Audio Compression Primer

Hack Jandy writes "For those of you with a little extra time this afternoon, check out Sudhian's primer to all things concerning audio compression. The article details everything from DRM to CRC matrixes (with a healthy dosage of Ogg)."

Comments

Is FLAC worth it?

[Megaweapon]

"FLAC is the Linux users lossless audio codec of choice"

Unless your doing some form of audio editing or "production" recording, is lossless really worth the extra size compared to a 192kbps Ogg or MP3? I usually have more problems with static from the stupid 3.5mm jack than a lossy format.

Virtually dismisses lossy compression

[Sanity]

This article doesn't seem to talk much about ogg at all, unless I am missing something, in fact, it virtually dismisses all lossy algorithms in favour of lossless algorithms which achieve only 50% compression (instead of 90% compression with lossy).

Each to their own, but I am more than satisfied with oggs or mp3s encoded at a reasonable bitrate - I think the popularity of hardware such as iPods suggest that most other people are too.

Waste of time . . .

[barryman_5000]

Not very informative for slashdot ppl. I think we should have had an article more about code or something. I think most slashdotters understand codecs and the differences in lossless and lossy compressions. Waste of 15 minutes.

Hey! Me too!

[Just Some Guy]

I do the exact same thing, except that I keep my entire CD collection on CD. If I ever need a new format, I can go back to the CD and reencode without transcoding from another lossy format.

I've got about 350GB of lossless audio goodness in a set of nice oak bookshelves built into my wall. Considering that the time it takes to get up, get a CD, rip it, and encode it is not much longer than it takes to locate a FLACed album on my fileserver and encode it - that is, the encoding stage is several times longer than the "get up and rip the first track before starting to encode" phase - I think I'll stick with my current system.