All.

ok…i have some hands on results re wav vs flac and why use of flac on a junker pc might make the junker seem more 'nimble'. particularly as trak counts climb on the
junker with older drive technology. (i hate to be beaten by this stuff …lol.)

keying off gordans excellent comment, and given there is a read//write 'path' or 'pipe' tween the drive and the music software ( in this case reaps )...its obvious that using wav results in more data (writes//reads)...being stuffed thru' the 'pipe' per second while much less is being stuffed thru the pipe using flac…which ive always thought must be the case...and confirmed by my testing this afternoon.

THEREFORE….
on old junker pc's , the 'pipes' are often slower right ? and slower drives etc.
thus as trak counts climb using flac the old junker seems more nimble to the user cos less data (read//writes)... is being stuffed thru the junkers 'pipes' versus wav…and also remember the clunker will have a slow clunky drive.
excellent insights gordon. my real life testing confirms your point.

btw…i looked in the dir after recording 8 flac tracs at a time. all was as i suspected...
on stop recording ie 8 flac files stored obviously.
in the wav case 8 waves in the dir resulted obviously.
of course the flacs took up less storage than the waves as would be expected.

so where is the 'magic conversion' of flac taking place ? that might lead to slowness versus wav ? cos i'm not seeing any slowiness in flac.

of course it cant be in the A>>D chips that digitise the incoming analogue audio…
SOOO what i cant figure out is where is this 'flac conversion' taking place ?
also maybe any overhead of the flac conversion task has less impact than the 'pipe stuffing//lookahead buffer creation process ' ? right ? ie the major performance impact is the 'pipe stuffing' task.

maybe i'm being dense ??…as i'm a big dumb oaf my wife says sometimes…lmao.

i find the wav vs flac a very interesting discussion topic. thanks for everyones thoughts.

if i'm correct it would seem advantageous for a user with an old clunker pc to use flac for recording rather than wav…particularly if such a user envisions very high trak counts on the clunker pc.

have a merry xmas all.

om

my songs....mixed for good earbuds...(fyi..my vocs on all songs..)
https://soundcloud.com/alfsongs
(90 songs created useing bb/rb)
(lots of tips of mine in pg tips forum.)