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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
How about ID3 tags, seekability, and built in md5 verification?
Zoid.com
There is a Winamp plugin for FLAC already (it has been around since the first time FLAC was on Slashdot, too).
Actually, there is such thing as "lossless" compression.
.zip uses) compresses data by developing a small dictionary of byte sequences that recur in a file, and representing those byte sequences as a single byte, thereby saving space. You develop a large enough dictionary of this type, and you're saving file space.
For example, dictionary-style compression (what
Zip is living proof that lossless compression exists - you COMPRESS your text files, without LOSING any of the data in it when you DECOMPRESS.
That's what lossless compression is.
For more info, look into the entropy of data, which helps to determine the lossless compressability.
An example of LOSSY compression is mp3 or JPEG, where you (usually) sacrifice some quality for increased compression. Part of what makes mp3 work so well, is that it throws out the parts of the audio signal that are out of the human range of hearing.
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Disclaimer: The above statement probably includes half-truths, because real truth is too complicated.
So the point isn't that FLAC is new... the point is that FLAC is OSS, and has joined forces with an organization backing such efforts. The SHN codec is not OSS.
If you take your LPs out of the cardboard sleeves you easily save over 50% space.
Trolling is a art,
Here's a little meat for you:
2. RESTRICTIONS. Notwithstanding any provisions in this agreement to the contrary, Licensee may not (a) make, use or load into temporary memory any unapproved copies of the Licensed Materials without the appropriate license(s) for use on additional CPUs; (b) distribute the Licensed Materials; (c) modify, transmit, rent, lease or sublicense the Licensed Materials; (d) reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble the Licensed Materials, except to the extent required to be permitted by applicable law; (e) disclose any source core or performance characteristics of the Licensed Materials to any person or entity; (f) use the Licensed Materials in a service bureau or "application service provider" environment or for the benefit of third parties; or (g) at any time do or permit to be done anything which shall adversely affect SoftSound's right, title or interest in the Licensed Materials. If the Licensed Materials are used within a country of the European Community, nothing in this Agreement shall be construed as restricting any rights available under the EC Council Directive 14 May 1991 on the legal protection of computer programs.
Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.Org Foundation
FLAC? Xiph? Ogg Vorbis? Narf!
Try saying that out loud, see what your co-workers do.
I wish Jeff Gilchrist would add a unix/linux section to the Archive Comparison Test (ACT) page (http://compression.ca). He does have a corpus of sound files, so check it out to see how other compressors are doing (FLAC is not included, though).
Method of processing duck feet
FLAC has been around for a very long time, as a seperate project -- FLAC 1.0 was released in June 2001, for example. The reason for this announcement is that FLAC is joining the Xiph family of completely free (no cost, no patents, no licencing restrictions) media projects. It nicely complements Vorbis, which is Xiph's lossy codec.
You can think of the relationship between FLAC and MAC similarly to the relationship between Vorbis and MP3. It's a slightly strained analogy, but works to a first approximation.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Here is a table listing many lossless compression techniques, FLAC is there, but it version .1c might be an early alpha, ZIP RAR SHORTEN and most of the other interesting ones are represented here as well.
Bork Bork Bork!!
ADPCM is high bit-rate but still lossy because the "difference" is not coded losslessly. As for gzip, it does not achieve 50% compression on wave files.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The upcoming version of AlsaPlayer will support FLAC streaming over HTTP, and even seeking if you use HTTP 1.1. We should see FLAC streaming support in Icecast soon, at least I hope so.
-adnans (*plug*!)
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
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?
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)
I just started archiving my CD collection (350+ discs) using FLAC. I tested a number of codecs, including LAME, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC.
In the end, I settled on FLAC for four reasons:
* It's completely lossless.
* Gapless playback
* If you save the TOC from the source CD, you can burn an exact copy, pregaps and all, from your FLACs.
* I can reencode to Ogg, MP3 or whatever lossy format I want at any time. Nice for when I want to make a MP3 disc to play on my MP3 walkman, and I don't lose quality like I would if my source material was in Ogg.
Hopefully, we'll see wider support for FLAC come from this partnership. Not too many players support FLAC, though the FLAC developers have made plugins for XMMS and WinAmp.
Oh, and some people have been tossing the '50% compression' thing around already. It really depends on the music. I have managed up to 70% compression on some sparse music, (mainly ambient and classical) while my death metal and noise encoded around 30%. It seems that the more dense the source is, the less it compresses.
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
Near as I can tell, Monkey's Audio still doesn't work anywhere but on Windows (though support for other platforms is promised). FLAC works on Windows, MacOS9/X, Linux, BSD and even has hardware support. That single platform limitation makes Monkey's Audio difficult to justify for any serious audio preservation.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
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.
300 "audiophiles" disagree with you.
I don't see a need for lossless compression. LAME MP3 with the r3mix preset sounds perfect to me, and anyone who thinks that they can tell a difference between that and CD audio is only saying that to impress people.
