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FLAC Joins The Xiph Family
Ancipital writes "Xiph.org (of Ogg Vorbis fame) have today announced that the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) project has joined the Xiph rebel alliance. The full story and press release can be found at the Xiph site. (FLAC is nice, because it gives you pristine lossless audio at roughtly 50% size reduction over uncompressed WAVs- you can store them on your hard drive/wherever and then transcode down to a lossy format when you need portability, yum!)"
Insurance or open source?
Does it work better than ZIP???
Once again, Slashdot is posting wild claims about a new compression scheme. This one claims to have a 50% compression ratio while losing no data. Earth to Slashdot, that's not possible! Either you are getting rid of data (and a filesize that's half the original indicates they are) or you aren't. There's no such thing as "lossless compression" by definition.
FLAC about MP3!
How to Download YouTube Videos
If you take your LPs out of the cardboard sleeves you easily save over 50% space.
Trolling is a art,
FLAC? Xiph? Ogg Vorbis? Narf!
Try saying that out loud, see what your co-workers do.
They are working on a lossless codec. This means that your sound quality would be exactly the same as the source, whether it be CD, DVD, or something else. MP3, Ogg, and all the other commonly used codecs are lossy, which means that they are of lower quality then the source file.
Whether or not the world needs another lossless codec is another matter entirely, but this project has a different goal then producing yet another MP3 competitor.
(Yes, that may have been a troll, but someone reading this probably managed to get confused in one way or another)
Remember kids, you're only allowed to have ONE source of information! You must choose a site, and take everything stated there as the word of God!
Dang I accidentally picked /. before I realized you only get one, and now I think that SOVIET RUSSIA is filled with either Beowulf Clusters or Natalie Portman and hot grits depending on who you ask.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Conversion between lossy codecs is meaningless
this is simply NOT TRUE. I convert between lossy formats all the time. I like to listen to 320kbps MP3 at work, but have trouble fitting them on floppies, so I encode them at 64kbps and then when I get to work, I RE-ENCODE them to 320 kbps. It's a brilliant trick, and I'm suprosed more people don't do it. I must say, however, I expected the sound quality of 320 kbps mp3 to be better than it is...
-RAEJIN
Now tell me what FLAC has that lzip hasn't! I constantly compress my CD rips down to a few MB's. You can too!
Some impressive stuff from the FAQ that made me leave that Monkey-compression-thingy once and for all:
"We're talking about a constant-time algorithm that can reduce a file down to 0% of its original size. What's not to like?"
---
"You will most likely experience a feeling of euphoria or lightheadedness as you watch your free disk space cascade upwards to 100%."
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Are there any drawbacks?
"Not that we know of. Occasionally, in the pre-1.0 days, someone would compress a file down to 0K and it would be lost for good. But that has been happening less and less frequently, and these days it has been a long time since we received any complaints from the people who reported this originally."
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I'm especially impressed by their complex PLACeBO and Lessiss-Moore algorithms.
And don't forget to read their Free-Object Oriented License (or simply "FOO"):
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
And by GNU no matter!
Its called gzip. Try it yourself and see the results!
gzip -c9 audiofile.wav > audiofile.gz
What signature defines me as a person?