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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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Actually one of the most important applications for lossless audio compression is production. The "stuff you can't hear" often because stuff you CAN hear if the sound is processed forther (EQ'd, chorused, etc). It's really not a good idea to use lossey compresison until you are completely down with your stuff. But, saving diskspace is often soemthing that would be nice, multitrack audio can get real big real quick. Hence, a losless ocmpression algortihm is great. Some companies implement one or another in tehir pro software but it would be nice if they were to settle on something like FLAC as a standard so the files would be interoperable.