Question Question About Creating Backup Copies of Songs

[MasterYoda327]

I ripped my audio CD collection to FLAC using MediaMonkey. I then made a backup copy of my FLAC music folder onto my external hard drive. I finally copied my songs on my main hard drive to my Sony Walkman player (in FLAC format) using the Sony Music Center for PC software on Windows 10.

The only other thing that I did with the FLAC files on the main hard drive is that I let Sony Music Center for PC update the song information and album artwork. I expected that there would be a file size difference between the original and backup files since the originals were updated with song information and album artwork and would result in larger file size.

However, when I compared the song information between those on the main hard drive and those on the backup drive, I noticed that at least a couple of the songs on the backup drive have a slightly lower bitrate than those on the main hard drive (e.g. 950 kbps vs 951 kbps). The other songs' bitrates appear to match each other on the list.

Is this slight bitrate reduction common when transferring copies of songs from the main drive to a backup drive or did the Sony Music Center alter the bitrate when it updated the songs on my main hard drive? I am pretty sure I can't tell the difference in sound quality, but this is something I do not recall noticing before and just thought I would ask.

Thanks.

 

[13thmonkey]

A backup should be a clone not a re-coding to reduce bit rate. My gut feel is that it hasn't changed but the meta data has changed. Or the bitrate is calculated by filesize/track length. adding a few bits of meta data to the track would increase it's size but not the length hence the backup without the additional data has the apparently lower bit rate.