Topic: FLAC Setting help (using TLH)

[AndyLGR]

Using traders little helper, is it detrimental to the quality of a wav file depending on what value of flac it is converted to? I always convert to setting 8 which TLH lists as the best. But would it make any difference if they were converted to the TLH default value (which I think is 5)?

[morst]

not detrimental at all, as FLAC compression/decoding is 100% lossless.  The difference in FLAC compression level is how much time/cpu power the encode takes to make the file even smaller. Level 5 is a larger filesize than level 8, but level 8 takes longer to calculate. They will decode identically, but have different FLAC fingerprints.

[Fried Chicken Boy]

^^ What morst said.  I believe TLH uses the most recent FLAC frontend as well so it's as good as it gets.

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

FWIW, I use FLAC level 6. It seems to be the best mix between filesize vs. decode/encode time (not that I ever decode FLAC's).

[scb]

not detrimental at all, as FLAC compression/decoding is 100% lossless.  The difference in FLAC compression level is how much time/cpu power the encode takes to make the file even smaller. Level 5 is a larger filesize than level 8, but level 8 takes longer to calculate. They will decode identically, but have different FLAC fingerprints.

They should have the same fingerprint.  The fingerprint is a hash of just the audio data in the file.  It is not a hash of the compressed data.  Think of it as an md5 of just the wav data.  If you compress that wav in 8 different ways, you didn't change the wav data at all. You just compressed it in a different way

[AndyLGR]

Thanks a lot everyone.