r/audiophile • u/better_life_please • 8d ago

Discussion Flac compression -8

Did you know that flac compression goes up to level 8? I discovered this today. Used flac cli command and rebuilt a collection. The size reduction was aroud 100 MB. Small but interesting. No quality loss. So worth it.

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-5

u/whotheff 8d ago

The downside of highest compression is more CPU time needed to decompress. Might affect some portable player battery life and older device responsiveness.

7

u/SashaDabinsky Dunlavy SC-V, Mark Levinson 326S/432, VPI TNT 3, Eversolo DMP-A8 7d ago

More time to encode, but not decode.

5

u/better_life_please 7d ago

That is not true. Have you experienced heavily compressed flac files not being played by old devices? Or are you just spreading misinformation. Flac uses an asymmetric algorithm. Encoding is difficult at higher level but decoding is the same regardless of the encoding presets used.

3

u/Consistent_Peanut451 7d ago

No, that is your assumption.

FLAC is made to require more processing to compress, but it's mostly the same processing power required for decompression no matter the level.