Lalala
With all of the damn codecs in the world, one that only provides 50% saving is just Not Ready for Prime Time. Somehow, with all of the repetition in music, there has GOT to be a way to do better than that.
I'm sure everyone here would welcome any successes you have in researching this.
Storing in one format and then have to convert to another all of the time just not an option. Maybe when memory is a dollar a gigabyte (and I mean RAM!), them this might be a choice - but I am hoping for something better.
Maybe you're missing the point. FLAC is a replacement for WAV. That is, a lossless way to store sound, and still be able to use it, via. direct playability in XMMS and WinAmp.
If you want small, then use mp3 or ogg, which is for small but lossy files. If, after encoding to mp3, you still keep your old WAV files, in order to be able to re-encode into any other lossy format, then FLAC is useful to convert your WAV collection to -- not as a replacement for mp3 or ogg.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
The FLAC format has metadata support, and since you now can put FLAC in Ogg containers, it can also use Ogg tag support which is truly great.
In short: id3 (especially id3v2) sucks and should just DIE as soon as possible. Foobar 2000 even goes as far as to completely forgo id3v2 support on ideological reasons. Honestly, I think they are on to something.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
This is why (or at least a major reason) lossless audio compression is so hard. There just isn't enough repitition at the sample level to produce a dictionary for your traditional compression algorithms (gzip, bzip2 etc)
Now, if music was as repetative as you thought, we'd be able to compress 90% of the music released in the last 5-10 years to about 1kbyte ;)
Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
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.
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:)
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.
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That's fine. But lossless compression is important for people that trade and distribute music. Having an *exact* copy is what we want and lossless compression schemes do that for us. In the trading circles that I'm a part of, mp3 and ogg are the product of the devil.
> Is lossless really a good idea?
Yes, it is.
There are many musicians who want portability. Try encoding some wav to mp3/ogg at home, decoding it in the studio, mix it, encode it again to mp3/ogg and go home to your homestudio.
Then try that 20 times, and see what remains of the soundquality.
Then sure, you can also carry wavfiles if it matters that much to you, but 50% savings can be a lot.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Speaking of quality increase isn't really the right way to look at it. It's the decrease from the original that is important.
Most poeple, experts included, cannot tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and an original 44.1khz pcm sample. I mean, the vast, huge majority of experts simply cannot tell the difference.
But there IS a difference. We know there is a difference because it's lossy compression. We know that when we take an original CD and use flac on it, we end up with an exact copy of the original. That's why lossy compression exists.
If you are simply listening to something on the headphone jack of your computer with medium or low quality headphone (like Bose or most of the Sennheiser line (medium) or the normal crap you buy in any store (low)), you don't have a chance of hearing the difference between a high bitrate mp3 and the original.. there is too much noise from the computer, and not enough power from the headphone jack.
On the other hand, if you are using a clock stabilized external output from a good external soundcard with a proper mixer, running through a good class-A headphone amp and into a good pair of headphones (Sennheiser HD580, HD600, Grado RS-1, RS-2, SR325), in a quiet room built for listening, and if you have good ears, and are used to listening for detail, you may hear a difference.
Say you've got your collection of CDs at home, and you're just about to encode them all for your iPod. "Okay", you figure, "I'm going to pick.. umm.. 192kbps MP3s, since that's pretty good and I'm going to be listening to them over cheap headphones on the train on the way to work."
So you go ahead and encode your entire 600-album collection to 192 kbps MP3s. And you put them on your iPod, and everything's fine... until you decide you want to listen to them at work as well, and 192kpbs just isn't good enough for listening in the quieter environment in your cube.
Now you've gotta take your 600 CDs and re-encode them at 320 kbps, because if you were to do something silly like extract your 192 kbps MP3s to wave files and re-encode to 320 kbps, you'd just end up with inflated 192 kbps MP3s.
Better yet, say you want (vbr) ogg files at work; or Apple (heaven forfend) finally comes out with a portable player with ogg support. You still need to go back to your original CDs (are they scratched yet? Did you lend 'em to your friend and forget he had it before he left for Maryland? Did your wife take your favorite disc to work with her, where one of her students used it for an art project?) and re-encode everything.
Now, say instead you use FLAC (or SHN, or even APE which I've never personally used).
You take your collection to work; turns out your servers are slightly too small for the FLAC files, so you expand to wave and encode to 320 kpbs MP3s using a simple shell script for the entire collection.
You want ogg files for your new next-generation iPod; great, just run a slightly different shell script to expand to wave and encode to ogg.
Your apartment is broken into and your entire 600 CD collection is stolen, including that ultra-rare CD you got from that band that was once part of that other band but split off when the original drummer OD'd, but they only burned 300 copies of their indie CD and besides they haven't been together since '94. No problem, you've still got the FLAC files and can at least burn yourself a virgin, bit-for-bit exact copy (depending on how carefully you originally extracted it, of course) of the audio -- your artwork and individually-numbered disc are still gone, sorry.
