Flac to lossy conversion

[Roboturner913]

Now that I have the player/headphone setup I wanted I think it's time to set up my library a little better. A big chunk (probably 80%) of these are in Flac files.

My question is would it be worth my time to unpack those into wav files before converting to a lossy format? Or will it be just as good going straight from flac to lossy?

Also I have not decided on mp3, aac or ogg, so if any of these poses a significant advantage I'm not aware of, let me know. I'm a bit new to all this. My preferred software is MusicBee if that makes any difference.

[CrowdAds]

[Marvin the Martian]

Straight from FLAC to lossy is fine. Just make sure you're conversion is going to a new location , so you don't lose your FLAC archive.

I use LAME MP3, mainly because I know MP3 will play on pretty much any device I get.(can't hurt to future-proof)

[skip252]

There's no need to manually create .wav files. Temporary conversion to .wav happens as part of the encoding process. It's an internal process you don't see so it's not obvious it occurs, but it does.

The presets in MusicBee are set around the general guidelines for transparency http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....e=Transparency so if you pick the High Quality setting you should be good. If you prefer to save space on your portable player the Portable Device setting will produce files that will do that and more often than not won't have an objectionable amount of audible artifacts.

Before you set off on a mass conversion project you can determine which quality setting is best for you by doing an apples to apples comparison using ABX testing. There's directions on how to do that here http://anythingbutipod.com/forum/showthread.php?t=68675 You may find the default settings are either too high or too low for your needs and decide to change them. MusicBee makes that simple in the Format Converter dialog.

[musichound]

Just think of FLAC files the same equivalent as files that are compressed using WinZip. When .Zip files are restored back to their normal state, they retain exactly the same information as when they were compressed. the same goes for FLAC files, because they are in lossless format.

[Roboturner913]

Originally Posted by skip252

There's no need to manually create .wav files. Temporary conversion to .wav happens as part of the encoding process. It's an internal process you don't see so it's not obvious it occurs, but it does.

I guess that's what I really needed to know. Awesome! From my one try it seemed too good to be true, turned a medium-length CD from Flac to mp3 in less than a minute. I was afraid it was skipping the decompress step or something.

[McDougal]

+1 with everyone's suggestions. Here's my advice.

MusicBee is great software to use for converting. IMHO I wouldn't bother to use any other lossy format other than MP3. I'd choose either LAME V2 or V0 presets. If you really don't want MP3, then AAC would be my second choice. It's the second most popular format, and does sound great (I purchase AAC files from iTunes).

If you were to go AAC, then I'd go with the iTunes encoder.

Another great program, is dBpoweramp. It's paid, but comes with a fully-functional 21 day trial. I've tried it out and it works great for batch converting FLACs to MP3s. However, dBpoweramp does not have the iTunes AAC encoder.

Good luck, let us know how it goes!