Editing flac files

[monkeyfight]

hi. sorry if this has been covered somewhere. i've searched the forum and the internet and haven't been able to find the answer to this.

so i have a bunch of albums in flac form that i want to edit in goldwave (maximize, adjust equalization, etc.). i've tried this with one album so far doing the following:

1) i joined all the flac formatted songs into one file (the full album) in goldwave in order to work with the album as a whole.
2) i saved that one file (full album) as a flac file.
3) i then edited the file, split the songs again and saved them as flac files.
4) i then intended to encode the flac songs as mp3s for smaller, general use files.

my main question is, with steps 1-3, is there any degradation or quality loss of the files? or would it be better that if at step 2 i saved it as a wav file and kept saving as wavs until i was ready to encode to mp3? generally i like to work with wav files since i know there's no loss, but all i have on hand is flac so i just want to be sure i'm doing this the best way.

i noticed that the file size of the original track 1 flac file is different than the edited file, and the kbps is different. i think with a wav file the file size would be identical as long as the song length remains the same. not sure if that matters at all.

thanks!

[mathyou9]

Like MP3 (and other lossy formats) the different file sizes [of the same waveform] is due to the various compression settings. But unlike MP3, the waveform itself of a FLAC file is lossless. So whether you've used a little or a lot of compression, you're virtually editing the original WAV file.

In the end, it all comes down to processing power. Different file sizes (sourced from the same waveform) simply utilize different amounts of processing power to encode/decode the same lossless waveform.

[monkeyfight]

so with goldwave, can you basically edit flac files as much as you want without quality loss, the same as with a wav file, or should the flac files be decompressed to wav files first?

thanks.

[Gord]

can you basically edit flac files as much as you want without quality loss, the same as with a wav file

Yes. The only difference you would notice is that each time you load a FLAC file GoldWave will have to decompress it, and each time you save it GoldWave will have to compress it again. If you find the compression/decompression is taking too long for your liking and if you have sufficient disk space, you could save your working files as WAV, then convert them to FLAC for archival purposes once you're done.

Your earlier comment puzzles me, however. You said that the edited copy of the first track was a different size than the original. That is not necessarily a problem because the new copy may have compressed a little bit more or less than the original. However, you also said that the bitrate had changed. I wouldn't expect that to happen unless you used "Save As..." and chose different FLAC attributes, e.g. if the original FLAC file was "Maximum, 16 bit, stereo" and you did a "Save As..." and specified "Maximum, 8 bit, stereo" or something like that.

[monkeyfight]

can you basically edit flac files as much as you want without quality loss, the same as with a wav file

Yes. The only difference you would notice is that each time you load a FLAC file GoldWave will have to decompress it, and each time you save it GoldWave will have to compress it again. If you find the compression/decompression is taking too long for your liking and if you have sufficient disk space, you could save your working files as WAV, then convert them to FLAC for archival purposes once you're done.

Your earlier comment puzzles me, however. You said that the edited copy of the first track was a different size than the original. That is not necessarily a problem because the new copy may have compressed a little bit more or less than the original. However, you also said that the bitrate had changed. I wouldn't expect that to happen unless you used "Save As..." and chose different FLAC attributes, e.g. if the original FLAC file was "Maximum, 16 bit, stereo" and you did a "Save As..." and specified "Maximum, 8 bit, stereo" or something like that.

i did just try a test. i opened track1.flac in goldwave, did "save as" and just used the default flac settings. the difference between the files was 31.5mb/31.6mb and 952kbps/954kbps. the other file i had edited had a bit more of a difference, but it seems negligible i guess.

[Gord]

the difference between the files was 31.5mb/31.6mb and 952kbps/954kbps. the other file i had edited had a bit more of a difference, but it seems negligible i guess.

I tend to agree that it probably isn't worth worrying about. It is curious, though. Two questions:

1. Where are you getting the bitrate values?

2. When you open the original FLAC file in GoldWave, what does it say on the status bar at the bottom of the main GoldWave window? When I open one of my FLAC files it says

FLAC: Lossless Codec 16 bit, 44100Hz, stereo

(All of my FLAC files are WAV files that I converted to FLAC "Maximum, 16 bit, stereo" using GoldWave's batch processing option.)

[monkeyfight]

I tend to agree that it probably isn't worth worrying about. It is curious, though. Two questions:

1. Where are you getting the bitrate values?

2. When you open the original FLAC file in GoldWave, what does it say on the status bar at the bottom of the main GoldWave window? When I open one of my FLAC files it says

FLAC: Lossless Codec 16 bit, 44100Hz, stereo

(All of my FLAC files are WAV files that I converted to FLAC "Maximum, 16 bit, stereo" using GoldWave's batch processing option.)

1. i got the bitrate values from my music player, foobar2000.

2. the status bar reads the same as yours: FLAC: Lossless Codec 16 bit, 44100Hz, stereo

[Gord]

i got the bitrate values from my music player, foobar2000

Okay, thanks. It looks like foobar2000 is just dividing the (compressed) file size by the length of the audio track (approximately 271 seconds in the example above).

That doesn't strike me as being a terribly useful number for a FLAC file because the same audio clip saved as two different FLAC files, one with Low/Fast compression and the other with Maximum compression, would report different bitrates. However, they would be exactly the same when they are uncompressed and played back (and therefore would play back at the same bitrate, i.e., the bitrate of the uncompressed data).