Best FLAC converter software

[Miska]

3 hours ago, AnotherSpin said:

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.

 

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.

 

[Miska]

7 hours ago, AnotherSpin said:

By the way, I remember that you definitely objected the usage of optimization scripts for Mac OS on the computer with HQPlayer Desktop installed 😀

 

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.

 

[Miska]

14 minutes ago, plissken said:

I think you meant to ask what is your favorite WAV to FLAC compressor. There is no conversion going on.

 

You should be able to take a WAV, generate an MD5 hash, FLAC compress/decompress and get the same MD5 hash.

 

I shot a video and posted it here years ago bursting this particular myth.

 

FLAC of course comes with the original "flac" command line tool that converts between FLAC and WAV. That's the official one.

 

What I wanted and none of the existing tools nicely provided was possibility to take for example 352.8/24 DXD WAV and create for example 120/20 FLAC out of it. One of the many reasons to create my own tool.

 

[Miska]

48 minutes ago, bogi said:

But SoX refuses to set any bit depth other than 8, 16, 24 with FLAC. It does not allow for example 20bit or 32bit integer:

 

Yeah, with HQPlayer 4 Pro I can encode FLAC with any word length from 8 up to it's maximum of 24.

 

[Miska]

5 hours ago, bogi said:

I thought that any bit depth (for example 22) is not allowed, because it cannot be encoded in those 3 bits. When you say "any word length from 8 up to it's maximum of 24" do you mean really any integer in the range 8 - 24 or do you mean 8, 12, 16, 20, 24 ? If any, how that fits into FLAC format?

 

When necessary, samples are zero-padded to word length supported by FLAC. FLAC is clever enough to take this zero padding into account on compression. So you can encode something like 15, 17 or 19 bit file as well.

 

[Miska]

41 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Interesting, but the thread is about converting .flac files back to their original format. 

 

I'm curious how do you define "original" format. FLAC can be as much original format as anything else.

 

42 minutes ago, sandyk said:

It seems non intuitive to use additional processing to convert a music file to .flac just to convert it again to DSD or ANY other format.

 

Not to me...

 

42 minutes ago, sandyk said:

why shouldn't consumers have the option of  obtaining their music in the same format as they would have been playing from an RBCD.DVD-A or SACD

 

Those on-disc formats are not any more original than the typical download formats, usually less. Most new DSD content for example is recorded at DSD128 or DSD256 and will never see SACD. Same for a lot of PCM content, if there is a CDDA version, it will be created along with MP3 versions and such, from the hires source. 

 

So I'm all for getting original format, and not some RedBook or similar. I would say nobody records in RedBook format.

 

 

[Miska]

17 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Not from the major Recording companies, HDTracks, Linn Records etc. ,Blue Coast (DSD mainly) Soundkeeper (.aiff)

Nether Cookie Marenco from Blue Coast,  or Barry Diament (SoundKeeper) like .flac SQ either and avoid it.

 

For most recordings, the original format is some DAW's proprietary multitrack file format. And then most DAWs can render output directly to FLAC, WAV, MP3, etc.

 

ProTools is probably market leader at the moment.

 

19 minutes ago, sandyk said:

BTW, there are quite a few recordings from the majors that appeared to have started life as 24/44.1

 

Yes, but that is not RedBook... 96k 24-bit or 32-bit is pretty typical too.

 

[Miska]

14 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Nevertheless, most DAWs do not generate direct .flac for consumer consumption.

 

Yes the mastering tools do, and most DAWs too. It is also practical for metadata purposes.

 

HQPlayer of course supports ID3v2 tags in WAV and can convert basic ones between FLAC and WAV/AIFF. But ID3 tag support in WAV is not very common yet.

 

14 minutes ago, sandyk said:

As for .mp3 , this is mainly relegated these days to unenlightened individuals who don't realise that .flac is much better, can have similar small file sizes , and is lossless.

 

That is unfortunately the majority (Amazon Music etc)... Or as much AAC these days (Apple Music) which does a bit better job. And then Vorbis (Spotify) which is similar to MP3.

 

14 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Neither can I  imagine the Record companies wanting to pay royalties to use .mp3

 

MP3 is now patent free (all patents have expired and thus patent licensing discontinued). AAC is not yet. Vorbis never had.

 

 

[Miska]

10 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 I didn't say they can't , just that I don't believe that the Majors would not normally do that for general consumption. Or do they ? 

 

Why wouldn't they if the final delivery is FLAC? Because they need to deliver metadata as well for downloads. Easier that way. And of course they deliver some MP3 and AAC as well. DSD is usually delivered as DSF files for the metadata reasons as well (HQPlayer also supports ID3v2 tags in DSDIFF but that is not commonly supported either).

 

FLAC also supports embedding MD5 checksum for the data, so you can make sure nothing changes on the way.

 

[Miska]

5 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 That was my question  .Do the Majors (themselves) send .flac files out to consumers, or is this done by the distributor who included Artwork as HDTracks used to (at least) do ?

IOW, has there been another conversion ?

 

HDtracks is quite messy and I'm trying to avoid it, I'm mostly using highresaudio.com. I can download without some stupid downloader app.

 

It is not about just artwork, but all the metadata embedded in the file.