The quickest, easiest way to compress an MP3 file

The reason the FLAC is larger than the MP3 of the same data is because they encode differently. :) MP3 just encodes perceptual information, while FLAC stores every single speck of data, just in a more compact format.

• Converting a WAV to a FLAC is like converting a BMP to a PNG.
  • Same exact pixels, but compressed losslessly like a ZIP file into a smaller size.
• Converting a WAV to an MP3 is like converting a BMP to a JPEG.
  • Instead of storing exact pixels, it's really storing instructions for generating squares with ripples of color that look kind of like the original.

Similarly, MP3 just stores instructions for generating ripples that, when added together, sound kind of like the original. But the difference between the true signal and the generated signal (the error signal) consists of random noisy artifacts, like JPEG jaggies. When you then store this in a perfectionist format like FLAC, it needs to store all those jaggies, and random noise is harder to compress losslessly, so it increases the size of the file. (Truly random noise is incompressible. When you compress a file losslessly, you're eliminating redundant repeating patterns and making it look more like random noise.)

I bet if you convert the JPEG to PNG you will see the same kind of increase in size as you see when converting MP3 to FLAC, since the perfectionist lossless codec needs to remember every little jaggy and artifact that wasn't in the original bmp.

This analogy isn't perfect, since audio is more like a photo than a line-art diagram, but it helps get the idea across:

Original BMP size: 29 kB

PNG size: 629 B

JPEG size: 1.7 kB

PNG created from JPEG: 6.2 kB

I doubt that the different schemes would make a lot of difference to be honest since the compression algorithms typically only look forward a limited amount in order to control memory use.

The exception is S3 which would end up larger most likely since compressing a compressed file adds overheads but cannot compress.

If you want better compression, look for newer archiving tools that have better algorithms. 7-zip for example is generally better than zip.

In terms of the difference between s1 and s2, I would say that it depends on how you are most likely to use the archive in the future and how big they end up.

Really big archives are a pain to handle (moving, opening, etc) and this is likely to be more important than saving a few kB.

Additionally, when thinking of long-term storage, don't ignore "bit-rot". A small error in a large archive can be devastating. Loosing one project is probably much better than loosing them all.

You might however look at something like RAR which allows redundancy and split archives. This is a bit like RAID5. You create multiple archive files each of which has built in redundancy so that you can loose a file and still recreate the original data.