Advantages of MinimStreamer

[gnomus]

As part of my progress on this steep learning curve, I have installed MinimStreamer and now have WAV playing through my renderer rather than the FLAC that I had yesterday.

I am not sure, however, what, if any, advantage I gain by doing this? Can someone help me understand? I had understood that FLAC and WAV were "bit identical".

I understand that it is possible to convert the 16-bit FLAC files to 24-bit WAVs (once I get a renderer capable of playing these). Again, however, I am struggling to understand what I gain by doing this. Surely the quality of the sound will be limited by the source 16-bit file. We cannot conjure extra sonic detail out of nothing.

Am I missing something? I'm not trying to be negative, I'm genuinely curious to hear the argument.

One thing I have noticed. When running MinimStreamer, I no longer seem able to fast forward through the track. If I tap half-way into the track timeline, the player will stop for a second or so and then skip to the next track on the playlist. Is that to be expected?