Flac levels - purpose

[Dave65]

What is the purpose of the different levels of Flac conversion?

My guess is that they offer different levels of compression... but why? If any level of Flac conversion produces the original uncompressed audio on playback, why would anyone not choose the highest level of compression?

Just wondering before I launch into converting 300 CDs to Flac...

Thanks
Dave

=========== SORRY - I noticed the help button next to the level options and this has answered my question. Unfortunately I cannot delete this post.

[pablogm123]

Re: Flac levels - purpose

Any modern CPU encodes very fastly any level of compression offered by the FLAC encoder (in fact, general process will be limited by the CD read speed). And even a very ancient CPU can decode the -8 level, for playback, without stuttering. I used to play files encoded at -8 level using a very old PIII Coppermine CPU, and everything was fine and fluid.