Unwittingly

As flac is lossless at all levels it is certainly not irretrievable. And whether it makes any difference at all depends on whether the renderer copes adequately with the presumably slightly greater unpacking effort, ditto the NAS if transcoded to wav on the fly whilst playing. Easiest way to find out is play and listen, compared to another copy at a lower flac compression level.

others who do transcode on the fly will be better positioned to advise on that aspect, but my understanding Minimserver, amongst others, installed on the NAS can indeed transcode fron flac to wav on the fly, and it seems popular with Naim streamers that are said to sound better fed with wav.

if you do determine that the flac level makes a difference and want to change, dBPoweramp has a batch conversion facility so if you put all the albums in one path you could just set dBP to do it unattended. 

I rip all mine at level 5, for what that’s worth. I read somewhere that ripping to lossless flac is pointless. There are full instructions on how to do the transcoding on the MinimServer website. 

I rip to lossless FLAC simply because storage space is so cheap nowadays that it seems to me to be almost pointless to do otherwise. I have never attempted to compare the sound quality of lossless and 'compressed' FLAC files, so have no idea if the extra work required to be undertaken by the renderer to unpack the compressed files makes a significant difference to sound quality. I would be very surprised if it did. 

I do transcode from FLAC to WAV on the fly, simply because having made the switch when I first started using MinimServer, I have been too lazy to switch the feature off again. For what it is worth, I do not notice a difference in sound quality between FLAC and WAV rips of the same source on my current (Linn) streamer, but I believe I did possiblyhear a very subtle difference when comparing FLAC and WAV files on my previous Naim streamer.

The difference was in fact so subtle that I could not rule out the possibility of the effect being entirely psychological. However, I did conduct a 'blind' test using my Naim streamer with a couple of friends, and one them was able to detect which was which with a 90% or so success rate. His opinion was that the WAV files consistently sounded very slightly better. This test was carried out prior to my use of the transcoding feature in MinimServer, and so I was comparing files directly ripped to FLAC or WAV using dbPoweramp, and not files that were transcoded on the fly.  

I guess it can't hurt to give transcoding a go, and yes, you do need to install MinimStreamer as an add-on extension for MinimServer. As HH has advised, best to follow the detailed instructions on the MinimServer website. 

Thanks everyone, 

Great and timely advice as always. 

I often wish I could contribute more to the forum as my ratio of questions to answers is quite unbalanced. I do try when I can though.

I am now committed to streaming and am learning as I go. 272/250 is waiting for collection on Saturday so no more cd replay. I am trying but failing not to read the Blimey..... Thread 

Go for it! £19,000 should do it! 

Blimey! 

As a new person to streaming, please take care to check your metadata as you rip or download - I suggest on your initial crop of rips as seen as you are able.

This copied from another recent thread:

In case you're not already aware, one consideration to bear in mind, and much easier to do from the start: make sure the metadata of your files is correct and consistent. I made the mistake of believing that the metadata from ripped CDs and downloaded flac files was fine, only to discover many hundreds of albums later that a significant proportion had missing, incorrect or inconsistent metadata, by then a major PITA to start trying to fix. It is worst with classical: by way of example of inconsistency, genre of different recordings of the same thing can appear variously as simply classical, or orchestral, or symphony. Composer can be WA Mozart, Mozart WA, Wolfgang Armadeus Mozart. Recording artist might be the orchestra, the conductor, or the soloist. Etc etc. Makes searching and browsing difficult.

So it pays to have in mind how you want things to be (good to have a few ripped files and downloads first to help inform you) then view the metadata of each album as soon as ripped/downloaded.

stuart posted:

I have committed a school boy error in my haste and niavity and ripped 200 Cds at level 8 flac. I would have preferred to rip with no compression. Does this matter ultimately as the file will be uncompressed at play back.

If it does matter can this be changed via dbpoweramp and minimserver without having to re-rip? 

On the same subject I would like to try transcoding flac to wav for replay. I have minimserver but do I need to install minimstreamer to do this?

Thanks. 

You do not need to re-rip any CD. On a Linux computer, you change the compression rate of a FLAC file with the command line command

  flac afile.flac -n --totally-silent --force

where "afile.flac" is the file name and "n" (between 0 and 8) is the compression rate that you want to enforce. In your case, since you want no compression, you would do

  flac afile.flac -0 --totally-silent --force

You will see that the new file has grown in size if the original compression rate was greater than 0. You can apply the command to all files in your current directory and in its subdirectory with the command

  find . -name '*.flac' -exec bash -c 'flac -0 --totally-silent --force "$1"' -- {} \;

This allows you to do the job on all your rips in a breeze and without touching your mouse. I suggest that you make a backup of your original files before you apply these commands. Similarly, if you want to decode all .flac files to, say, .wav, you simply enter

  find . -name '*.flac' -exec bash -c 'flac -d "$1"; rm "$1"' -- {} \;

You can find more information on the official documentation page of flac, see https://xiph.org/flac/documentation_tools_flac.html. I do not know dbpoweramp. You can easily set minimserver to transcode .flac files to .wav files (this is what I do) but this does not change your original files and has nothing to do with the problem that you are trying to solve.