How to use eac3to to edit AC3 to avoid transcoding

[commandrbond]

Is anything being changed or lost by saving a synced ac3 track to FLAC?

[LucasGodzilla]

Is anything being changed or lost by saving a synced ac3 track to FLAC?

Compatibility and space compression. FLAC support is a bit finnicky and might now play on some setups, and since AC3 don't follow a fixed bit depth, transcoding to a safe FLAC 24-bit would be quite notably bigger in file size.

[commandrbond]

Is anything being changed or lost by saving a synced ac3 track to FLAC?

Compatibility and space compression. FLAC support is a bit finnicky and might now play on some setups, and since AC3 don't follow a fixed bit depth, transcoding to a safe FLAC 24-bit would be quite notably bigger in file size.

I ask because I edited an untouched ac3 rip in audacity and exported as FLAC, but when I play them back, the untouched AC3 sounds FAR more dynamic and punchy, even though both waveforms/spectrograms are exactly the same in audacity.  Im guessing it must have something to do with the AC3 metadata being lost in the conversion to FLAC. I even went back and tried reencoding the flac to ac3 using the metadata numbers revealed by Mediainfo to no avail. Still didn't sound right.

[bronan]

I ask because I edited an untouched ac3 rip in audacity and exported as FLAC, but when I play them back, the untouched AC3 sounds FAR more dynamic and punchy, even though both waveforms/spectrograms are exactly the same in audacity.  Im guessing it must have something to do with the AC3 metadata being lost in the conversion to FLAC. I even went back and tried reencoding the flac to ac3 using the metadata numbers revealed by Mediainfo to no avail. Still didn't sound right.

AC3 uses Dialnorm that affects gain on playback. Try using eac3to to convert the .ac3 to .wav before editing in Audacity, it should apply Dialnorm when decoding.