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Ogg FLAC

 

You can think of an audio codec as having two layers. The inside layer is the raw compressed data, and the outside layer is the "container" or "transport layer" that splits and arranges the compressed data in pieces so it can be seeked through, edited, etc.

"Native" FLAC is the compressed FLAC data stored in a very minimalist container, designed to be very efficient at storing single audio streams.

Ogg FLAC is the compressed FLAC data stored in an Ogg container. Ogg is a much more powerful transport layer that enables mixing several kinds of different streams (audio, data, metadata, etc). The overhead is slightly higher than with native FLAC.

If all you are doing is compressing audio to be played back later, native FLAC will do everything you need, is more widely supported, and will yield smaller files. If you plan to edit the compressed audio, or want to multiplex the audio with video later in an Ogg container, Ogg FLAC is a better choice.

Compression Level
Higher compression levels will result in smaler file sizes but longer encode times. Lower compression levels result in larger file sizes but encode faster. The compression level does not effect the sound quality of the file.

Sample Rate
Sample rate is the number of samples of audio carried per second, measured in Hz or kHz (1000 Hz). 44.1 kHz is the sampling rate of audio CDs and 48.0 kHz is commonly used for professional video. Higher sample rates result in higher quality audio with larger file sizes. Setting this to Auto will create an output file with the same sample rate as the input file.

Bit Depth
Bit Depth defines the numer of bits (1's and 0's) used to represent each sample. By increasing the bit depth, quantization noise is reduced improving the signal to noise ratio. For each 1-bit increment in bit depth, the S/N will increase by 6dB. 24-bit digital audio has a theoretical maximum S/N of 144 dB, compared to 96 dB for 16-bit. Audio CDs use a bit depth of 16 bits. 24-bit is common in professional audio and video environments.

Verify Encoding
With this option, a decoder is run in parallel to the encoder and its output is compared against the original input. If a difference is found flac will stop with an error.