Hi, i have one important question. I really appreciate lots of soundtracks in loseless compresion, but are these soundtracks converted from .wav files or are they converted from mp3? Sometimes i have strong feel that the .flac album is created from mp3 one, but this conversion has no effect on quality of the songs, in fact it has no sense....Thanks for answering:)

I checking every file, my uploads are true lossless (CDDA).

The conversion has no audible effect on the song, because high quality mp3s lose practicaly nothing by it...
Personally, I don't get the FLAC, maybe because I listen to most stuff with my headphones on, and know little to none about the difference when played on 5+1. I admit that the mp3s do lose some quality, but that can be heard only if you are a cheapskate and compress the file too much.

FLAC and other lossless codecs are used for archival purposes or for buring to CD-R to make a exact copy of the original disc. I and so many others backup their precious collections on external HDD's and DVD-R's in lossless formats.

If you rip a disc to mp3 or download an mp3 you're stuck with that quality. It's pointless archiving your precious collection as mp3's or burning them to a disc because ripping that burnt disc gives really bad quality. Even if you burn a cbr320 mp3 to disc and re-rip that track to cbr320 it still loses a lot of quality - you can't transcode a lossy format like mp3 without discarding even more audio data. Even transcoding a cbr320 mp3 to cbr320 still causes loss of audio data leaving you with a lower quality mp3 track, even if it is cbr 320.

In order to compress a CD track to mp3 the encoder has to throw away audio data to produce a small file. This data can never be retreived, ever.

You can however transcode a lossless format to another lossless format without discarding any audio data at all - hence the word LOSSLESS.


Transcode examples:

FLAC ----> APE [no data/quality loss]
APE ----> FLAC [no data/quality loss]
FLAC ----> APE ----> WAVPAK ----> FLAC [no data/quality loss]
CDDA ----> FLAC [no data/quality loss]
CDDA ----> FLAC ----> CDDA [no data/quality loss]


CDDA ----> mp3 [data/quality lost]
FLAC ----> mp3 [data/quality lost]
mp3 ----> mp3 [data/quality lost]
mp3@320kbps ----> mp3@320kbps [data/quality lost]
mp3@320kbps ----> CDDA ----> mp3@320kbps [data/quality lost]
ogg ----> mp3 [data/quality lost]
mp3 ----> ogg [data/quality lost]

mp3 ----> FLAC [plain stupid]