WMA to FLAC

[fabiospark]

Hi, just registered.

Just a quick one 'cause it's one in the night.

I ripped all my CDs to WMA lossless. I didn't know any other lossless format. Now I usually read in forums that WMA is probably the worst so I'd like to do some personal testing.

The questions:

- Can dBpowerAMP convert from WMA lossless to FLAC?

- In batch?

- Will I loose quality in the process?

- Or metadata?

Thanks.

Good night.

[adaywayne]

Re: WMA to FLAC

Hi, just registered.

Just a quick one 'cause it's one in the night.

I ripped all my CDs to WMA lossless. I didn't know any other lossless format. Now I usually read in forums that WMA is probably the worst so I'd like to do some personal testing.

The questions:

- Can dBpowerAMP convert from WMA lossless to FLAC?

- In batch?

- Will I loose quality in the process?



- Or metadata?

Thanks.

Good night.

All "lossless" files are of the same quality when decompressed, so stop worrying. You can convert to another lossless format if you wish, but I would do it in two steps....first back to wav and then to whatever lossless format you choose. The only differences between the various lossless formats are in speed of conversion and compression ratio. Audio quality is the same.

[LtData]

Re: WMA to FLAC

One thing to note tho: If you use wave as an intermediate step, you will lose your ID tags.

Why do you recommend using WAV as an intermediate step, aday?

[fabiospark]

Re: WMA to FLAC

Thank you for the answers.

As I'm still a bit confused, would you mind clarifying a couple of points, please? (Or just give me some links if you think it's better).

Does a player have to "deconvert" (or interpret) a compressed file in order to play it?

Does it have to do the same with wave files?

If it's like that, can I assume that the information (I mean that lenghtless stripe of ones and zeros) passed to the sound card , through the CPU etc, is actually the same either playing a wave or any lossless compressed file? (Provided it is the same song, of course...
...just joking...).

Thanks again.

Cheers.

[Spoons]

Re: WMA to FLAC

why do you think WMA is the worst? thats all i use these days. you should be able to safely convert from one lossless format to another in theory but i have never done a lot of that.

[adaywayne]

Re: WMA to FLAC

One thing to note tho: If you use wave as an intermediate step, you will lose your ID tags.

Why do you recommend using WAV as an intermediate step, aday?

~~~~~~~~~~
Just one of my old-fashioned habits of doing one step at a time. Most of the music files I convert are from LPs and don't have ID tags. Sorry I forgot about that part of it. So long as the name/title of the file stays intact that's all I need.

[fabiospark]

Re: WMA to FLAC

To Razgo:

Winamp forums are full of bad user reviews about WMA vs other formats. Probably they are talking about lossy WMA but, as it isn't clearly stated, I got the doubt it relates to lossless wma too.

In the end, my goal is to have all my original CDs on to an hard disk, filled with tags, metadata or whichever name to call those infos that let you find it easy to choose what you want to listen to, written into the files itself. I want to be able to change player without loosing infos. You know, after some weeks of testing I'm not completely satisfied with a single player: bugs, crashes, missing features, bad playing, tag un-support, etc.

For now, it seems to me that FLAC has got less support than WMA. And what about tags?

Bye.