Best FLAC converter software

[AnotherSpin]

There is no such thing as "the best", the perception of different people is different. Not to mention the fact that the perception of the same person is not fixed, and can change under the influence of a variety of external factors. Also, the software options for different operating systems are not the same.

[AnotherSpin]

I guess quite soon we will be offered to buy another converter from FLAC to WAV that will radically revolutionize our listening experience😀

[AnotherSpin]

Your second post, maybe?

[AnotherSpin]

1 hour ago, cappo said:

[...] Example: download Audio Transcoder and, using it, convert just 1 of your favorite albums into WAV and listen. Then tell us what you think. All of this will take you half an hour max and you will learn something useful. No need to pay either since they offer a free trial period... [...]

 

Bingo!

[AnotherSpin]

7 minutes ago, cappo said:

Bingo what?

Guys, there is nothing wrong about your desire to sell or to promote the sales - it is quite understandable. But the way you do it makes me laugh. Thank you for fun😀

[AnotherSpin]

34 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Just because you personally, are unable to hear the differences between .flac and .wav doesn't mean that numerous other members are unable to as many have previously reported, and just like the OP and  Vlodzimierz  has reported here also .

However, if the artwork is more important to you than sound quality, then stick with .flac

 

BTW, this discussion isn't about converting FROM .wav. It's about converting from .flac and .ape TO .wav as per the initial post in the thread. Given that many companies provide their Downloads in .flac format mainly to save bandwidth ,it should hardly be surprising that they want the best sounding conversion to .wav possible.
 

 

And now I am looking forward to hear your expert analysis of the results of the conversion from flac to wav with the help of the fabulous, and not expensive at all app already mentioned above. Please!

[AnotherSpin]

8 hours ago, sandyk said:

Please keep your sarcasm to yourself, and unless you have anything of value to report in this clearly SUBJECTIVE type thread, please refrain from deliberately trying to disrupt it and force it's closure, as well as the banning of both new members without first giving them the benefit of the doubt.

It should also be clear that there are language barriers here too.

 

 

Why did you think that I couldn't be interested in your opinion about the product that is being promoted here?

[AnotherSpin]

56 minutes ago, bogi said:

The same WAV file can sound differently for example when played from different media such as magnetic disk vs RAM disk because of different noise profile generated during playback. Nothing new, experiences of this type were mentioned here years ago.

  

 

You are telling us that two WAV files with the same checksum are different files only because of they were generated by a different algorithm. So you are telling us that different algorithms, producing the same bits, are producing some sound difference. Applied back to much simpler cases, it seems that commutative law of mathematics is now ruled out and 1 + 2 generates different number 3 than 2 + 1.

 

OK, then we need new terms and new physical explanations. Maybe some new universe. I would call this phenomena as WOW effect of WAV files. So how is this WOW effect associated with media file that the checksum tool cannot find it? Where can the WOW effect be stored? My candidates are:

 

a) in listener's head - the only place the difference exists
b) in WAV bits itself ... like protons and neutrons consist of quarks, audio bits consist of WOWs - they are not yet discovered but hopefully they will be

c) in at least one additional dimension of our universe - we are not able to perceive them in usual ways, but music is an exception - it is a door into otherwise imperceptible dimensions of anything.

 

Looking forward for your explanations.

 

For me, it looks like an attempt to prevent the sales. Remember, you must truly believe in benefit of doubt!

[AnotherSpin]

9 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Other than the attached , I will not be going further with this in this thread as it has been done to death numerous times already, and Chris will not permit it all to be posted yet again.

The attached is from the 6th separate , and CORRECTLY performed session of DBTs, each with 8 repeats in each, for a total of 48 out of 48 POSITIVE results, performed by E.E. Martin Colloms from Hi Fi Critic, as well as being  past editor of Hi Fi News and Record Review.

 I supplied pairs of comparison .wav files via the Internet of tracks from Dire Straits-Love Over Gold for the purpose. 

 

 Among the now many members who have now verified my findings are E.E. George Graves. Paul Raulerson. Peter St.  manishander, acg (Anthony) .fas42 . 

Recording and Mastering Engineer Barry Diament has also verified my findings via comparison CD-Rs sent to him.

 

IF you require further info please use PMs ONLY

 

Why give other people's names in support of what you consider to be a purely subjective? Does the subjective needs something else besides itself? Is nothing enough? Know the truth and truth will set you free.

[AnotherSpin]

4 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 IGNORED .

My condolences.

[AnotherSpin]

4 hours ago, cappo said:

You, ignoramus, have an IQ of an amoeba and don't know your arse from your elbow!

 

True. Subjective all-inclusive Knowing makes no difference between various objects, all of them are equally known. All the rest is noise.

 

[AnotherSpin]

2 minutes ago, robocop said:

OMG why has this gone to hell in a hand basket. Small margins of sound difference are not to be argued over. I have never heard of Audio Transcoder so never tried it. But we are splitting hairs I think. 

