For some time now, I have been upgrading my music library from bad-sounding MP3 files to lossless FLACs. This obviously takes much more storage space.

The 465 GB internal disk which contains my "music" directory tree now has filled up > 95% of that drive, so I am forced to think of ideas to save bytes.

While experimenting with a random FLAC file, I discovered that I can run `ffmpeg` like this:

```
ffmpeg.exe -i "original.flac" -compression_level 12 "ultra_compressed.flac"

```

"12" is the maximum number supported, and the file size went from:

```
54 149 070 bytes

```

to:

```
48 828 507 bytes

```

Which is *something*. It will add up quite a bit if I do this for all my FLACs and if they all have similar results. But this seems "too good to be true".

I don't really suspect that it will make the songs sound worse, because FLAC is per definition lossless. It just uses more complicated compression methods, as I understand it, which takes much longer to encode and possibly noticeably so even to decode. However, I cannot detect any difference in the silence between songs playing pre- and post-compressing.

I am also concerned that this drops certain valuable metadata and resets the "created at" and/or "modified at" timestamps, which I have previously used many times to determine when I obtained or exported various sound/music files.

Can you please poke holes in my idea to free up storage space by writing a script which goes through every single FLAC file in my music directory tree and converts them, one by one, to the maximum compression level? Is there something about this which is bad?

(When the disk eventually dies, I will of course get a larger one to replace it, but hopefully it doesn't happen for a long time yet. Plus I still have to think about all the backup disks which also would have to be replaced with bigger ones if I simply "threw money at it". Plus I have no money to throw anyway.)