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Alan Silberlight
Known Participant
February 25, 2019
Question

Convert to uncompressed FLAC?

  • February 25, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 4218 views

Is it possible to convert to uncompressed FLAC? I do not see a way to do this but hopefully, I am wrong. Thank you.

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    1 reply

    SteveG_AudioMasters_
    Community Expert
    SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
    Community Expert
    February 25, 2019

    There's no such thing. FLAC is a lossless, but nevertheless compressed audio format. It achieves its compression by removing redundant data, but in a way that can be recovered without loss. For instance, if you had a string of, say, 18 '0's in a file, you could, for instance, express that as 0>18 rather than 000000000000000000. When decoded, perfectly recoverable, but taking up far less space. But if you didn't do this, it wouldn't be FLAC...

    ryclark
    ryclark
    Participating Frequently
    February 25, 2019

    But otherwise yes. Audition can certainly save audio in the lossless Flac format with no problems.

    ryclark
    ryclark
    Participating Frequently
    March 8, 2019

    Yes, I would say so.

    compressed file--529,990 kb

    uncompressed file--884,986 kb

    That's about 41 percent.


    Is that comparison of the uncompressed original Wav file or of the 'uncompressed' Flac version?

    There is no such thing as an 'uncompressed' Flac file! The 10 different settings in a Flac encoder don't refer to uncompressed or compressed versions of the resulting file since all Flac files are compressed in size compared to an original Wav file but they are all still lossless. They refer to different levels of the amount of efficiency in how the files are encoded. Lower numbered settings mean that the Flac encoder can take longer optimising how much the file size is compressed thus leading to smaller file sizes. But a Flac file always plays back as completely lossless audio quality no matter how much the file size has been reduced.

    According to Wiki

    libFLAC uses a compression level parameter that varies from 0 (fastest) to 8 (slowest). The compressed files are always perfect, lossless representations of the original data. Although the compression process involves a tradeoff between speed and size, the decoding process is always quite fast and not dependent on the level of compression.[11][12]

    According to a .WAV benchmark,[13] using higher rates above default level -5, takes considerably more time to encode without real gains in space savings.

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