When a flac file is uploaded to Commons, it gets transcoded to ogg for playback at nearly lowest possible quality with the -q 1 ffmpeg option. From ffmpeg wiki:
-qscale:a – audio quality. Range is 0–10, where 10 is highest quality. 3–6 is a good range to try. Default is -qscale:a 3
Oggenc's default is also 3 and is a good compromise between quality and size. The current setting produces files at ~70 kbps which is unacceptably low especially for classical music recordings.
Change 265915 had a related patch set uploaded (by Setthemfree):
Change the ogg audio quality from 1 to 3 (ffmpeg's and oggenc's default)
Hmm, I think this might be a sane change. Note that this will not automatically cause existing flac files to be reprocessed.
I would highly appreciate if someone could merge it (unless there are any side effects to consider, which I don't see here - but I may be wrong). There is a pile of FLAC files uploaded recently that I can't really use on wikis because of the low playback quality. It starts to cause unnecessary delay in some WMUA projects.
Change 265915 merged by jenkins-bot:
Change the ogg audio quality from 1 to 3 (ffmpeg's and oggenc's default)