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My understanding is that the WAV and FLAC formats are containers for lossless audio. I have seen the FLAC format as being perhaps better because it is able to losslessly compress audio from say a WAV file.
However today I noticed that bleep is offering both WAV and FLAC files to download. Is their practice redundant or am I missing something?
After reading allquixotic and
slhck answers I was curious as to the
audio codec for the wav
files in question. This is what I found
Input #0, wav, from 'Exai-001-Autechre-Fleure.wav':
Duration: 00:04:51.39, bitrate: 1411 kb/s
Stream #0:0: Audio: pcm_s16le ([1][0][0][0] / 0x0001), 44100 Hz,
stereo, s16, 1411 kb/s
note that bleep.com will sometimes offer "24-bit wav" or "16-bit flac" but not "24-bit flac" – Quetzalcoatl – 2018-04-07T00:43:03.290
2In response to Steven's added-on observation: "pcm_s16le" is ffmpeg's way of saying the audio format is LPCM, with each sample represented as a signed 16-bit integer, with each sample's bytes in little-endian order. With 44100 samples per second, times 2 channels (stereo), it works out to 1411 kilobits/second, which is just an indicator of how fat the audio data in the WAV is; it has no correlation to quality. In the FLAC, the audio data is described differently and the bitrate varies. But when the FLAC is played, it is decompressed to exactly the same LPCM audio data stream as in the WAV. – Mike Brown – 2013-05-27T18:48:43.693