converting flac to flac bitrate

[nikonka]

I bought and downloaded a flac album from hdtracks.com, selecting the highest quality 24/192 encoding, only to find out it doesn't play on my gear. How to convert to a flac lower bitrate like 24/96 or even 16/44.1. Thanks for your advice.

[Spoon]

Re: converting flac to flac bitrate

Convert FLAC to FLAC and use the DSP effects 'resample' and 'bit depth'

[nikonka]

Re: converting flac to flac bitrate

Thanks, Spoon,
Works perfect with downconvert to 16/44.1, so there should be no problems with other converts.
Much appreciated.

[fermin]

Re: converting flac to flac bitrate

I got a similar problem. Apparently my control4 system can't handle some of the flac files I have, although they play perfectly well on my PC. Just checked - one of the files has sample rate 44.1 kHz, sample size 16 bit, bit rate 1411 kbps. I suspec the latter is the problem, but how do I get a lower bit rate?

[fermin]

Re: converting flac to flac bitrate

Doh. Never mind. The bit rate of 1411 kbps will of course remain the same unless I change the sample rate and/or sample size. I was able to get to around 700 kbps bit rate by selecting 22 kHz sample rate. Just not sure I want to do that to my music collection; streaming the music to my Oppo works just fine with the unaltered files, so I'll look into using my Oppo. Probably better quality, anyway.

[dbfan]

Re: converting flac to flac bitrate

1411kbps is right for cd audio

[HikeForFood]

Re: converting flac to flac bitrate

I have a related question. I have (192 kHz / 24 bit) FLAC files from HDtracks.com that will play on one of my DACs, but not the other (it is limited to 96 kHz / 24 bit). My question is a technical one (I am a DSP engineer): Does a conversion from 192 kHz to 96 kHz simply throw away every other sample (decimate) from the original file? Or instead is digital filtering employed to compute new samples at the lower sample rate? Ideally the two approaches would produce exactly the same output, but in practice because of imperfect filtering and numerical round-off effects (both unavoidable), the two approaches will yield slightly different files.

[Spoon]

Re: converting flac to flac bitrate

It does not throw away samples, instead the resampler will internally resample to a higher rate (in the frequency domain) to then reduce to the desired frequency.

[HikeForFood]

Re: converting flac to flac bitrate

It does not throw away samples, instead the resampler will internally resample to a higher rate (in the frequency domain) to then reduce to the desired frequency.

OK, thank you. My earlier comment assumed that, for the original sample rate of 192 kHz, the recording contains no spectral energy above 48 kHz, due to strong prior filtering. In that case, throwing away every other sample would be the best thing to do. However, I realize now that it might not be wise to make that assumption, in which case the digital re-sampling and filtering you indicate would be the safer thing to do. Thanks again.