FLAC Tags, Explorer, Comparison to WAV

[avgjoe]

Okay, besides buying a program, how can i get windows explorer to see FLAC tags. Decided, after hard drive space convinced me, to move to compressed music but my question remains, if done properly, is there any loss of music quality by going to a lossless format like FLAC. If not, why and how?

[Mike Anderson]

In Windows XP, I can see the tags if I let the mouse pointer hover over a file name for a few secs. You might also be able to change the directory settings to view them; I'll give it a try when I get home.

And you absolutely do not lose anything when you go from WAV to FLAC. You can test this by comparing the PCM stream from each type of file: They're identical, bit-for-bit.

FLAC can do this by taking advantage of inefficiencies in the way WAV files are encoded. For example, a WAV file consisting of 30 seconds of dead silence will be no smaller than a 30 second WAV file of pure noise at full volume. FLAC takes advantage of the fact that you don't need any data to encode pure silence, so that file will much smaller in size.

Similarly, you don't need much data to encode a pure sine wave. So the closer the music is to silence or pure tones, the more compression you can get without losing data. Only pure noise at full volume is basically impossible to compress without loss of data.

[Mike Anderson]

^^^ I take that back, I can't get Explorer to see the FLAC tags, only tags for MP3 files.

[avgjoe]

How do you decompress FLAC files using EAC? If you can't use EAC, what other program can be used to decompress FLAC files?

[Mike Anderson]

Can you use Perl? If so, I like this guy's scripts:

http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimse...msoftware.html

One of them (flac2mp3) is really handy for creating mirror directories of FLAC files converted to MP3, if you have an iPod or MP3 player of some sort.

I haven't tried it, but it looks like the flac2wav script does the same thing.

But... why?

[Mike Anderson]

BTW, GOOGLE is your friend!

[avgjoe]

actually figured it out. the flac frontend program that comes with the flac encoder decodes as well. just in case i need to restore my cds...

Thanks.

[Mike Anderson]

If you want to fully restore your CDs (not just the individual tracks on them), you'll want the cue sheets as well. This is the data that tells you exactly how the tracks are arranged, e.g. is there a gap of 1s between the first and second tracks, etc. Sometimes you get one track that goes right into another without any pause, and you probably want to reproduce that.

EAC can do this, but you have to set it up to do so.