If i convert Flac to Wav and than to La What i Get???

A flava?

You get the same lossless file you started with minus the tags....

What do you mean by "minus the tags"?

i loose tags if encode it thats it?
im compressing to wav uncompressed method and i keep the same specs of the flac file.
im using dbpoweramp to encode the files to wav and than La to compress the music to a smaller file.
you really mean i loose quality?

that's what i want:
compress the flac files to la without quality loss and make the file smaller but i really don't want to loose quality.
La is the top lossless compression
going lossless to lossless make the file the same don't it?

Converting lossless to lossless is... lossless. Isn't that nifty?

Lossless is lossless... yes really, it's lossless. You get the same contents but with a different codec.

Use foobar2000 to convert, then you even keep all your tags intact.

HA should start pinning a few statements in each forum, as this question comes up REALLY often...

If you use intermediate wav, you lose tags, because wav doesn't support tags... That's what gordolindsay meant!
Go DIRECTLY from flac to la, or better yet, go DIRECTLY to la!

Why would you want to trade your state of the art FLAC files for the hopelessly outdated La format?

La does not support reasonable tagging (ID3v1 only), is not supported by most players (neither software nor hardware) and development has been abandoned more than 5 years ago.

Not only would going for La be a bet on a dead horse, it would be a bet on a dead and already buried horse - with lots of grass already grown on the grave.


As far as the compression ratio is concerned, yes it still is. However, are some 2-3% better compression compared to FLAC really a good deal considering the deficiencies of the La format?

If you desperately want those 2-3%, better go for TAK or Monkey's Audio. Those will get you approximately the same compression ratio as La and at least support contemporary tagging.

So you wanna spend how much time transcoding all your lossless files? Is it really worth it for 1-2% extra storage???

A Seagate 1.5TB internal drive is $120 at NewEgg (Just the price of 10-15 CD's!) - I store roughly 45.000 tracks on it and still has plenty of space free on it! It's so cheap I would buy two of them to have a backup of all my music!

BTW. What players actually support La? I was looking at various lossless formats a few months ago just for interest I wanted to play a La file and see what the cpu usage was like on a current system. Sadly I couldn't find any plugins to even listen to La on any current media players. Yes it definitely seems to be a dead format based on that experience.

Winamp 2 (and therefore Winamp 5 but without transcoding support etc.); Foobar2000 0.8.3. But these plugins cut several samples from the end of a decoding file.

On my Core2 Duo E4600 (2.4 GHz) LA decoding speed is ~9.4x realtime (LA -high is ~6.4x realtime).
FLAC decoding speed is ~340x realtime.

If you're on Windows and still want to save some almost costless hard drive space consider using TAK instead of LA. Here you got an extensive comparison.

Why not try OptimFrog or TAK (my favorite atm)?
TAK has very good efficiency, I mean it's pretty fast, while compression ratio is equal to or better then Monkey's Audio.
FLAC is only popular because it is light on resources and fast, etc. But it's compression ratio is just pathetic IMHO.
If you intend to archive you're stuff for playback on PC only, I say go TAK all the way, only people with no life whatsoever have the time for LA or the more extreme settings of OptimFrog IMHO (well either that or they have 16 core 50Ghz cpus or something)

I disagree. According to Synthetic Soul's test (http://synthetic-soul.co.uk/comparison/lossless/), compression ratio for FLAC -8 is 65.476%, and for TAK -p4m is 63.544%. => You can convert 1 GB of FLAC files into 0,97 GB of TAK files. I'd rather say that the difference is just pathetic.
(added: hyperlink)

I didn't realize that a 60%+ compression ratio was pathetic.

FLAC is popular because it is supported by multiple applications, open-source, free to use, has a set tagging standard, and is lossless. Sure, TAK might be able to provide a slightly better compression ratio (all lossless formats kind of suck when it comes to compressing my metal music) but the amount of software and hardware that supports TAK is limited. FLAC support is growing on a near constant basis.

I had to conduct a few minutes of research to figure out what La audio was. The format has been dead and buried for 5 years yet someone still wants to use it? You know, I have an 8-track car deck that you might want.

For those keeping score, this statement simply isn't true.

Nothing like another pointless food fight over lossless formats. My life would have never been the same.

OK, so let's rephrase... Most applications don't support wav/riff-tags (which doesn't really change the fact that wav-tags are pointless/useless)

Yet there are applications and devices that support them. Will the nonsense ever stop?

Let's try to stay on topic and stick to the facts instead of twisting someone else's post in order to justify a personal opinion, shall we?

im thinking on going to TAK instead of La if you all say its dead.
decoding of TAK seems to be faster.
plus almost the same Monkeys Audio compression level.
Optimfrog for me is just to slow to decode,encode almost like La

i use KGB Archiver
LOL i downloaded powerdvd to get dolby prologic 2
and i have no life at all i play WoW.

