Hifi audio converter?

[Conrad007]

Hello everybody,

as far as I know, this forum is one of the best in the matter of audio and video. A lot of people are referring on posts on this great forum, so I think that here would be the best place to ask for an advice...
I have a few high quality music files in .flac format and I would like to burn them also on a CD in highest possible quality, to play them in my car. Could you recommend me a software for this conversion and for burning the CD? Which would be the best format for the CD, maybe .wav (instead of mp3) or are there better file formats which I can burn on a CD and play on my car stereo system?
I would be very grateful if somebody could give me an advice concerning the file format and the best software for that (free or not).

Thank you in advance!

Conrad

[LoRd_MuldeR]

If you want to burn a "real" Audio-CD then there aren't much options, because on an Audio CD there aren't any files, only Audio Tracks. And these tracks are uncompressed PCM, 16-Bit, 44.100 Hz, Stereo as defined by the "Red Book" standard. FLAC is a lossless compression. Therefore going from FLAC to uncompressed PCM is a completely lossless process. If however your FLAC files aren't 44.100 Hz, you may need to resample to that sampling rate. So all you need is a burning program that can create Audio CD's. There are plenty to choose from, including various free ones (e.g. ImgBurn (http://www.imgburn.com/)). If your burning program can't read FLAC directly, you may need to decode the FLAC files to uncompressed Wave files first. This can be done with the FLAC software (and there are various GUI's for FLAC, if you don't want to use FLAC from the command line).

[yetanotherid]

If you can hear the difference between a good quality MP3 and a wave file at the best of times you've got much better ears than me, but if you can hear a difference between a decent MP3 and a wave file played in your car you've either got amazing ears or an incredibly quiet car.

If your burning program won't open the flac files directly to burn them as an audio CD then you can convert them to wave files first with an audio player such as foober2000.

If your car player plays MP3s I'd be burning MP3s to a CD as you'll fit a lot more songs on a disc that way. Once again, you can convert the flac files to MP3s with foobar2000 (the LAME MP3 encoder needs to be installed separately, and the default encoder setting is perfectly adequate).

[Ghitulescu]

I recognize MP3 from WAV on my car, it's neither a silent car (Diesel) nor I have good ears: the trick is to recognize compression artefacts: once you got them you can't overlook them. It happens also on TVs, I can't stand LCDs :)