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!)"

Comments

Re:huh?

[Deagol]

FLAC isn't just free-as-in-beer. It's Free, complete with source and everything.

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.

Please - no r3mix.net links

[Inf0phreak]

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.

Re:Great... but what about 3rd party support?

[joe_bruin]

well, the kenwood music keg and phatnoise phatbox support both ogg vorbis and flac (in addition to mp3 and wma). flac has turned out to be the best way to keep single session recordings (ie, concert recordings) continuous without gaps on digital music players. i'm guessing we'll be seeing more firmare upgradeable devices start adding support for flac real soon now.

Re:Oh, boy, yet another codec....

[Andy_R]

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.

Re:Algorithms?

[Josh Coalson]

So what sort of compression algorithm does FLAC use?

• interchannel decorrelation: mid-side coding
• intrachannel decorrelation: FIR linear prediction
• entropy coding: Rice codes with a simple context mechanism

For more info see here

One idea that would be really cool is if they could get acheive lossless compression by noting the differences between the original and the .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.

This has been suggested before, but would require all Vorbis decoders to decode to the exact same result, which is not practical (Vorbis decodes to float samples).