PS for ODYSSEY

Im on Brazil dude.
if you get 120 bucks for those 1.5 gbs hd i get here more than the double cause of importation,taxes and etc. im on a really corrupt country
price of the same hd on cheapest place here is 301,0569 dolars
you're on 1 world im on 3 or at least as you say development country

BUT I AM PENTA CHAMPION ON FOOTBALL AND YOU'RE NOT!!!!!! FTW

Good idea:

Fact 1. foobar2000 doesn't support wav-tags
Fact 2. Winamp doesn't support wav-tags
Fact 3. FLAC encoder doesn't support wav-tags
Fact 4. shntool and any other cli-tool I've seen, doesn't support wav-tags

I think you should post a list of applications that truly support wav-tags. Feel free to split it into a separate thread, but if you really think it's needed to point out that wav DOES support tags, you should support your claim instead of just attacking a perfectly valid claim!

BTW, you took the thread offtopic, and now tries to justify that we did?


Even if the drive is twice as expensive, it's still a pretty good deal if you think about how much music you can store on it.

"Most applications don't support wav/riff-tags" is a valid claim (most probably).
"Wav-tags are pointless/useless" is just trolling.

greynol was correcting a false claim that RIFF WAVE format can't store any metadata. It was you who thought it was necessary to go on about your view that it's possible, but they are pointless and useless.

So you don't think it's useless?

Saying that wav-tags are useless because most applications has no idea how to handle them, is precisely the same as saying that la codec are dead. It's a very format, it can't die. although you might have to use 10+ year old software, it still is perfectly possible!

I'd still like to see that list of software that supports wav-tags before you call me trolling!

Edit: A little googling returns some "interresting" info about riff-tagging methods, however it doesn't really sound like (to me) that there is ONE standartized method for tagging, just that there are abilities to tag. If that's true, I don't see why you need to nitpick on a statement that's at least partly true, and especially true for anything in regard to this very topic!

Oh I want to nitpick some more! (greynol learned me that!)

The statement is very true indeed. Reading the wav-file specification shows that the wav-data itself is stored in a riff-chuck. Thus wav can not hold tags at all - riff chunks can!

No, la codec is dead because it's slow and limited and nobody has any reason to use it, because there are better alternatives.

RIFF tags are not dead because they are still used today on a regular basis, work fine and they are on par with other solutions, storing both originator information and technical fields for use in various pro-audio applications like samplers, recorders and DAWs, which all use WAV or AIFF with RIFF tags (or the extended BWF kind) with no problems, because that format is considered a de facto industry standard in broadcasting and mastering applications.

ACID, Adobe Audition, Pro Tools, SONAR, surely you can do the Googling yourself.

Scroll up and read how it all started, will you? greynol simply stated that "wav doesn't support tags" is a false statement and you jumped in with your "pointless and useless" agenda, going all worked up about it.

Seriously, will the nonsense, your arrogant confrontational attacks and childish post editing ever stop?

Don't you mean that the PCM data and the tags are both stored as riff chunks in a wav container?

As long as greynol is here and is equally rediculous? No...

It's funny you only mention professional tools, since this topic started as a problem with "consumer-products". I still don't see any kind of wav-ish tag-support in common tools as foobar2000 and dbpoweramp - Do you? Maybe you should go develop some, because it has been requested countless times. Then I might stop claiming that wav-tags are useless, point-less and even non-existant!

None of you have given any useful information to OP on how even to preserve tags while decoding to wav (but you keep on insisting that it's possible). Post a solution if you want to discuss and stop useless nitpicking!

Sure, WAV tags are useless, pointless and even non-existent, because odyssey from the Internet says so. Well, until somebody includes support for them in end-user software, then he might graciously accept their existence and the world could start using them again. *yawn*

Because I (we? who?) am not talking to the OP but correcting your false claims. Yeah, play the "I can write any BS, but I, for one, at least tried to help!" card.Sure it is, open an MP3/FLAC file e.g. in the old Cool Edit, save as WAV, metadata preserved, no miracle. Naturally this is not feasible for a batch conversion, but a big difference compared with something non-existent and completely useless nonetheless.
(Says guy who wrote "Oh I want to nitpick some more!"...)
Anyway, I'm discussing nonsense claims only, there is a good solution in the previous posts already.

Let's recap

I didn't claim this initially, yet I do support the claim, as I'm sure many other regular users would.

You can disagree all you want, and although Cool Edit/Audition might support saving the metadata to wav-files, chances are that FLAC-encoder would disregard them, so what use are your claim?

Yeah, some might not get the irony...

If more common software began to support any kind of wav/riff-tags chances are others would follow up, so yeah why not start with foobar2000?

dbpoweramp has long supported wav tags.

Great, case closed then...

I was going to stay quiet after my comment caused "a fight", but I think it went too far and it laster longer than I anticipated.

Therefore, I want to appologize!

All I wanted to say is what odyssey is claiming between the lines... wav taging is practucally useless (in regard of OP's needs), even though it can be done with special software combinations. And even if wav tags were completely supported in the same way as flac tags are, OP's way of going about from flac to wav and then to la is a waste of time. And that's what I wanted my post to be all about. Skipping the wav part (for whatever the reason may be now).

Please, let us get along, as I kind of have a good opinion about all of you who are arguing right now.

Not gonna wade too deeply into this, but it is only foobar2000 v0.9 that does not support WAV-tags. They did exist in v0.8.x

Now that you mention it I recall a user preferring 0.8 for that reason (never used 0.8 myself, so i had no idea)... Why was it removed in the transition to 0.9, and are there plans to include support for it?

It used a non-standard way of doing it, APEv2 tags at the end of the file, not a RIFF INFO chunk like the other applications do. See here.