Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
There's no point in checking the bit rate on FLAC. It's a lossless format. The bit rate will be whatever it needs to be.
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I hope you'll allow me to clarify this a bit for people who don't understand this yet.
If a piece has silence in it, the bit rate will be very low, or maybe even 0. If a a piece has a very complex part in it, the might be 1000 or even 1400 kbps; much higher than the 320 kbps max of MP3. This is the reason why MP3 is lossy: if you *need* 1000 kbps to encode lossless, but you can only use 320 kbps max, you'll therefore loose quality.
If you have a FLAC file that has 2 minutes of silence at a bit rate of 0, and 2 minutes of very complex music at a bit rate of 1400, the bit rate will probably be displayed as 700 kbps by most programs.
As pdurrant says, FLAC uses the bit rate it needs to use, to encode the audio in such a way as to lose nothing. The only thing you can say is that a file with a low bit rate was very easy to compress without loss, and a file with a high bit rate was very hard. Therefore, with FLAC, bitrate does not indicate quality; it indicates compression.
I hope I'm not preaching to the choir here, and stating things most people already know
