Converting flac to wav

[chileboy]

Dumb question maybe - I converted some flac files (that I had ripped from CD using CD Ripper) to wav files so that I could stream them to my PS3. I had thought that would give me a lossless result, but when I look at the "Audio Properties", Audio Quality says are "High (Lossy)", although the sample rate, sample size and bit rate are identical (44.1 KHz, 16 bit and 1,411 kbps respectively).

Was I mistaken about wav being lossless? Or are my files in fact of the same quality as the original flacs?

[Porcus]

Re: Converting flac to wav

I wouldn't call that question 'dumb'. CD --> FLAC --> WAV should be lossless.

There are utilities which can bit-verify a FLAC against a WAV (to ensure that you haven't done anything weird in the conversion). I use the foobar2000 audio player with the foo_bitcompare component.

[Spoon]

Re: Converting flac to wav

Visit codec central above and install the audio info utility codec, convert one file with the option on for all information.

[chileboy]

Re: Converting flac to wav

Thanks Spoon, I already had that codec and did not think of running it -it indeed shows "Audio Quality" as lossless.

@Porcus - Thanks for that as well - I use foobar2000 quite a bit, and I downloaded that component (pretty neat) and it verifies the tracks are identical.

BTW Spoon, in testing my files, I noticed something very strange - I had Batch Converted a bunch of tracks (from flac to wav), but from a network path to another network path - i.e., \\<computer_1>\<path> to \\<computer_2>\path - and every resulting wav was truncated. Although the "Audio Properties" showed all of the data correctly, including the track length, if I actually play the tracks they all contain less than 30 seconds or so of audio. I realized there was an issue because when I loaded the wavs into foobar2000, it correctly showed the length as 20 seconds (or whatever).

When I mapped the paths to drive letters first, and then converted to-and-from those, it worked fine.

I'm using the latest versions of everything.

I'm not sure if using encode local would make a difference, honestly I didn't try it, because "way back when" when I timed it, it was actually slower than just encoding directly to the network. But I'll try that tonight if you like.

Apologize if this is a known issue.

Thanks,

- Mark