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:Lossless format

[Masem]

Yes, there is, but the data has to be ideal for 'compression' to work; Run Length Encoding comes to mind (eg: "aaaaaaaaaa" compared to "10a"). Heck, everyone uses zip and gzip and bz2 files, which are compression, but nothing gets lost, thus lossless.

However, the compression mostly happens for highly idealized data (such as written text); binary files or music/image files where the randomness of successive bits is very high, and thus lossless compression can't happen.

I don't disagree that a lossless compression scheme that gets 50% compression is highly questionable, but it's definitely not out of the realm of possibility.