Does Windows 8.1 automatically compress music files?

Odd question, right? I only ask because before installing Windows 8.1, I backed up my music collection, which was largely FLAC, APE, and WAVE files. After installing Windows 8.1, I transferred my music back from my portable drive onto my hard drive and noticed that a huge chunk of my lossless music is now only 320kbps.

It doesn't sound like it should be possible, but that's exactly what happened. I plugged in my portable drive and the music on it is still FLAC, but once copied to my Windows 8.1 drive, I plain as day see that it's 320kbps instead.

What's the deal? How do I turn that shit off?

Or is it "reading" it like that?

has the file size decreased after being transferred to your pc?

Not to my knowledge.

I transferred about 50Gbs of flacs back when i re formated my ssd and installed windows 8.1 on it.Size or quality hasn't changed.

Yes. It's about 380Gb on my portable drive of music, and after drag-n-dropping to PC, it's closer to 340Gb. It shows there being a lot more files on the backup drive, but scrolling through it doesn't really let me see what's missing or not. From what I can see on the surface, everything seemed to have transferred, but the stats show otherwise. I remember seeing the move operation work smoothly (wasn't interrupted by anything, took hours, watched it on and off, no errors at end).

Computer ghosts!

It's probably whatever you are using to "import" is automatically converting it. Since you can browse the files directly, just copy and paste them from the folders.

Since you said "move operation" though, it seems like this might have been what you did.

Check the file count in both locations to know if you transferred everything rather than trying to scroll through your folders. Make sure your folder viewing options are the same between both the source and the destination (i.e. hidden files, system files, etc are all either visible or invisible).

How exactly did you do the transfer? Drag and drop file copy? What file system is the external drive formatted as? How are you calculating the size of the files on the external drive? Are you selecting all of the media on the external drive and viewing properties or are you inferring the size of the media based on the free space left on the drive (assuming the music is all that's on the drive)?

My suspicion is that the files themselves have not changed but Windows is reporting them differently. The size difference could be for a lot of different reasons like hidden and system files that might be on the external, "space on disk" differences between different file systems, etc.

-Byshop

To add to this, maybe try another copy program and see if the same thing happens. Just do a few files, not the whole thing as a test.

You could always download Musicbee and use that to try and copy the music over. See if that makes a difference. In my experience its transfer and copy functions are very good. It's what I use for all my music organization, playing, and copying.

It was drag n drop.

@KHAndAnime: Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't the drag & drop use windows media player (in some form)? WMP is by default set to convert anything it gets in as mp3, unless you change the settings yourself. This was atleast my experiences with Windows Media Player.

I moved to Foobar2000 a while back. It has a free plugin you can install that you can convert files from wav to flac, (among other conversions). I recommend trying Foobar2000, its free.

It wouldn't unless some application was watching for it and picked it up. I've never had that happen. Drag and drop should just use Windows Explorer or something like Teracopy if you use that. Unless you dragged it into a program like Media Player that is.

@guynamedbilly: Yea I wasn't sure, I drag and drop all the time on Vista, and Windows 7, (will soon with 8.1 as well) I have never had a problem with that. I am pretty confident that if Windows 8.1 auto-compressed any audio file that we would easily see so many search results of complaints from many audio engineers, music lovers, composers.

Matter of fact I know that some of the staff (at the company that makes my DAW) uses 8.1. I think he would have posted about such a thing happened if it is such a thing.

As long as you have a media player that is FLAC compatible/supported then you should have no problem with FLAC even on 8.1.

Are you not able to answer my questions? I need more info.

-Byshop