On Mar 14, 2013, at 13:24, Declan Kelly wrote: > I want the tightest possible compression, while remaining 100% > compatible with the subset that all known FLAC decoders can > successfully > stream or play now in cars, Hi-Fi units, "MP3 players" and cell > phones. > The out and out most widely supported lossless audio format could (and > should) have a better "bang for the buck" to the average user (who has > possibly been tempted away from MP3 or WMV or some Apple format).
I have a vague recollection that going beyond -4 is incompatible with certain hardware players. Sorry I don't have a reference for this, but it seems like even -8 or --best are not 100% compatible with all decoders. Going beyond that to -9 or even -12 seems like it would be far less than 100% compatible. Of course, the logical approach is to look into why these decoders can only handle some FLAC encodings, and work within those restrictions. > I buy a lot of music on Bandcamp (and similar sites) and usually get > smaller files (for long term storage) when recompressing (flac -8). > A common sentiment I have seen online is "my CPU time is too > valuable to > bother with maximum compression", but that ignores the fact that > all of > the copies made of those files are going to add up to something > bigger. I buy nearly everything in FLAC. I do not re-compress, and as far as I know there is no easy way to determine how the originals were compressed. Download speeds are faster, and I figure that my backups are already small enough using the original FLAC that I don't need to experiment with re-compressing in the hopes of getting the files even smaller. For original recordings, I use --best, but I'm not concerned with direct playback on all devices. If I have a problem with playback, I'd probably decode and re-encode. Also, my original recordings are raw and unmastered, so I rarely listen to them without mixing and processing. I then compress the mastered audio (for CD or HD audio) using FLAC again, as a backup of the final product. Again, I use -- best and --no-padding because it's convenient, but I wouldn't mind learning a better default command line. Brian _______________________________________________ flac-dev mailing list flac-dev@xiph.org http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev
