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How can I convert an album that is FLAC (high quality lossless) into an MP4 specifically without losing quality or is it even possible? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by sopularity_fax@sopuli.xyz to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

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I have an album thats a bit more than 200MB, converted to just an audio only M4a or MP4 its still under 80MB

Is that 120+MB all chaff or is there another way to prevent losing all muh damn wheat

CONSTRAINT/NON-CONSTRAINTS

FILE SIZE DOES NOT MATTER AT ALL TO ME. JUST TO BE CLEAR

MUST BE AN MP4 "video" file. I get that MP4 is a container or whatever but that is a hard constraint—Please respect that

M4A/AAC are not acceptable. It must be within the container that is MP4, non-negotiable

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[–] sopularity_fax@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Also i really do not care about file size when it comes to quality for certain things. I just haplen to need an MP4 for my use case and id like to explore the options to do that exactly. I cant overemphasize how insignificant the file sizes are to me, id like to optimize for fidelity above all but in an mp4

[–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Ah. Ok. Well, in that case, I've got an idea.

And, being honest here, I've learned this in the last few minutes, but apparently MP4 can technically only hold a certain number of different kinds of audio. There are some not-to-spec ways to put things like uncompressed WAV or FLAC into an MP4, but a lot of tools don't support that.

I just did some tests with FFMPEG and was not able to embed FLAC or WAV (pcm_s16le or pcm_s24le) into an M4A container, but I was able to embed ALAC into an M4A file with the following command:

ffmpeg -i zelda_25th_symphony_01.flac -acodec alac zelda_25th_symphony_01.m4a

And mpv is able to play the resulting M4A file just fine.

So, it seems like what you're going for is doable, at least depending which tool you use. But FFMPEG can do it. Whether your player of choice can play it is another question, but it definitely seems worth a try.

Oh, by the way, the M4A file is a tiny bit larger than the FLAC file:

tootsweet@computer /tmp $ ls -lah zelda*
-rw-r--r--. 1 tootsweet tootsweet 43M Nov  8 11:16 zelda_25th_symphony_01.flac
-rw-r--r--. 1 tootsweet tootsweet 44M Nov  8 11:40 zelda_25th_symphony_01.m4a
tootsweet@computer /tmp $ ls -la zelda*
-rw-r--r--. 1 tootsweet tootsweet 44481504 Nov  8 11:16 zelda_25th_symphony_01.flac
-rw-r--r--. 1 tootsweet tootsweet 45660506 Nov  8 11:40 zelda_25th_symphony_01.m4a
tootsweet@computer /tmp $

(Username and computer hostname changed to protect the guilty.)

[–] sopularity_fax@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 days ago

Excellent :) Thanks for this