Audacity Forum

steve wrote:

bgravato wrote: Resampling from 48 kHz to 44.1 kHz (or the other way) is not recommended. Those 2 frequencies were choosen on purpose to dificult conversion from one to the other.

Have you ever tried an ABX test on that (double blind comparison)? With a good resampling algorithm the conversion is extremely close. With the highest quality conversion using SoX the conversion is near perfect.

Actually no, but I probably wouldn't tell the difference, I don't have audiophile ears! I've tried blind tests on lossless vs lossy formats and I couldn't really tell the difference where other have, so I guess I might not be the best subject for that kind of test

In theory (mathematically speaking) conversion between those 2 sample rates is supposed to be "not-the-best". If not for any other reason, avoiding one extra step on the process might save some time.

oK, settled on 24/44.1KHZ WAVs

I seem to consistently prefer these to 16/44.1khz wavs on doubleblind tests.

Q, are there better wav to Flac convertors than those in Audacity?

I saw Sox mentioned.

Midnight Rider wrote:Q, are there better wav to Flac convertors than those in Audacity?

I saw Sox mentioned.

Better in which way? Faster? Capable of batch processing? You'll probably find plenty of them, some being free software. SoX is a command line tool, if the goal is to simply convert from wav to flac there might be better (and by better here I mean "prettier") options. I'm not a windows user so I can't really recommend any wav-flac converter for windows, but you can find some links in the FLAC website: http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html (scroll down to the "extras" section).

From my experience there is no difference in speed or sound quality whichever Flac converter you use. The only real difference is the graphical interface, underneath which they all use the same encoder (though some may use older or newer versions by a point or two).

Just a quick update,

I reset the stream format decoders in my Squeezebox Duet so that the SB wasn't doing the encoding locally and my god what a difference that has made to the SQ.

I can now play Flacs and not be able to distguish them from the WAVs.

I also lowered the input on my Cakewalk when recording from Vinyl so that audacity peaks at -6db and topped up the bearing oil on my TT.

The results I am getting now are excellent and I am finally really happy with the results.

I've noticed now that if I do some gentle post processing such as declick and noise reduction that the results do not detract from the music.

Very happy now and would recomend that anyone who uses a SB Duet resets their file format preferences and also anyone who uses a Cakewalk is very conservative with their input levels.