Quality settings for lossless format?!

[jancivil]

Just mixed down a short track to wav and flac, both at 96kHz/16bit, the file sizes were 3.15MB vs 212KB respectively. And yet the tiny flac file sounds better than the wav file because it is lossless?
Mix-down took just a second for each.

The .wav is not lossy. - 'because it's on vinyl', ie., you're enjoying a placebo effect.

[fluffy_little_something]

Second time someone mentions vinyl, what does wav have to do with vinyl?

[jancivil]

It's a joke, the indication is you apparently came to believe the FLAC file sounds better based in the concept 'lossless'. Like someone that believes in superiority of 'vinyl'. But .wav is not lossy compression, (as a file) it's undergone no compression.

[fluffy_little_something]

I don't think it sounds better, I was asking if it does. I could not listen to that FLAC file because none of my programs seems to handle it.

I am simply not sure what exactly FLAC is. Is it an audio format or a type of compression, or both in one, unlike wav, which you say is not compressed at all.

So, I assume the slight sound difference between the live DAW sound and the wav is due to the audio settings used? But I was already using the best settings possible...
Is there no way to capture exactly the live DAW sound or would that consume too much space?

[AsPeeXXXVIII]

Isn't WAV lossless as well, though? Or have I been under the wrong impression this whole time?

[whyterabbyt]

Isn't WAV lossless as well, though? Or have I been under the wrong impression this whole time?

'lossless' is lossless data compression; WAV files dont have any data compression, so there's nothing to be lossless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression

[Daags]

It's just giving you an option to downsample the source audio. So you can export a 44.1KHz/16-bit flac from a 96KHz/24-bit master. Most DAWs will offer this option. Yours just includes the compression format as well.

The quality setting for FLAC determines how strong the compression is. Higher compression requires more CPU and RAM to decode. Not an issue for most computers nowadays, but there was a time when this was a factor for some.

/thread

[sprnva]

Technically wav could be considered lossless as it hasn't lost any detail from compression. But generally you would only consider audio to be lossless when it's been compressed to a format like FLAC.

FLAC is an audio format. A compressed one, like MP3, but without any quality loss. The idea is to be able to store and transmit full-quality audio in a smaller package. Depending on the content, a FLAC copy of an album could be maybe half the size of the wav version.

You could just compress the album in a zip file. But then you'd have to unzip it every time you want to use or play it. With FLAC you can just use the files as if they were still in their original wav format.

What audio player(s) are you using? Most should be able to play back FLAC nowadays. The last time I used WinAMP (long, long ago) it supported FLAC, but that might have been with an extra plugin.

[whyterabbyt]

Technically wav could be considered lossless as it hasn't lost any detail from compression.

Nope. Technically, when 'lossless' is used regarding file formats, its specifically a reference to data compression. If its not compressed, it cant have lossless compression.

You might wanna replace 'Technically' with 'Not technically, but as commonly misuse by laymen'.

[aciddose]

It's a joke, the indication is you apparently came to believe the FLAC file sounds better based in the concept 'lossless'. Like someone that believes in superiority of 'vinyl'. But .wav is not lossy compression, (as a file) it's undergone no compression.

The Microsoft RIFF WAVE format is in fact a container for audio. The container may contain anything from lossless PCM (format = 1) to MP3, to ADPCM and more.

This is much like an AVI container (also contained in a parent RIFF), MOV, MPEG or so on.

The file format of a container has little to nothing to do with the data actually contained therein.

[Daags]

You could just compress the album in a zip file. But then you'd have to unzip it every time you want to use or play it.

Not true, daddy-o. VLC for example can play audio that is contained within zip files.

[aciddose]

http://www-mmsp.ece.mcgill.ca/documents ... fc2361.txt

It is difficult to locate an exhaustive list for RIFF WAVE subformat (fmt_.subformat) registrations due to the fact that RIFF-WAVE is for the most part obsolete.

Perhaps someone else can locate a more up-to-date list published by Microsoft or others?

[PALU]

If we want to be technical about it - WAVE format is a container that can contain multiple streams that can be raw and uncompressed, but can be also compressed. Usually it's in LPCM - raw and uncompressed.

As for "quality setting for FLAC" - "libFLAC uses a compression level parameter that varies from 0 (fastest) to 8 (smallest). 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 very dependent on the level of compression."

edit: aciddose beat me to it

[aciddose]

Discussion regarding multi-channel formats and issues with 20, 24 bit samples and ambiguity of the original RIFF WAVE fmt chunk:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 85%29.aspx

Specification of the WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE structure which is used to work around these issues:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 85%29.aspx

[fluffy_little_something]

Yes, I don't know much about compression and audio formats, so I had mixed separate things, my bad. I mixed the native audio quality of an audio file with the compression technology used. But from I have read here one can make a lossless FLAC file of a crappy sounding audio file

I am using Winamp 2.95, ancient stuff

Would it make sense to export the DAW output per live streaming (line outputs of the sound card) to a tape machine in order to avoid audio files altogether? One could go all analog from there, pressing vinyl