Zargg
 
I believe it is.
Even I can hear a difference between MP3 and FLAC in my room..
(or at least I think I can)

which is why i was a little curious as to comparing flac file to an mp3, i would have thought the difference in sound quality would have been a given, basically the same as comparing a .wav to an mp3. i guess the benifit of flac is file size, being significantly smaller than a .wav, (and significantly larger than an mp3) i stick with .wav, no extra steps and file size/storage is of no consequence.

The Grim

Zargg
 
I believe it is.
Even I can hear a difference between MP3 and FLAC in my room..
(or at least I think I can)

which is why i was a little curious as to comparing flac file to an mp3, i would have thought the difference in sound quality would have been a given, basically the same as comparing a .wav to an mp3. i guess the benifit of flac is file size, being significantly smaller than a .wav, (and significantly larger than an mp3) i stick with .wav, no extra steps and file size/storage is of no consequence.

I have a one-click fixes all transcoding powershell script around here somewhere...  Just goes through a dir and its sub dirs replacing all sound files into FLAC.  Run it, guitar practice and done.
 
They come in handy, the one click things.  Especially when you write them yourself to avoid shareware.

Zargg
 
I believe it is.
Even I can hear a difference between MP3 and FLAC in my room..
(or at least I think I can)

 
I think I can too Ken - but 'think' may be the operative word here:) Double blind studies beg to differ. 
 
http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~hockman/documents/Pras_presentation2009.pdf
 

Cactus Music
Will it just now work in the latest update or do we have to do something? 
 
I've always just been cheap and use the batch converter in Gold Wave. I wonder if Wave Lab will also activate the encoder? And Flac does not work on many players like my car stereo and USB flash drive systems etc. 

Flac doesn't even work in itunes, which is ridiculous seeing that flac was originally something Apple were very interested in.

Apple's lossless format files do work in itunes and there are free convertors which can change flac to lossless and seem to do a good job. The difference between the lossless formats/CD and high quality mp3 on a car stereo is a bit of an academic question though, cars generally not being good audio environments.

Just one of many reasons iAvoid iStuff

I wish I had known it was on the PA9 disc.
I bought it when it was $30, Ohh well it was worth it or I wouldn't have bought.
Next time I'll wait a few years(no I won't).

For anybody reading this isn't upgrading to or past 17.04, the tool that enables the Cake mp3 encoder from the PA9 CD does NOT work for more recent versions of SONAR.
 
However, if you contact Cake support with your PA9 serial number, they will give you an updated tool that WILL work for recent versions of SONAR.
 

Interesting. I always knew it was possible to configure LAME in Sonar, but for reasons that are nebulous to me I never bothered. Insted I generally export as FLAC (to conserve a bit of disk space, since it unpacks to full res anyway) and used Sound Forge to convert to mp3 if/when I needed to. It's weird and an oblique process, I agree, but it's just what I've always done and for some reason I kind of liked the separation of powers as it were, and it gave me the opportunity of using another stage of analysis in Sound Forge to kind of check and make sure that everything was as it should be. I wonder if I will still do this? I wouldn't put it past me... exactly the kind of irrational habit I'm likely to just keep doing even with absolutely no reason to keep doing it. 

MP3 has never been an audiophile's first choice.  But it is good to have the option to burn a few MP3's straight out of Sonar if you ever need that option for low bandwidth use or compact file storage devices.
 
MP3 could be compared to the jpg format for photos, which is also lossy compression.  It became the best way to store full color images online for web pages back in the day of slow dial-up networking.  Nowadays I prefer to use lossless png for export to web images.
 
I think now that memory is cheaper, and bandwidth relatively unlimited, the usefulness of the MP3 format will soon run its course.  The better options will become more mainstream eventually.  Just look at streaming video now.  A few years ago you could only get high resolution movies on that BluRay optical disk.  Now you can stream ultra HD over the net!

Just in case any Bakers or anyone else in the know pops in I'm still curious about the stuff I was rambling about in this post....
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3598569
 
Dunking chains.
 
:-)