Streamed show: Audio captured from soundcard - a lossless Q.

[zazafromjohor]

I captured the audio of a show streamed live on the BBC with Audacity... the project is currently saved as wave (44100hz 16bit). I wanted to know the best way to save this: MP3 (320) or FLAC? which one would make sence?

[LeifH12345]

Save it as wav/flac. Its already lossy, so you don't want to re-encode to a lossy format and further degrade it

[zazafromjohor]

Save it as wav/flac. Its already lossy, so you don't want to re-encode to a lossy format and further degrade it You mean MP3 should be the logical saved format?

[LeifH12345]

No, its already lossy, so re-encoding it again to mp3 is not recommended.

[Audioarchivist]

Right - captured from lossy and decoded to a lossless format and saved as wav is what it is now. Re-encoding that back to lossy adds a second layer of coding compression errors and further degrades the quality. If you save the wav files as flac, because it is low bitrate from the detail degradation of the original lossy source material, the flacs won't be very large anyway... Little benefit of space saved as "double eMPty3"... hehe