Yes, flac is very compressed it's fine. You can use eac3to to convert the flac file, you just type "eac3to myflac.flac myflac.wav". ffmpeg may be able to as well, I don't really use it as much so Tom's post was enlightening

(2019-03-30, 05:34 AM)bronan Wrote: Yes, flac is very compressed it's fine. You can use eac3to to convert the flac file, you just type "eac3to myflac.flac myflac.wav". ffmpeg may be able to as well, I don't really use it as much so Tom's post was enlightening

Ha! You ain't kidding. He knows his stuff! But thank you too, That was also helpful.

Yep, it's normal that FLAC is smaller. DTS-HD MA is a very bloated format, which is why I occasionally rant about it. Though usually the savings are closer to 20-30% in my experience, but it always depends on the content. Out of curiosity, was it a 24 bit or 16 bit file? You can tell with MediaInfo for example.

You can convert it with ffmpeg to .wav or .w64 as well, in the same way as described:
but the problem is the same as before, you have to manually specify the bit depth. ffmpeg is weird in that way with wavs. The eac3to way seems simpler in that way I guess.

There's also a handy little tool called "flicflac" which lets you convert FLACs to WAV files and vice versa with a simple drag and drop. Though I think I've experienced it having a hiccup occasionally with some files, in that it won't recognize them.

The 16 bit DTS-HD file I tried last night ended up as a 16 bit flac.

Okay yeah, that makes sense. 16 bit tend to be the most bloated in DTS-HD MA.

I find eac3to to be superior for this sort of conversion. Caveat being that you should update the version of libdcadec.dll to v0.2.0. Eac3to comes with v0.1.0. https://github.com/foo86/dcadec/releases...-win32.zip

The decoding will automatically select the correct bit depth, and there is an excellent gui that makes using it much easier than having to type in the command line for ffmpeg.

https://www.videohelp.com/software/eac3to

(2019-04-30, 04:16 PM)schorman Wrote: I find eac3to to be superior for this sort of conversion.  Caveat being that you should update the version of libdcadec.dll to v0.2.0.  Eac3to comes with v0.1.0. https://github.com/foo86/dcadec/releases...-win32.zip

The decoding will automatically select the correct bit depth, and there is an excellent gui that makes using it much easier than having to type in the command line for ffmpeg.

https://www.videohelp.com/software/eac3to

The thing is, even the libdcadec library you linked is already >2 years old. ffmpeg has the most current version of libdcadec already integrated, so if that older one had any minor bugs or didn't support some particular format, that was only fixed in ffmpeg. Correct bit depth will be selected with FLAC, but yeah with WAV it's a bit annoying. it's the only real downside I see personally, because I've grown quite accustomed to using ffmpeg over the past year or so.

Yeah, but lossless is lossless. I have many functional programs that are older than 2 years.

I understand, but there can always be bugs that could compromise losslessness and the DTS format, as others, is constantly updated with new versions (like DTS:X) which may or may not introduce variations in the algorithm. I'm gonna say in 99.9% of cases it's probably no big deal, but shit can always happen. Don't wanna shit on your recommendation or anything, it probably really is good for people who prefer GUIs, I just want to point out there is a (low) chance of potential downsides.

I have an idea: just encode a PCM track in DTS-HD MA, then decode it using various decoder, and compare the result; they should be bit-by-bit identical - if not, mention here which one gives a different result!