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In Reply to: RE: I should know the answer to this. . . posted by 2-ears on April 16, 2021 at 16:45:33
"If I rip a CD in flac format using Windows Media Player is the resulting file of lower audio quality than it might using another means?"
It shouldn't be..... The only question will be whether the starts and endings of tracks were marked accurately, based on the drive ripped from.... (The "offsets" vary from drive to drive.) Using a tool to resolve this (Accurate Rip on Exact Audio Copy, for example), should get this right, provided that the model number of the drive you're ripping from is in the Accurate Rip database.
The only advantage a good ripping program has over WMP is in cases where there are errors encountered when reading the disc, WMP may rip those errors directly to the WAV or FLAC file, where a Exact Audio Copy or dBpoweramp would first try to resolve the errors.
The "low quality" you're hearing could be due to the FLAC conversion.... I've never liked how FLAC sounded when decoded during playback in real time. You may want to convert the FLAC back to WAV first, and then listen, you might realize the rip was otherwise fine.
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