 

My idea is first never having to convert anything from original is best in my book. The source (wave) is the best if you can't get this then second is flac, after this not worth arguing over. Put up with what you have and don't bother with comparisons.

 

Mind you I'm ignoring DSD which I've not bothered with being PCM follower.

 

A bottle of red wine helps with enhanced listening or perhaps two!!!

 

 

 

 

Yes. All files do sound different before and after visiting the bathroom. No software required for this.

[AnotherSpin]

2 hours ago, sandyk said:

 IGNORED .

Are you by any chance related to Ralf11 ?

 

Sorry, no.

[AnotherSpin]

5 hours ago, sandyk said:

 If the OP hadn't been banned as a result of him losing his cool ,because of the attacks from members such as yourself and AnotherSpin, he would have been in the position as the OP to request that as this is clearly  a Subjective, NOT Objective thread,  that comments like your would have been removed , and not have been permitted.as they inevitably lead to the closure of threads which is their clear intention.

 This is exactly the kind of disruptive behaviour that saw quite a few members either banned or move to A.S.R.

 

Did you try the app aggressively promoted here by OP? Can you share your impressions about results?

[AnotherSpin]

21 minutes ago, sandyk said:

The results of the only other S/W I tried were posted 23 hours ago on page 2

 

So, you have not tried the app promoted by nice couple of our new friends. Given your support and your tacit agreement with their style of communication, it is rather strange, as I dare to believe. 

[AnotherSpin]

50 minutes ago, manueljenkin said:

Speaking of sony, half a decade ago, they released an "audiophile" sd card. I guess market didn't like that approach and seems to have backfired. I wish I could try one to see if it had any legibility, and considering its from Sony, I have far less skepticism than I generally would with other manufacturer.

 

Forum participants experimented some time ago with installing an operating system on the sd cards and playing music from the sd card, or from virtual RAM, etc. I remember that different cards indeed 'sounded' slightly differently in such experiments. Sony products were believed to be "good". However, the difference was not at all dramatic and the inconveniences of running the computer from the sd card were more important. There were also attempts to optimize the operating system using different scripts. I would also put the encoding of the files from the flac to the wav into the same category. If you listen very carefully, you will notice the slightest differences, not improvement necessarily, but all this is within the framework of minor upticks that can be safely ignored by any one who simply wants to listen music and avoid masochistic procedures on the way. Imho, of course.

 

You could try search function to find all these discussions on the forum. Some fresh ideas are not so fresh after all.

 

[AnotherSpin]

39 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

I'm doing that all the time with HQPlayer OS, but I don't find it any more inconvenient than any other method. Dumping the OS image on card and booting it up. Possibly restoring configuration backup and that's it.

 

But in my case content is on SMB network share or from UPnP or Roon stream, not local.

 

 

I also boot the NUC from USB stick with your NAA image. But, I meant something else. By the way, I remember that you definitely objected the usage of optimization scripts for Mac OS on the computer with HQPlayer Desktop installed 😀

[AnotherSpin]

5 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Yes, because it tends to break things... Same as on Windows, stopping services needed by HQPlayer won't do much good. If it doesn't make the application outright fail, it may degrade performance.

 

Usually, by default, macOS behaves quite sensible way.

 

 

And what do you think of converting flac files to wav before they are sent to HQPlayer? Would it be sensible to embed such converting into HQPlayer?

[AnotherSpin]

2 hours ago, bogi said:

 

I don't understand what exactly you mean with your question. Every audio player needs to decode the input audio file to get raw PCM (or DSD) content. To decode FLAC, a player has to decompress the sample data to get raw PCM samples. That's what HQPlayer is doing with PCM content and the same must be done by any FLAC to WAV converter. HQPlayer is doing that decompression already. And it is doing it on the fly with no special memory requirements for that process (other thing are memory requirements for DSP). Embedding that in HQPlayer would mean converting the whole input file to WAV before further processing, because something as "one sample WAV" does not make sense. And decoding the complete audio file before actual playback would mean:
1. Decode FLAC, get raw PCM data

2. Encode raw PCM data to WAV

3. Decode WAV to get raw PCM data

4. Pass raw PCM data to player engine.

As you see, points 2 and 3 are redundant. And what is important, FLAC to WAV conversion takes some time and one could want to play 20 or more minutes long track - nothing special for classical music, or for rock music of 70's. That would mean interruption of playback between tracks. And it would mean interruption also in the case of track transition without silence ("The Dark Side Of The Moon", "Wish You Were Here", concert recordings ...).

 

Converting FLAC to WAV in advance, but independently on HQPlayer, before an audio content (a whole album is optimal case) is passed to HQPlayer, has IMO still advantages. I am doing so in an automated fashion. Every PCM track I want to play I am converting to WAV, physically it means also transferring audio data from a magnetic USB disk (my FLACs) to RAM disk (the WAVs to be played). I am doing that after my listening tests I did years ago. The only logical explanation I have to explain the difference is about higher level of noise computer generates when reading file from magnetic disc. And some noise could be added also by FLAC decompression in HQPlayer, if FLAC is played instead of WAV. The WAV file decoding is much easier - nothing is to be decompressed, sample values can be directly read.

