Recently, there has been much talk of FLAC, and the fact that it may well be the new saviour for compressed music. Read more about the project
here.
I decided to do a little testing this afternoon. Using my Living Colour CD - Stain, I ripped tracks 8 & 9 (Nothingness & Postman) four times, to the following formats, using the listed options, which resulted in the shown file sizes:
Track 8 - Size(Kb) - Quality
WAV - 36,452
MP3 - 6,425 - VBR-MTRH, quality=0(best), Lame Encoder
OGG - 4,226 - Q=0(best) min=80, max=350
FLAC - 24,140 - Q=8
FLAC - 25,661 - Q=0
Track 9 - Size(Kb) - Quality
WAV - 36,378
MP3 - 6,960 - VBR-MTRH, quality=0(best), Lame Encoder
OGG - 4,216 - Q=0(best) min=80, max=350
FLAC - 27,010 - Q=8
FLAC - 28,553 - Q=0
Testing method
I used CD-ex for all except FLAC; for FLAC I used FLAC 1.1.0 with the windows frontend. For playback testing, I used Winamp 5, with the FLAC plugin added. Testing was performed
blind - in other words, I couldn't see from the playlist which version of the track that I was listening to.
Winamp was configured with the EQ turned off, and to a relatively low volume. Loud subjective testing makes for short subjective testing.
Discoveries
Size
First observation was that the FLAC files were significantly larger than the lossy compression files. Although HDD's are cheaper these days, the FLAC files are approximately 6 times the size of the OGG files. I was surprised at how large the FLAC files were, so I ripped the WAV's again, this time at Q=0. Still a very large file compared to OGG & MP3.
Volume
I did my listening using my PC, with crappy 2.1 computer speakers - all tracks were played back through the same system, at the same volume. There was no discernable change in volume from one track to the next; that is - all encoding methods output tracks at the same volume level.
Sound quality
It was pretty easy to determine which were the lossy compressed tracks, and which weren't.
It took me a little while to decide (and numerous repeats) that there was a winner from the lossy compressions - it turned out to be OGG. However I couldn't tell the difference between the FLAC and the WAV file.
Conclusions- My wife is completely over the first verse of each of these tracks
- OGG was noticably better than MP3
- FLAC and WAV are virtually indistinguishable
Now - my objective from this test was to figure out whether FLAC was all it is cracked up to be. It is. Better than OGG and MP3? No doubt.
I don't know whether I can stomach the file sizes at this stage though. Having said that though, I'll be looking to encode from this point using OGG rather than MP3 - the difference was that noticable. Bonus is that the files for OGG are smaller again than MP3.
The only trap is that the new sound system in the car may show up some of the deficiencies of compressed music. Time will tell.
Hope this is useful to someone. Has anyone else done testing of this nature?
C!
If you want a comparison, there's also another codec called Monkey's Audio around which is also lossless and generates slighly smaller files than FLAC (though it takes a bit longer to compress).
Linear Mode
