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dimeadozen
I know for this site its all flac, and since I just got on (finally) I want to up a few torrents to keep my ratio good. Question: Whenever I download a torrent, regardless of where I get it, i convert it to MP3, so I can listen to it on my MP3 player. What is my best plan of action to make flac torrents from MP3s? (already have TLH). Convert to wav, then encode to flac 6? or should I do something else. And does flac really make a huge difference from 320kbps MP3?
Never, EVER convert from MP3 to FLAC. MP3 throws away data to make the file size smaller, and can never be retrieved. FLAC, however, is lossless, and simply compresses the data, usually by about half. The difference between MP3 and FLAC: regardless of how high of a bitrate you set for the MP3s, you're not getting a full copy of the original. Some say that extra data adds a certain depth to live recordings; I say the lack of that extra data makes the recording sound tinny.
What app(s) do you recommend for ripping to FLAC and capturing FLAC fingerprints? I'm going to rip my Towson 1979 24 Bit Remaster to FLAC and make it available for everyone on the site.
But what if its a really poor recording to begin with? @ notangus use Exact audio copy BJ888 - if I have to though, what should I do? I cant really tell the difference. See I dont have a big HDD, and I dont have alot of $$$$, so flac, however good it may be, is just to large for my computers hard drive.
Danger101, what about an external HD?, DL the flac files,copy em, covert the copies to mp3 (if you must!, no disrespect, im old school, c-90 b4 ipod etc), winrar the original flac files onto your external HD and delete the converted copy files, should save you some room, or alternatively burn the flacs to CD, then you got ipod and cd's
Plain and simple: You don't. There's no need to ever convert from MP3 to FLAC. Anyone who knows how to read a spectrograph will know right away that it's from MP3. Just because you can't tell the difference, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you can't afford to store the actual FLAC files on hard disk, burn them to a CD/DVD in data form, and store them that way. But don't ever knowingly upload MP3-sourced FLACs, cause that will get you banned from Dime pretty quickly. High quality MP3s are not lossless, no matter how much you want them to be.
@ BrianJohnson888 So there is a way to make a mp3 file lossless? Could you please tell me how this work?
No....I just said they aren't, and can't ever be. The very nature of MP3's makes this impossible. MP3s, in order to reduce the size of the file, throw away data which, for the most part can not be heard by the human ear, which is fine for most commercial music, since it's usually produced to the tits anyway. Not much difference can be heard when you convert music these days from CD/WAV to MP3. But alot of people, myself included, find that live concerts recorded from the audience, lack something when converted to MP3. Not so much heard, but felt. That's those unheard frequencies and data. There's no way to get the data back once converted to MP3, and anyone with Audacity can open up a file, and check the origin with the spectrogram. FLAC/SHN/APE however, use a mathematical formula, to compress the original WAV file to about half in most cases. They all use mathematical formulas to do the work. I'm not good at explaining it, but think of them as ZIP/RAR files of the audio world. They are lossless, and can always be brought back to the original format with no data loss. There's been some toying with bringing back the lost frequencies with math formulas, the same way audio clipping can be repaired somewhat. But it's never really found any ground, since you'd have to have a unique formula for every song, since there's too many variables. And even then, you're not going to get that file back to 100% of the original. So no, absolutely no way you can