And that's not to mention new compression algorithms, media formats, etc. MP3 and any other lossy compression algorithm doesn't handle future-readiness very well.
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
Visit etree.org. The big benefit of lossless compression is it makes for better distribution of live recordings. The short of it is that demanding recordings in a losslessly compressed audio format, along with verification using checksum files, guarantees no loss in fidelity.
There are many alternate live-music trading scenarios which cause a loss in fidelity. Two of the most common: 1) CD Audio->CD Audio copies are not perfect (unless you use a specialized tool like EAC - Exact Audio Copy); 2) trading lossily-compressed audio tends to lead to loss of fidelity through inevitable decompression, writing to CD, reripping, and reencoding.
Since FLAC is designed specifically for audio, it can take advantage of audio statistics, enabling it to compress better. AFAIK general lossless compression programs such as zip perform bad on audio, since audio seems fairly random to them.
Somehow, with all of the repetition in music, there has GOT to be a way to do better than that.
The problem comes with the word "lossless".
Music does indeed have a *lot* of repetition, at a high level. If you look at an audio waveform, you can see very regular-looking patterns in the data, that change every now and then but can go on for thousands of samples with only slight variation. At a low level, however, music has a *huge* amount of noise (not noise as in clicks and artifacts, mind you, noise as in stronly leptokurtic Gaussian deviations from what the waveform "should" look like), and even extremely regular plosives just destroy any sort of adaptive prediction-based encoding. For reference, "huge" means on the order of 5 to 6 bits out of 16 (even local nonlinear methods give a RMS error of at best 40ish, but getting that low means storing a lot of parameters of the prediction model, RBF centers and weights as an example).
If you want and extremely high level of compression that you can *almost* call lossless, use FLAC (or Shorten, or Monkey's, or whatever) *after* running your sound through a trajectory-based nonlinear noise reduction filter. You'll see the compression go from 50% to 25% or better (for reference, "archive quality" VBR OGG only gets down to 20-25%). But, you can't *truly* call that lossless anymore, because even though you might not consider the "noise" as part of the music, people *can* tell the difference and usually prefer the version with noise (and, as I mentioned, such a filter blunts plosives, which *should* stay in the music, so you'd need to detect those and add them back in to avoid a noticeable degredation of quality).
Trust me, lossless audio compression does *not* count as a "toy" problem, nor one that people have already "solved" optimally (for example, just about every well-understood time series prediction/analysis technique out there depends on a property called "stationarity", which music very strongly lacks... You can still use such methods, but they give suboptimal results in the best case, and exhibit serious instability in the worst cases). For another problem, *almost all* research on time series analysis has focused on out-of-series error and stability. This lets you do things like predict stock values and the weather. It doesn't, however, necessarily give the best *in-series* error, which matters in an application like audio compression, since you already know the entire extent of the data you need to predict (postdict?). In AI, this has a close analogy to the idea of "overfitting" a neural net - if you train a neural net too long, it learns too many subtleties of the training data and loses its generalization power. Except, in audio compression, you don't *care* about the generalization power, you care about it learning as much about the training data as possible.
Minor point, but the tags are not part of the Ogg container. FLAC implements tags the same way as Vorbis does, as one of the initial packets, so they are available in raw FLAC as well as Ogg FLAC.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
PS: This post is a user interface question. I understand the entropy stuff :)
I don't think that "lossless" sounds three times as good as 128kbps mp3.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
People should check out: http://wiki.etree.org, an online network for people interested in live jam band music. They are trying to move towards using all FLAC, or at least mostly. Also check out the etree audio archive, they have some stuff in FLAC, although most of it's in SHN.
Windows is likely to disappear from the face of the earth sometime in 2004
MS-DOS lived from 1981 to 2002. It is no longer maintained; instead, a GPL clone is maintained by the community.
The first good version of Microsoft Windows (Windows 3.x) appeared around 1990. I don't see the product surviving past 2020, let alone the 2080's when the copyrights begin to expire.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
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?"
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"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!
Except that they go even further than your naive scheme, and use a predictor to get even smaller deltas than your scheme (e.g., assume waveform is locally quadratic/cubic/quartic then extrapolate the next sample). A signal can be varying rapidly and yet still be highly predictable. Your simplistic scheme wouldn't handle it.
Then they use Rice-Golomb coding to encode the deltas. This does FAR better than gzip ever could, because it is designed SPECIFICALLY to handle the geometric distribution of the deltas, whereas gzip is a generic dictionary algorithm.
I really doubt you've even tried what you are suggesting. You're on the right track, but the FLAC team beat you to the punch. Sorry.
Umm, you try it. Presumably they've spent a lot of time on designing a format. You should take a little bit of effort before claiming you can do much better, especially since verifying the compression of such a simple format should be easy. Making the claim without even taking that much effort is insulting.
Besides, FLAC has important features your format does not. In particular, FLAC is seekable. As anyone who has tried to quickly extract a single file from a large .tar.gz knows, gzip is not.
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?