[mbself]

Originally Posted by Voodoochild137

can you burn them as .wav? because i use audioconverterstudio to go from .flac to .wav to .wma at 320 kbps, I want to burn CD player-playable lossless CDs....

CD players read .cda files only unless it is one of thes hybrids that can read mp3 or wma files. mp3 and wma are lossless except for wma lossless. I am not sure, but i do not think that any of the wma compatible cdplayers read wma lossless. I may be wrong. If so, you can rip a cd to wma lossless and play it or you can convert any lossless file to wma lossless.

If a file has EVER been through an mp3 or wma (other than wma lossless) conversion it is NEVER going to be a LOSSLESS file EVER EVER again. Those bits and bytes that were compressed out are gone for good.

Those lossy formats make assumptions about what the human ear can hear and what frequencies should be left in the file and which ones should be discarded. A lossless codec simply manipulates the 0's and 1's of a digital file to make the data fit in a smaller file.

In layman's terms (and those are the only terms I know ) If a file is a 16bit audio file and the 1st 4 characters are 0's then the data will be stored as a 12bit packet of data. upon decompression the decoder reads the packet and notices that it is short 4 bits and that the 1st bit that is there is a 1---then it knows to add 4 0's to the front of the file to restore the original integrity of the file. That is why the compression ratios of lossless files rarely go better than .5 or .6 of the original file.

On the other hand, an mp3 or wma encoder not only performs functions similar to those above, but also discards entire packets of data that the software determines to be inaudible or not necessary. This is how those lossy encoders can achieve compression ratios of .1 or .2 of the original file.