 

 

Does it mean the whole idea of converting FLAC into WAV in advance with dedicated converter app makes no sense at all, if a sophisticated player, as HQPlayer, is used - if FLAC is put into virtual RAM, etc.?

[AnotherSpin]

1 hour ago, bogi said:

If FLAC is put into virtual disk (RAM disk), HQPlayer still needs to decompress, so there may be some added noise caused by processing against reading WAV from virtual disk. And the decompression costs some (not really much) computing resources which in some border situation theoretically could be missing for DSP. Theoretically. IMO magnetic disk vs. virtual RAM disk makes more significant difference than FLAC vs WAV in virtual disk. And my experience is that RAM disk implementation sonically also matters. I don't like to write something what others could consider a nonsense, but years ago I compared more RAM disk implementations. At that time Primo RAM disk was suggested by for example Geoff and Eurodriver, who made sonic comparisons of more products too. That time I found free Softperfect RAM disk, compared it with others and I am using it till today, without any further comparisons. So if you want to try such a thing, you know my recommendation.

 

 

I am simply doing copying to RAM disk with FLAC to WAV conversion in one step. I am doing so for whole album at once. I am using foobar2000 converter in command line mode for that. It processes up to 4 files in parallel and is able to use 4 cores for that, so it really runs in parallel and very fast. For typical CD it takes about 10 seconds. For hires FLAC content it takes longer, about half minute, or possibly more for 192k or multichannel. Occassionally I tend to do some basic DSP with PCM content yet before it is passed to HQPlayer (the foobar2000 converter can be set up to do DSP during format conversion). For example, when I am listening on headphones, I can run multichannel to stereo to lower HQPlayer load. If the recording is too bright, I can run a tilt filter (discussed a month ago). In HQPlayer I tend to do stereo to binaural processing (since I am listening on headphones). So for me moving of content to be played into RAM disk is bound together with format conversion and possible DSP.

 

I made a comparison between: a) FLAC file; b) FLAC file converted to WAV with XLD; c) FLAC file converted with XLD to WAV and placed in a virtual RAM disc. It seemed to me that there was no difference between variant a and b, or the difference could be ignored, and there was a very small, barely perceptible difference between a and c. Maybe, c sounded a little more dynamic. All the files were played through HQPlayer in mac OS + NUC NAA. Anyway, the difference between the various HQPlayer settings is more noticeable. The case put in rest.

 

Also: it seems to me that when I first experimented with the converting FLAC into WAV ten years or so ago, the difference was more noticeable. Since then, linear power supply units were added at all critical points, better quality cables, and NAA have been added to the audio system. Now there is practically no difference. Probably, it could be concluded that in this case the efforts in the field of hardware proved to be more effective.

[AnotherSpin]

37 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Isn't that exactly what I have been saying ? 😉

 

 

 

I believe you were exactly saying that converting FLAC files to WAV makes sense, if I understood correctly.

[AnotherSpin]

9 hours ago, sandyk said:

I always convert .flac to.wav for serious listening, even with corrected and posted .flac files in John Dyson's PM group about feral Dolby-A encoded files.

 So why is it so inconceivable that the 2 banned posters were able to hear differences between .flac files converted to .wav using different types of S/W ?

 

No doubt many people with ears can hear the difference between different types of files - that's exactly what I wrote already. The two posters were not banned for being able to hear the difference between files, as I believe. I only can guess what do you think they were banned for?

 

In my system and for my ears, there is a difference between a FLAC and a WAV, but it's not so crucial to go through converting routine each time. However, there are software solutions that have a greater impact on sound. For example, in my case it is the use of a virtual RAM disc.

[AnotherSpin]

14 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 They were banned due to provocation by a couple of members resulting in them considering this a hostile instead of welcoming forum, and reacted very badly . Yes, their reactions were OTT and completely unacceptable and left Chris with no other option.

 

 I must admit that I went very close to doing the same on several occasions, mainly due to provocation by Ralf11.

 

 If you are indeed able to hear differences between .flac and .wav then it should be very easy for you to hear the same differences that Frank reported about in his previous post ? 

 

You may want to re-read first couple of posts of OP before you start accusing someone of provocations. 

[AnotherSpin]

30 minutes ago, sandyk said:

They were banned due to provocation by a couple of members resulting in them considering this a hostile instead of welcoming forum

 

"In other words, nobody cares about superior WAV and everybody continues to listen to their inferior FLACs?

 

If that is indeed the case, then, it appears, that I'm in the wrong place with my questions. I erroneously thought that this was the forum where addicted-to-best audiophiles share, help and learn from each other..." 

 

Nothing in this post sounds to me as a request for discussion from someone who has written his first post on a long existing forum. Sorry. You may disagree, of course.

[AnotherSpin]

Just now, manueljenkin said:

What's this? In the middle of people offering useful contributions to the post.

 

You may refer to the OP post which I quoted above. My post was after that.