Plummeting bitrate

[SJH]

I’ve been using DB for a while to rip my CDs to default level 5 FLAC – the bitrate is on average 1400kbs – recently this has plummeted to 600kbs and even choosing level 8 doesn’t change thins much – can anyone tell me why this is happening and how to fix it? (the issue applies to all CDs/artists not just the one shown in the screen capture).

[mville]

Re: Plummeting bitrate

I think the bitrate for flac is related to compression and not quality. There is nothing to fix here.

[SJH]

Re: Plummeting bitrate

I think the bitrate for flac is related to compression and not quality. There is nothing to fix here.

Thanks for your comment, I thought that quality and compression (and therefore bitrate) are inversely proportional to each other so the greater the compression, the lower the bitrate therefore lower quality...

[mville]

Re: Plummeting bitrate

Thanks for your comment, I thought that quality and compression (and therefore bitrate) are inversely proportional to each other so the greater the compression, the lower the bitrate therefore lower quality...

No, flac is a lossless format, so no matter what the compression level, there is no loss of quality and the decoded audio will always be the same.

For more information on flac look here, FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec

[SJH]

Re: Plummeting bitrate

No, flac is a lossless format, so no matter what the compression level, there is no loss of quality and the decoded audio will always be the same.

For more information on flac look here, FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec

Ok &*8211; in that case, is there an advantage to selecting level 5, 8 or lossless if the quality doesn&*8217;t change? Or is the argument that the higher the bitrate, the less &*8216;work&*8217; your decoding software has to do so in theory your music sounds better?

[Spoon]

Re: Plummeting bitrate

The only thing that changes is the amount of CPU effort to encode / decode, and the compressed filesizes. The decoded audio is 100% identical to CD.

[garym]

Re: Plummeting bitrate

No, flac is a lossless format, so no matter what the compression level, there is no loss of quality and the decoded audio will always be the same.

For more information on flac look here, FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec

mville is correct. Lossless=lossless regardless of compression. I think you are confusing compression of a FLAC file (which only relates to file size) and the perceptual "compression" used in created lossy files such as mp3 or AAC. These are two entirely different things.