Transcoding Lossless??

[Chomsky]

I got a ton of .shn that need to be converted to .flac

dMC does this just fine... so it seems.

I read the thread in the FAQ about transcoding lossy formats and how its bad... but it didnt mention transcoding lossless. Is this still bad?

Is there a utility that can compare the outcome to the original source?

I really like this program a lot and hope to be able to use it in my shn>flac adventures but i want to check facts before I convert my entire library.

[Razgo]

well i am no expert but it should all be the same. it would be like zipping up a text file in .rar then archiving it in .ace and then .zip , the file should still be the same. as lossless is a form of zip compression and doesn't remove any audio.

but others might say something different?

[ferris209]

Tha way I've always understood it is the same as Raz, you can convert lossless all day and suffer no loss of quality at all.

[drspy00]

That sounds right! You could convert from lossless to lossless millions or unlimited times and nothing would happen, except you'd probably get bored!

[OldCoder]

You cannot directly compare the two files because they are in two different formats with different compression schemes.

However, you can go a step further, and convert *both* of the files to WAV format, and then compare the WAVs. They should be identical, which you can verify with a binary file comparison. In XP, you can use the FC command with a /B switch, on earlier MS OSs look for COMP with the same switch.

Once you do this a few times, you'll have the confidence tgat the software really does work.

I wouldn't say you can convert lossless formats without a problem UNLESS you do so with Spoon's software - there are other tools out there that do the same stuff, but I don't have the faith in them that I do here.

After all, Spoon's Da Man!