whay do people post in flac than mp3 when they post
what iis the disference

Flac is 'lossless', and therefore is less compressed than mp3. Some folks claim they can hear a difference in quality (flac has more details).

Mp3 is a skeleton of music, FLAC adds flesh.
If you want a rosy skin colour and a glimmer of life in the eyes of your musical subject, try HD files!

Gimme vinyl!

Funny, when I just listened to mp3, I used to claim not to care. But now I'm flac or wav only and HD files are insane. Love vinyl but it requires more WORK. Have become but a sound snob AND lazy :-)

Love flac and wav files, others don't or can't play them on their music players. So, for those who would like me to give them mp3 versions of flac stuff, what's the best or better free flac to mp3 converters out there? Thanks.

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mighty stork
Gimme vinyl!

if you insist...

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dmay
Love flac and wav files, others don't or can't play them on their music players. So, for those who would like me to give them mp3 versions of flac stuff, what's the best or better free flac to mp3 converters out there? Thanks.

VLC is pretty good. But most Androids and i Phones play FLACs directly now.

I believe the most used audio convertor would be 'dBpowerAMP', converts anything to anything. I think there's a freeware version available but you'll have to check it out, I've had mine for years & as long as something is working fine I don't bother with updates.

To answer the original question we have to go a little bit into the theory of audio I'm afraid.

If we record a piece of music digitally, the best commonly used formats that keep all the audio information are the Microsoft 'WAV' & the Apple 'Aaif' formats. These formats are 'uncompressed' however, they produces large file sizes which can be a problem if you don't have much storage space (iPod, tablets, etc.) or if you want to post on the internet & your internet speed isn't that good.

The way around this is to make the file smaller, to 'compress' it, & this can be done two ways

1) 'Lossy', this removes some of the audio information & you can't get it back. The most popular are the Microsoft 'wma', the Apple iTunes 'AAC', & the most popular 'mp3'. You can compress to a greater or lesser degree, the more you compress, the more you lose, the smaller the file, & vice-versa. It gets to the point, however, that if you compress too much, the music will sound awful, spoken word can be compressed much more than music.

2) 'Lossless', as the name implies, this compresses the audio file but without any loss of audio quality, think of it as squeezing out the spaces in a pillow, you still have the same 'mass' but in a much smaller space. The best known & used of these formats is 'flac' (Free Lossless Audio Codec) & the file size is about 60% of a WAV file.

Which to use? That is up to your ears. If you have good hearing & if you have a good quality hi-fidelity system that can reproduce the best, then of course, use the best. If, however, you are like me, a 64 year old musician whose hearing is slightly down & who has only a modest stereo system, then decent quality mp3s are perfectly fine. On my system I cannot hear the difference between good mp3s & flac.

I certainly use average mp3s in my tablet, no way can those tiny speakers or earbuds reproduce the full sonic flavour of flacs.

Once I went to a coverbands gig. When I got home I still could here the wistle blowing. I heared it blowing for a Thousand miles. A load beep in my ears. I am Lucky. All is back to normal, and still can notice the difference between flac and mp3. My ears date back from the 1950, so one can calculate.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2014-12-21 22:07 by stonesmuziekfan.

A good free convertor is Pazero Audio extractor. I've used this for years no problems. There are also different versions for converting video formats.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2014-12-22 16:40 by rumple21.

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stonesmuziekfan
Once I went to a coverbands gig. When I got home I still could here the wistle blowing. I heared it blowing for a Thousand miles. A load beep in my ears. I am Lucky. All is back to normal, and still can notice the difference between flac and mp3. My ears date back from the 1950, so one can calculate.

I was once sitting ON a speaker during a cover band's gig... 3 days whistling, but then my 1957 vintage ears were back to normal and I can still hear the difference between Flac and mp3 too :-)

Chris from Belgium

There are several good, free converters around.
The only problem is that they usually come with a lot of useless stuff, so you have to be extremely careful when installing them. And it won't hurt to keep your Anti-virus software running during the download.

I'm using several converters: Bigasoft Audio Converter and Freemake Audio Converter. (the last one is free, but needs your full attention while installing, so you don't get extra stuff,; toolbars, browser and the like)


.

Chris from Belgium