How to compare the audio quality of a FLAC and Mp3 file? Please

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>>353910

I think this page explains everything pretty well: https://interviewfor.red/en/spectrals.html

You can use Audacity to open up a music file, then go to where I've clicked and select "Spectrogram".

Here's a quick list of cutoffs to look out for:

64 kbps - 11kHz
128 kbps - 16 kHz
192 kbps - 19 kHz
320 kbps - 20 kHz
(FLAC) 1000 kbps or higher - 22 kHz or higher

File: FLAC.png (2MB, 1920x1050px) Image search: [Google]

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>>353910

And a FLAC file for comparison. As you can see, the MP3 cuts off at 20 kHz, as it should, and this cuts off at 22 kHz.

File: Spectrograms.png (14KB, 588x359px) Image search: [Google]

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>>353918

And one last banana, go to Edit -> Preferences and then "Spectrograms" and make your options something like this. I don't actually know what they should be, but if you don't put either the window size or the maximum frequency high enough, then the spectrogram is limited to the default, which is something like 8 kHz, which isn't what you want.

>>353910
- Download an ABX tester ( http://lacinato.com/cm/software/othersoft/abx is well-regarded)
- fail to tell them apart
- realise you don't have golden ears, because golden ears are made up

>>353917
>>353918
>>353920
Wew, lad

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Okay, maybe I'm asking the wrong question.
Will I lose anything that my ears will notice by converting FLAC files into MP3?
Pic related is how I do it with DBPoweramp, is this the best way to get maximum quality?

>>353936
No, you just got the wrong answer. Your question was fine, see >>353931. If you can't distinguish your FLAC and MP3 under double-blind conditions, that means they're identical as far as you can tell, and any difference you see under normal conditions is just your expectations.

LAME is a very competent MP3 encoder, but do you actually have to use MP3? Almost all "MP3 players" and all phones play AAC, which sounds better at any given bitrate.

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>>353947
If it sounds better, I have some rare albums that I've only been able to find in MP3. I'd assume that converting MP3 to something with better audio quality doesn't really work out?
I'm mostly using MP3 because it's what most of my music was by default, and because I want to have as many albums on my music player as possible.
Also, I don't think I've even seen an AAC file before.

>>353954
Converting MP3 to something newer will always sound worse, at least technically. It is possible that with the right settings you could end up with a file that's smaller and technically worse but not in any way you can actually hear.

Converting MP3 to FLAC will sound exactly the same: lossless codecs like FLAC always sound exactly the same.

If you have a FLAC you're looking to convert for a device that doesn't have much storage, AAC will sound better than MP3, be smaller than MP3, or both.

You probably have encountered AAC before, it's just that the file extension is usually M4A. AAC is usually put inside an MP4 container, which adds a few kb but greatly simplifies seeking, reading the track names, etc.

>>353954
>I'd assume that converting MP3 to something with better audio quality doesn't really work out?
If you have a big cake and you have to cut some bits off to fit it into a small box, moving it into a bigger box later won't bring back the parts you cut off.
Same applies here.
FLAC is a "lossless" codec, which means when you encode something into FLAC it keeps 100% of the information and tries to get the smallest file size it can without losing anything. Mp3 is a "lossy" codec, so encoding to MP3 cuts out information that the encoder thinks isn't very important to the listening experience in order to save space. The end result is a much smaller filesize, but this also means you're always losing SOME information and SOME quality.

>>354035
Sure, but the reason the entire world has standardised on psychometric codecs, for digital TV, for music downloads, for netflix, for the pictures your your camera takes, for the textures in the games you play, and the voice you hear on your phone calls, is that this difference in quality often isn't perceptible, and therefore *doesn't matter*.

>>354044
Well yeah. Lossy codecs are designed to toss out data that a human viewer or listener won't notice, so that to a normal observer the .jpg or .mp3 sounds almost the same as the lossless version of the same file with 5x the filesize.

I'm just explaining why converting from mp3 to flac won't do anything.

>>354049
Ah, but OP was asking about converting from MP3 to "something with better audio quality", which would also include all the newer lossy codecs.

Obviously you'd have to test, but it's entirely possible that you could go from MP3 to something newer and get indistinguishable quality for a smaller filesize.