Pointless guessing contest!

[rabbit]

Also, to quote the Wikipedia article on mp3, "[the mp3 format] provides [...] audio data in a much smaller size by discarding portions that are considered less important to human hearing."  Based on that, I'd say that un- and re-encoding them a few times won't make much difference because the losses fall outside the human hearing range. 

This is why more things should support FLAC.  FLAC is amazing.

[Newby]

FLAC is awesome.

[deadly7]

I've never listened to anything FLAC. =\

[zorm]

28GB, 2 days.

[iago]

See, but FLAC and OSS are huge, so that's no good.  Plus, very few portable players support OSS, and I'm not aware of ANY that support FLAC.  Hmm! 

But yeah, they have the same problem as 320kbps mp3's.

By the way, it's not done yet. 

[rabbit]

a 320 FLAC is about the same size as a 128 mp3.  Huge?  I think not.

[Hitmen]

a 320 FLAC is about the same size as a 128 mp3.  Huge?  I think not.

If you're using FLAC at such a low bitrate there is really no point in using FLAC in the first place :P

[rabbit]

I was trying to explain to iago that it's not huge :)

[iago]

If you encoded it at a lower bitrate, wouldn't it become lossy?  I thought FLAC was supposed to always be lossless, but I don't see how you can encode the same amount of data in less space after running out of entropy

[Sidoh]

If you encoded it at a lower bitrate, wouldn't it become lossy?  I thought FLAC was supposed to always be lossless, but I don't see how you can encode the same amount of data in less space after running out of entropy

It's magic.

[Newby]

If you encoded it at a lower bitrate, wouldn't it become lossy?  I thought FLAC was supposed to always be lossless, but I don't see how you can encode the same amount of data in less space after running out of entropy

What it has will be lossless, however it will have lost a bunch of data encoding it.

Hence why you can have low quality FLAC songs. :P

[rabbit]

Take a look at the source.  It's sort of like zip, but good and specifically for media.

[iago]

What it has will be lossless, however it will have lost a bunch of data encoding it.

Hence why you can have low quality FLAC songs. :P

But if you lose data, then it's not lossless.  That's the definition of lossless! :P

[Sidoh]

But if you lose data, then it's not lossless.  That's the definition of lossless! :P

I think he's talking about losing data when you decompress the file.

Here's the way I'm understanding it (I'll use MP3 in my example):

Let's say file X has a "quality" value of 5000.

You decompress it.  The file's quality is now 4995.

You re-compress it into a lower birate.  The file's quality is now 2995.

With FLAC, it would be:

5000 -> 5000 -> 3000.

That's what I'm thinking, anyway.

[rabbit]

Exactly.  mp3 is totally removing "unimportant parts" whereas FLAC is compressing it.  Nothing is actually removed with FLAC.