[Flac] Encoding Options

[Oskar L.]

I have read FLAC's "--help", the man-page, and the HTML documentaion, but
there are a few things that I don't understand.

1. I'll start with the thing I'm most confused about. The --best option is
synonymous with -l 12 -b 4608 -m -e -r 6. Why is that? Is not -l 32 better
that l- 12? And you can have -r 0,8 without using --lax, and -r 0,16 with
--lax.

2. The --lax option allows the encoder to generate "non-Subset files", but
just what is a non-Subset file? The HTML documentation says that these
files may not be streamable, but if I don't need streamable files, is
there any reason not to use --lax?

3. I made a FLAC file without a seektable, and I could seek in it using
XMMS in GNU/Linux and in Winamp in Windows. Are there any applications
that require a seektable for seeking to work?

4. What does the -p option do? The HTML documentation only says
"Exhaustively search LP coeff quantization", and that it's expensive and
overrides any -q option. Just what is "LP coeff quantization"? I tried
using this option on several files, but it resulted in larer files that
without it, why is that? The documentation says that it "typically will
only improve the compression a tiny fraction of a percent", not make
larger files.

Oskar