OK, so I converted one folder to FLAC. Jeez, it takes up about five times as much disk space as MP3 files!
SO...since I am off work tomorrow, I will find out on Saturday if my car stereo will take FLAC files. If so, I am gonna need a bigger stick, probably a 64GB stick for all my music files.
As it is my MP3's take 11 GB.
Is FLAC really that much better? What is the advantage that makes up for the fact that it takes five times the disk space?
I consider flac to be better than mp3 for a number of reasons. However what you did is called transcoding, which is something that is not recommended.
You took the lossy compressed music of your mp3 files and bloated it up to a lossless format that takes up more space. However this step cannot undo the data loss that occurred when the music was encoded as mp3 in the first place so now you have the worst of both worlds. Big file size AND no gains in audio quality over the original mp3.
When converting audio files there are 4 possible scenarios.
When doing this:
You perform scenario 3, lossy to lossy, which is already not recommended.
By then converting the resulting files to flac you follow up with scenario 4.
It's lossless, you can convert it to any other lossless audio format as many times as you want without losing quality. Flac also includes a checksum for the audio data meaning you can verify that your files are not corrupt easily. Flac files allow ~60% space saving compared to wav files while still being lossless, having better tag support etc..
Another upside is the wide support, pretty much any modern player supports flac.
But flac files only make sense when the source is lossless as well.
If you want to see how compressed your music files actually are you can use software like spek or ffmpeg to visualize the audio data.
This is the spectrogram of a flac file with a CD as the source:
For your use case I would try to find out which audio formats are supported by your car stereo. It would surprise me if it supported flac files but not mp3 files as in my experience it's usually the other way around.
If it really only does support flac, convert the audio for your car to it but keep your original mp3s as there really is no point in wasting space by keeping transcodes.
In addition to the great explanations of @Casual_Tea:
Converting MP3 files to FLAC is never worth the space.
You gain nothing but you "lose" a lot of space.
You should really only convert files to FLAC in the case #1 from above:
If you have an uncompressed source (WAV, AIFF) or a lossless source music format (ALAC,extension *.m4a) or if you directly rip your songs from your original CD.
Thanks for the advice. I did not actually know this. But at least I have one folder done to test if the car can even handle FLAC files.
Of about 2150 files, less than 200 are files that I could not rip from a CD I already own, so it looks like I may end up re-ripping a lot of stuff.
Thanks for the info. So, FLAC is not a good idea, unless the file is originally FLAC or other lossless format. So, if I am ripping right from a CD, it is best to to that as FLAC in the first place, but not converting.
Glad I asked the question. My car does MP3's. Whether or not it does FLAC, I do not yet know. But I got one folder in FLAC format, and we will see. In either case, given what you posted, I am not going to convert any other files of these to FLAC, but only ones I rip direct.
You could have a USB stick with noth FLAC and MP3 on the same stick, if the stereo takes both formats, right? If so, then I can do FLAC files on the ones I have available to rip...which is actually most of them.
Out of 2150 files, I'd say less than 200 were not directly ripped from CDs
FLAC is a very good idea when ripping original audio discs (or wav files) As a lossless format they are of course bigger than mp3-files, but you can listen to them on really big loudspeakers. Playing a lossy format like mp3 even in a high quality like 320 kbps will reveal the shortcomings. And the jury is still out if "qualities" higher than 192 kbps are an improvement anyhow. For my better half who listens to music only on her smartphone I always convert FLACs to mp3 (320).
Ao, does anyone know...if a player will take both FLAC and MP3 - can you mix those files on the same USB, and have the player play all the songs?
I am guessing yes, but would like to know if anyone knows for sure. Because I can re-rip a lot of my stuff.
Just try it with your specific player ("Boss Elite 550") and you know it for sure. 
According to the user manual found here mp3 seems to be the way to go.
Well, there ya go. Is WMA any better?
Microsoft will probably claim so. But you have to check which version of WMA is supported. I’m not sure it’s worth it.
They are both lossy formats. So "better"is going to be subjective at best. But mp3 will be more universally playable, so that would be my recommendation.
FLAC is excellent for archival on the computer. For listening in a car without particular demands for quality you can transcode it to any other lossy format. This will take less time than ripping CDs again. Your tags will also be transferred. You don't even need to push for maximum quality (like q0), and modern encoders are usually quite fast without that.
Sometimes you need to edit a music album because it has flaws, clicks, cue positions (track marks) don't match the start of the music or clipping. Editing a lossy file will incur generation loss, and processes will be less acurate. This is why you would want FLAC.
