wow you must listen to a type of music that is very compressible to get 30% to 40% compression. the study on flac's page got an average compression of 0.5458.

I haven't used FLAC but I'm interested in it for the advantages listed in this thread. I'm not really interested (as much) in the ability to play the files, but thats cool too) just to archive them.

I'm cuious about a few things though. if you FLAC a wav and then reconvert it back to a wav will you get the identical file (bitwise) or will it just be "acoustically" identical?

If it really is the same file, how is FLAC so much more efficient than conventional compression algorthyms? is it just really well tuned to compress wav audio?

John