There is a slider in the FLAC control panel during export. Better/Fastest. Since FLAC doesn’t have quality adjustments. What’s the slider doing?
Koz
There is no slider in the Audacity options. Have you downloaded something from FLAC - if so, what exactly? I assume whatever you are seeing is the compression level (which affects encoding speed very significantly while - because lossless - barely changes the size of the exported file).
Gale
Bad choice of words. I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around the function of “level.”
If the file size doesn’t change (much) and the quality is fixed, why would you want anything other than fast?
Koz
Fastest will compress to about 57% of the original size, level 5 (default) will compress to about 54% or so of the original file size. Level 8 might compress to 50%.
http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html
So if that extra 7% compression is important, you want level 8. If you want the file compressed quickly, choose level 1.
– Bill