[Flac] quality question

[rappard at dds.nl]

> I am a newbie and I want to encode some wavs using FLAC Frontend.
> I see many settings and 'Level' kept my attention.
> As I know, FLAC is a lossless encoding format, and I see from my   
> tests that Level affects file size and bitrate.
> What is the meaning of it? Is there any difference in sound quality   
> or just compression and/or CPU usage?
The latter: the higher the level, the better the compression - that  
said, the difference in filesize between level 5 (the default) and  
level 8 (the highest) is a few percent at best. Speaking from  
practical experience: when I still used an old single-CPU box I  
encoded at 5, now that I'm using a dual core I encode at 8 - I found  
that my old computer became very slow when using the more  
CPU-intensive level 8.
(There's no difference in sound quality - flac is *always* *lossless*.)

Regards,

Martin