to be able to transcode to different lossy formats and versions without being forced to rip and tag your audio collection over and over is one of the major reasons to go for lossless, hence you're about doing a good thing here. You can use a mathematically lossless archive for any kinds of processing without suffering any drawbacks compared to the time-consuming manual detour via the decompression to WAV. The bit-perfect conversion to raw PCM is exactly what any transcoder does prior to further handling the data anyway.

Transcoding is only an issue if lossy source files are used to encode to another lossy format. Unlike lossless codecs lossy ones degrade quality with every new encoding process, making the material audibly suffer and therefore rendering it unusable at a certain point.


You'd waste a lot of time and even had to tag the mp3s from scratch.