Hi,

I currently have approx 350GB's worth of FLAC's, but in order to save harddiskspace and to benefit from the great WavPack format I'm planning to do a big transcode. This musiccollection means a lot to me and there are a lot of hard to get albums in there so I'm looking for a way to make this operation as safe as possible (with the means at hand offcourse). I currently have an offline sync backup solution working that gives me some piece of mind should something go wrong, but in the end the new WavPack files will be synced on this replacing the FLAC's.

Current specs :

• 350GB's of FLAC's;
• FLAC -5 encoded and ogg vorbis tagged.

New specs :

• WavPack 4.41
• compression options : -hh -m -x1

I'm planning to do the conversion using foobar2000 (using the convertertool). Some initial tests prove that everything is quite easy to setup but there are some questions I'm left with :

• Is there any way to log any decode/encode errors during the transcode process and have them output to a logfile?
• Should I do a memtest (memtest86) before doing the transcode?
• Should I do a verify of the new WavPack files afterwards using some of the verifytools/scripts?
• Is there any way to compare the audiocontent between the old FLAC and new WavPack files?
• Should I do a harddiskcheck before doing this, the harddisk is offcourse going to work quite some days, don't know if this could be a problem?

Maybe other people also have some tips on how to do this, feel free to reply.

1) Let foobar do the conversion, if there are errors you should get a pop-up. You open the console to get a log (not sure if it will contain errors if you get a pop-up instead).
2) Memtest is always good but a good memtest doesn't give you absolute security anyway.
3) Foobar has a verify component you can use (see http://foobar2000.org/components/index.html - File Integrity Verifier).
4) Foobar bitcompare tool can do that. It will compare audio data only. you can load all the files in foobar making sure they are sorted in a way that you have all the flac files first and the wavpack files afterwards. The flac and wavpack files have to be in the same order and then you bit compare. It will then compare first half to second half of the selection.
5) I doubt it will be a problem. A bit compare with the flac files should let you know if there were any problems.

I'd do a conversion in foobar and bit compare like you have suggested.

when you get done I'd be interested in what you got for the final size of the collection vs the flac -5 size.

Well the conversion is done actually, these are the numbers :

• It took me 1d23h of encoding on a P4 2,8GHz;
• Collection in FLAC -5 (encoded with different versions of FLAC) was approx 366GB;
• Collection in WavPack -hh -x1 -m is now approx 354GB;
• In the end I saved approx 11GB in total (this means approx 10MB per album).

So in the end I saved a "whopping" 11GB , this is actually less then I expected but nonetheless means spacesavings for me. In hindsight maybe FLAC -8 was also a good option but I expected it to perform less than WavPack, so having to face a recode I choose WavPack...

Ah well people are curious beasts sometimes and don't we all want some new toys to play with from time to time ? Maybe in a year or two when TAK has been opensourced and has reached the same level of maturity as FLAC or WavPack right now I'll transcode to that. I see this becoming less of a problem as CPU's continue to improve in efficiency/clocktick and number of cores.

You could have done this with Monkey's Audio much more quickly with the high preset (maybe even the normal preset) and saved even more space.

I haven't looked at Monkey's Audio for quite some time. My main lossless codecs that I consider using are FLAC, WavPack and eventually TAK. I like the way the developers contribute on the forum. It gives me the feeling that they are willing to listen to the userbase and are continuously improving the codecs. Maybe Monkey's is still in development but to be honest I haven't followed it anymore.

I think development for Monkey's Audio has pretty much stopped, though I believe it is mature and stable. The main problem with the format is that it doesn't decode as quickly as flac, TAK and WavPack.

I agree completely about Josh, Thomas and David. Their contributions to this forum and to the audio community in general are invaluable.

If you haven't already, take a look at Synthetic Soul's lossless comparison:
http://www.synthetic-soul.co.uk/comparison/lossless/

thanks for the info. yeah, depending on how the files were originally encoded, re-encoding with a recent flac -8 probably would have made up only 1/5 to 1/2 of that 11GB difference.