FLAC vs MP3 bitrates

[FreddieT]

Richard,

+1 for FLAC. Not only lossless, half the size of the equivalent WAV file & covertible to other forms it also has the luxury of proper ID3 tagging and album art. And it's free!!

Unlike one or two who claim the WAV file still sounds better I can't tell any difference between the files played back on the same (pretty decent although I do say so myself) equipment.

It is not surprising, therefore, that hi res downloads also use FLAC; unless it is a DSD download. The good news is that Foobar (and other programmes no doubt) can convert DSD (.dsf files) to high bit rate FLAC; usually 24/88.2 or 24/176.4.

F.

[Richard]

Hi Freddie, yes I use Foobar on the server PC to play music directly it's a very good player but Ive yet to try higher res than CD.

For the main system I use Logitech Media Server which plays all the files I've tried.

I did find WAV can't be reliably tagged but FLAC can and the tags and artwork jpg also came across perfectly when using Flacsquisher for conversion to MP3.

When using fre:ac for MP4/m4a I found the tags didn't work as well, tracks weren't in order and there was no artwork file. I didn't spend much time with it though as it didn't sound much different to MP3 so I'll stick with that for car and phone to avoid any problems.

I did find when ripping CDs down to FLAC with EAC that the artwork jpg gets put in the music folder with the audio files. With my earlier MP3 rips using Media Player there was no artwork in there so I think those tags must just point to art elsewhere.

When dropping the music folders onto the phone the phone will show the artwork if it's in the folder and tagged (EAC rips). If not (Media Player rips) it doesn't, and needs to be added after, and ends up in different folders on the phone so now I'll do all artwork and tags before loading on the phone.

[Richard]

For editing all file tags I use MP3TAG,

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html

Easiest way to open is to right click the folder containing the album and choose Mp3tag. (You can do one album at a time for say adding artwork, or all of them if you want to make the music category the same for all your Springsteen albums for example.)

Left click on a track to change it. Some properties can then be changed directly in the track box and others in the properties pane on the left.

To add artwork drop the jpg in the folder before opening it (suggest up to 500px x 500px and up to 50k works well). Left click and drag across all files to highlight them. Right click the circle image in the art box in the left pane and choose add cover. Left click to highlight the picture shown and open.

After any change then click the save icon top left under file