Should I convert NSF/SPC etc to WAV/FLAC or mp3?

Should I convert NSF/SPC etc to WAV/FLAC or mp3?
by BubbleBobble on 2010-01-01 (#54592)

is there any point in having lossless audio that has been extracted from NSFs, SPCs or any other types?

it seems like since the files are so small, converting to mp3 would be the more logical choice, but I'm just wondering if wav or flac would actually be better sound quality, or if it's just wasting space

I know WAV is just wasting space, which is why I was considering my WAVs to FLAC, but I might just convert to mp3

in that case, I need suggestions for the best free (or otherwise) program to convert WAV to FLAC and/or WAV to mp3

thanks

by Dwedit on 2010-01-01 (#54595)

If you use compression on the wave files like gzip or zip, their size should go down tremendously.

by BubbleBobble on 2010-01-01 (#54598)

if a wav is compressed, it's not lossless anymore, is it?

by tepples on 2010-01-01 (#54599)

Dwedit: General-purpose LZ+Huffman compression works well on the raw, unfiltered output from VisualBoyAdvance, but it doesn't work so well on files produced by game music players that use a band-pass filter to kill DC and high-frequency aliasing.

BB: FLAC is lossless compression, like Zip except optimized specifically for linear PCM audio.

But seriously, NES music is mono, and it's so simple that you don't lose much from 64 kbps Vorbis or even MP3. Encode music at several bitrates, and put them on shuffle to see which ones you can tell from the original.

by BubbleBobble on 2010-01-02 (#54637)

ah well, I'm satisfied with my FLACs and can afford the disk space

by bucky o'hare on 2010-01-03 (#54681)

My perspective is that you're only ever going to have as decent audio as your source. So arguably, a FLAC of an NSF played back on your computer may not be as good quality as a 192 k MP3 sampled from the actual hardware.

This is why I only bother with FLAC of hardware recordings. I'm not the biggest audiophile out there, but I figure that it's pretty nice to have the *best* quality of the most accurate recordings out there when you can. But with emulated tracks, it could simply be a matter of someone releasing a more accurate player / format and rendering even your old FLAC as "lower" quality. So I just stick to mp3s if I'm not dealing with hardware.

But there's of course no right or wrong way of doing things. If you're happy with FLAC, then roll with it! A nice plus to FLAC is how you can add any tag field you want, so you can include better and more specific credit information if you wanted to. Stuff like Developer, Sound Programmer(s), Foreign Title...

by Jedi QuestMaster on 2010-01-06 (#54778)

bucky o'hare wrote:
But with emulated tracks, it could simply be a matter of someone releasing a more accurate player / format and rendering even your old FLAC as "lower" quality. So I just stick to mp3s if I'm not dealing with hardware.

That's one of the smartest things I've heard all day. You get a .

Unless you don't want a cookie, then have a .

But what if the music is done in stereo? Like how some people split the A & B channels?

by hyarion on 2010-01-06 (#54781)

Jedi QuestMaster wrote:
But what if the music is done in stereo? Like how some people split the A & B channels?

then use stereo instead of mono if you really want the separation