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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!)"
I've backed-up about 325 music CDs to CD-R using FLAC. It works as advertised. If you want lossless compression, use FLAC. It even has a XMMS plugin -- I use it all the time.
Method of processing duck feet
It's great to see something available for those of us who want to record our favorite music to hard drive, but don't want the low quality and artifacts of lossy formats like mp3 and ogg. Even 256kbps mp3s are noticeably worse than CDs when listening to certain types of music.
I'm also a little curious as to why they've gone and reproduced all of this work rather than just using gzip or bzip2, which frequently achieve compression rates of 50% or more.
Either way, I urge all of you to consider lossless compression of music data. Lossy compression is a great burden for one person to bear, and there are other options.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
This is good news in a nebulous sense, but what about actually getting 3rd party adoption? How many players out there support FLAC? Or even Ogg Vorbis?
I've been contemplating a digital audio player like the Turtle Beach AudioTron for awhile now, and while the AT has better support for a variety of formats than most, it's missing both FLAC and OGG (and the developers have stated it's not coming due to lack of CPU power).
I'd love to encode all my CDs onto a central server and have several units around the house playing from that. But I'd rather not rip around 1000 CDs more than once. And it's still not cost effective to just store them as WAVs - using FLAC would double the capacity.
Yeah, I know... Samba can translate files on the fly now, but that requires a good bit of horsepower. The Celeron 300A in the server just isn't going to be capable of transcoding FLAC->anything in real time, much less do it for 2 or 3 streams at once.
I guess the question is, what's holding back consumer electronics companies from implementing OGG and FLAC support? Is it technical, financial, or what? And what can Xiph do to help them in this?
So what sort of compression algorithm does FLAC use?
.OGG, and appending that to the .OGG. Then if you can just strip off the added info when you make copies to restricted-space devices. The only question is whether this can be done with a competitive compression ratio.
One idea that would be really cool is if they could get acheive lossless compression by noting the differences between the original and the
Is lossless really a good idea?
Why can't we develop a codec which is "almost lossless" and works well at higher bitrates? Ogg and MP3 do okay at 320kbps, but the quality increase isn't 3 times a 128kbps mp3.
A good test for encoding quality is to encode new age (enya, enigma) or classical music as they tend to have many subtle, yet distinct instrumental sounds (bells, small symbols, synthesized effects) in the background. Listen to them using a pair of good quality headphones (seinheisser or bose) - you're not listening for artifacts (at high bitrates, you should't find any) - instead listen for the subtle background sounds. THEN, make the decision if lossless really is better. Personally, I prefer 192kbps OGG for my encoding, as it provides reasonably good quality without sucking up my entire drive.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
ADPCM is not lossless. It is a non-perceptual lossy method of encoding audio. Contrast this with MP3, which is a perceptual lossy encoder, and ZIP which is a non-perceptual lossless encoder.
'Perceptual' means that the method has some model of human hearing, which means that it can more easily discard data which the human ear can't hear.
'Lossy' means that the encoded data is not an accurate representation of the original.
Generally, non-perceptual lossy audio codecs represent an old generation of technology -- they take up less processing power than perceptual codecs, but cannot compress audio as efficiently as perceptual codecs.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
With all the news on Microsoft's "new" TabletPC (old idea), I am quite intrigued that Microsoft doesn't have any innovative technology to bundle with their TabletPC; Xiph.org has it! The Opensource "revolution" is crumbling many barriers, including the proprietary ones put up just as a "distraction" (yes, inter-operability with Microsoft's proprietary software is a distraction from good programmers to design and implement better software and standards).
Come to think of it, Microsoft has nothing innovative in the audio and video world. Their AVI format, its many subspecies (wsf, wmf, wma, etc), and the general proliferation thereof are a justified (and quite notable) example of how media standards is not as crucial element in a company's survival. Bill Gates (yes his statment still stands as being verry impressive and of his accurate observation) generally stated that Microsoft's goal is to extend itself to its competitors by ussurping them to use Microsoft software. I just saw a black cat, the same one, walk by twice. XIPH has technology that Microsoft wants; loss-less audio. We know S3's S3TC is a loss-less standard of computer graphics and it is the only standing technology that is keep the DRI project from being able to objectionably compete as an opensource platform. So now, where does Microsoft think its going today? Microsoft has no software forcing anyone to use it now; the better of the software is opensourced and freely available.
In the immortal words of Nelson... "Hah ha!"
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Everyone on Hydrogen Audio disagrees with you. Do NOT link to r3mix.net - that site is notorious for its blatantly false information and crappy comparisons. Read the MP3 forums at Hydrogen Audio and becomre more enlightened.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
On top of this, you are still limited by the response of the equipment you are playing it on. Maybe this would help a little if you had an optical connection to a good amp, but computer speakers will provide more interference than compression any ol day.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Just curious. How many gigs did you need to store your 325 music CDs in FLAC files? ;)
(I mean 'gigs' as in Gigabytes, not the head-banging kind
I am actually more than curious, I am very interested to know. I have a 500+ CD collection that I have never ripped. I think it's time to begin backup-ing everything digitally, but I can't decide between mp3 and ogg (and I don't want to rip more than once either). So FLAC looks like the right thing for me. Just wondering about the size of files.
Just because you don't have a use for it doesn't mean it's useless!
There is a real market for such a codec in the professional audio industry - have you any idea how much space backing up a 48-track studio recording takes, especially now the industry is moving towards 96Khz/24bit recording?
Respected (at least until Apple bought them!) music software giant Emagic will sell you a program called ZAP which make about a 35% space saving and costs about $100, so free software that beats that is definitely good news for some people.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
PS: This post is a user interface question. I understand the entropy stuff :)