[roann]

Originally Posted by jazzbo

I don't see how it's possible, as it is bytes in the uncompressed audio stream, not the compressed side that need to be moved so the data needs to be piped back through flac by shntool in order to make the correction.

I also tested it, and shntool clearly recompresses at level 5 when doing a SBE fix.

...

You're absolutely right: shntool does re-encode to compression level 5 when fixing flac files. I'm such an idiot (or am I just too old for this?) not to get the facts ... you can easily see what happened using the shntool info mode (same in Trader's Little Helper). The output for every file shows a row beginning with "compression ratio". Compare the values for an unfixed and a fixed flac file and you know whether or not the compression level has been changed.

And now the good news: In the next version of Trader's Little Helper there will be an option to set the compression level when fixing files.

PS: Just my two cents on the level of flac compression ... I'm not really a friend of a flac encoding levels higher than 6. Take a look at the filesizes below (sizes are in Byte):

...
2005-04-17  08:16       317,048,732 Track01.wav
2005-04-17  08:16       190,677,594 Track01_level5.flac
2005-04-17  08:16       190,182,642 Track01_level8.flac
2005-04-17  08:16        82,797,836 Track02.wav
2005-04-17  08:16        48,118,903 Track02_level5.flac
2005-04-17  08:16        47,874,321 Track02_level8.flac
...

The compressed versions of Track01 differ with about 483 kB or 0.0026%. For Track02 the size difference is about 239 kB or 0.0051%. On an old P3 550 Mhz machine of mine the time for encoding those two files with level 8 is about 4.5 times or 450% bigger than the time needed with level 5. IMO those size differences are not worth the significant bigger amount of time. But as i said before ... just a matter of opinion.