The differences between FLAC and MP3, Lossless vs Lossy

The time has come where you can get a 500GB or 1TB hard drive for pretty cheap. Space is no longer a issue for most people. A lot of people are wondering what music format they should use, and what's the difference in quality between each format is.

Lossy Format
This means when you rip a CD, you lose audio data and quality. The most common lossy file is MP3.

Lossless Format
This means when you rip a CD, it is an exact audio copy and you lose no quality. The most common type of lossless files are FLAC and WMA Lossless. A good comparison of lossless formats can be found here.

Will you be able to hear a difference between lossy and lossless?
Depending on what you use to play your music, what your speakers/headphones are, and how good your ears are, you may or may not notice a difference between them. Some people, however, cannot hear the difference between them even on the highest end of hardware.

Does my player support lossless?
Some portable music players (iPods, Zunes, etc) will not play certain lossless formats. You should check to see if your player can handle it, and what lossless format your player likes best. Foobar and Winamp should be able to play all type of lossless formats, however WMP11 will only play WMA Lossless.

Lossless is more future proof than Lossy
The best thing about the lossless format is that you can convert FLAC to WMA Lossless and back to FLAC as many times as you want without losing any quality. The same goes for any lossless format. With lossy format (MP3) each time you convert you lose quality and cannot get it back.

Picture Comparisons
Here are some pictures to show exactly how much data you lose between formats, and what the typical file sizes of each format is. The highest being the best quality, and the lowest being the worse quality. These pictures are high quality PNG images, so they may take awhile to load.





I hope this will help some of the people that are confused with the different formats and what the differences are between them. The absolute lowest you should go is 192KBPS MP3s or the quality loss will be very noticable to most ears.
Edited by Murlocke - 4/11/10 at 7:39pm

I would have, but Adobe Audition does not support 24bit/96khz.. atleast when I try to load the file nothing happens. I believe the data would look the same as lossless though.

The best programs would be:
Exact Audo Copy (EAC - Free, and a very confusing application to learn)
Easy CD-DA Extractor (Costs)

I use Easy CD-DA Extractor. It will convert virtually any format to another format as well as rip to any format. Remember to set the highest error checking quality, as well as CRC checking and verify data boxes. It takes alot longer but you'd be surprised how many times a RIP gets bad CRC checks which means something didn't go right.

Remember: Converting lossy to lossless (AKA MP3 to FLAC) will not increase quality and will only use more space on your hard drive, infact if you do this it my be lower quality than the MP3 was to begin with. There is no way to convert lossy to lossless, however you can convert lossless to lossy which is the same thing as ripping from the CD.

Yea most lossless files (espically ones that come from CDs in the 70s and 60s) will be alot lower, but lossless should never be below the 18500HZ line. If it is, you program just go a transcode (someone converted a MP3 to lossless, so its just a big MP3 quality file)

It really depends on the persons ears and what setup you have. My HT speakers cost more than most peoples cars, and the difference between 320KBPS and lossless was rather big. My friend who is not a audiophile agreed he could hear a difference between them, but said he didn't care about quality as long as he had music. Some people are like that I guess
Edited by Murlocke - 5/12/08 at 4:51am