Order of conversion

[Dave65]

My plan is to rip my CD collection to Flac, these Flac copies becoming effectively a master copy which I understand will be of the same quality as the original CD. I then plan to convert from the Flac copy to any other format as required.

My question is, if I produce an ogg file from a flac file, will the ogg file be "as good" as if I had produced it directly from the CD (or indeed a wav copy of the CD)?

Apologies; this may be posted in the wrong place but it is to do with my evaluation of the ripping software and whether my plans for it (and the conversion software) make sense.

Thanks,
Dave

[garym]

Re: Order of conversion

My question is, if I produce an ogg file from a flac file, will the ogg file be "as good" as if I had produced it directly from the CD (or indeed a wav copy of the CD)?

Yes, CD > OGG is identical to CD > FLAC > OGG or CD > WAV > FLAC > OGG, etc. etc. This is the why ripping to lossless initially is so important.

edit: and to be very clear, not just "as good" but bit perfect identical.

[pablogm123]

Re: Order of conversion

FLAC/APE/WAVPACK/many others...: Compressed and lossless. Think of a rar/7z/ace/zip style format... but designed specifically for audio data. They store the same content which you could store in a WAV/AIFF/headerless PCM file, but compressed losslessly (mathematically identical), with tagging capabilities, and there are formats which can store a hash to validate the content (FLAC, APE and WV can do this, automatically).

WAV/AIFF/headerless PCM file: Not compressed and lossless. They are bigger, hasn't offer any standarized way of tagging, and doesn't offer any way to self-validate the content, to detect corrupt/damaged files.