FLAC uses the same data format regardless of compression level, therefore the compression level is not needed to decode the data. It is only of interest to humans who are curious. ;-)
Basically, when you specific a compression level, you are telling the encoder how hard to work. The decoder does not need to know how hard the encoder worked. All the decoder needs to do is decode one data format which is the same for all compression levels. In fact, as the encode is improved, there may be more compression levels in the future, or the existing levels may change, or the levels may become more fine-grained. In other words, there's no finite way to precisely express the compression level which would not eventually become invalid. Perhaps this explanation shows you why there is no compression level stored in the file. You can always calculate the percent reduction in size due to compression, but mapping that to the original command line is not precise. Brian Willoughby Sound Consulting On Jan 27, 2009, at 08:04, Santiago Jimeno wrote: If compression level is not default (!=5), is it stored? If compression level is stored in some case, where I can find it? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Josh Coalson" <[email protected]> > --- Santiago Jimeno <[email protected]> wrote: >> I am making a program to obtain information from FLAC files in Visual >> Basic. NET language. >> If somebody needs it I can send it. I can also translate it to C #. >> But I have read the documentation and I have looked for in sdk 1.2.2 >> and I don't find how to get the frames number of the file and the >> used compression level (5 default and others) > > compression level is not stored by default. if the stream is fixed > blocksize (min and max blocksize in the streaminfo is the same) the > total number of frames can be calculated by dividing the number of > samples (also in streaminfo) by blocksize. > > http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html#metadata_block_streaminfo _______________________________________________ Flac mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac
