its a bit misleading to me as i typicaly use >960kbps (probably better to use >1250kps) in auto playlists to section out hi res files as metadata from hi res rarely contains bit depth field with QT ending support and my andoid device not supporting alac i decided to convert m4a files over i did the alac first, then i did the low res aac/m4a once i realised this I used timestamp to back highlight 100's and added a custom 3 field of "low res" so that i know that the source file could have been better now some of these files meet my >960kps hi res minimum auto playlist threshold.

Murdie: FLAC is lossless (ALAC too), so it nearly always will be significantly larger than lossy AAC/M4A (MP3, etc.), it means also higher bitrate, but no quality loss. You have compression level set to 0, it means, you want the fastest FLAC compression at the cost of larger file. If you want to achieve smaller file (but slower compression and slightly more demading decoding), you need to set this level to some higher value, I would recommend 6, it seems to be quite good compromise.

I did one better,
I did a video screen recording with commentary to better illustrate my problem. I droped the 4 example wav's in that video into a gdrive.
On ticket Ticket #2708

On the off topic low res convert
@mipi yeah i don't Fully understand the aac/m4a files conversion but compared to alac files conversion these files seem to be similar in size to resulting flac but the low res files jumped in size and bitrate dramaticly I converted several hundred <320kbs m4a to flac the quadrupling in the file size was surprissing maybe this is expected but i was surprised to see the on the flac 900kps on a 256kbs m4a. i guess i expected to se similar 256 on the flac.

its a bit misleading to me as i typicaly use >960kbps (probably better to use >1250kps) in auto playlists to section out hi res files as metadata from hi res rarely contains bit depth field. with QT ending support and my andoid device not supporting alac i decided to convert m4a files over i did the alac first, then i did the low res aac/m4a once i realised this I used timestamp to back highlight 100's and added a custom 3 field of "low res" so that i know that the source file could have been better now some of these files meet my >960kps hi res minimum auto playlist threshold.
and auto playlist of this field reveals i have 831 files taking up 25.6.gb which previously took about 6-8gb pre conversion

I cannot reproduce problem with converting 24bit WAV, could be file specific problem, sample file posted to ticket would help.

Re Q - I am not sure I understand. FLAC is lossless format, its size and bitrate depends on how the original raw (uncompressed) audio can be compressed by FLAC alghoritm. AAC/m4a is lossy compression. You can imagine AAC->FLAC conversion like AAC->WAV->FLAC conversion. Size/bitrate of resulting FLAC is not related to the bitrate of original AAC, but to complexity of the WAV/raw audio.

Please offer a sample file that fails to Support: https://www.mediamonkey.com/support/

You may need to upload to a fileshare like DropBox or OneDrive and include a link to the shared file in the Support Ticket.

as a test i wanted to convert a small no. of wav's to flac
the source wavs are 24bit. they are being directed to a different location not overwriting under the convert format/settings
format: flac
compression 0
sample rate default
channels default
bits per sample 24

select OK
error notification at base of screen
playback failed cannot decode
C:\Users\murdi\OneDrive\MediaMonkey 5\MediaMonkey 5\Plugins/in_wav.dll
(i verifiied the the root the dll is there.)

Also right after it fails it plays the file which i can hear through headphones which i didn't ask it too.
retrying convert, yields the same result with a restart of the track playing.

followed by a Error box center of the screen..."there was a problem decoding converting the folowing files"
detailing the item and problem columns with the message mediamonkey is unable to decode this format.

which it obvioulsy just did because your playing it!

It convert a bunch of m4a files without issue (qt player installed in win10) some of these where hi res (>1200-6000 kbps). a comment though.
Q) In low res <320 aac/m4a VBR files on the same setting but selecting 16 instead of 24 this has shot up the size of the files like from 8mb to 38mb and the 256kb files are now towards 1000kbps is this an expected result?
the hi res files convert are about the same size and bit rate but the low res convert quadrupled in size

EDIT
mm5 5.0.1.2433
win10 10600k