FLAC Compression

Beatnik

What's this ?
When extracting a cd to flac and you have an option for compression from 0 to 8 is there a quality difference ?

395MB to 360MB is the difference in file size on the same cd.
 
No quality difference, the higher levels take longer to encode is all. When unpacked they still should be lossless.
 
If you do a search, several people have done studies of FLAC encode time vs file length. If I remember right, 4 or 5 was about optimum. Anything more than 5 doesn't get you a significantly smaller file but takes quite a bit longer to encode.
 
One of the better explanations I've seen concerning encoding level ...

Without going into too much detail about the specifics of the codec, a good oversimplification is that during compression, many different algorithms are tested to try to model the data. The higher the compression level, the longer it searches for a good algorithm--usually resulting in a more efficient modeling of the data (hence a smaller file size). When the compressed file is written, that algorithm is written into the file as well--to decode, simply apply the algorithm. All the algorithms, regardless of compression level, are stable and relatively computationally cheap; all the work is done upfront during encoding trying to find that ideal algorithm.
 
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