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  From: Pigeon <jah.pigeon@ukonline.co.uk>
  To  : <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 18:14:16 +0000

Re: Lossless Music format FLAC joins Xiph team

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 10:03:45AM +1030, Brandon Johnson wrote:
> About a week ago some (xfesty?) was complaining about sound quality. Anyone
> used FLAC or heard of it before? About 50% better then the uncompressed wav
> file.

Downloaded it, tested it, works, but never actually had cause to use
it in anger since I listen to music with my hi-fi and don't store it
on my PC. If I did, I'd use flac or something similar - there are
various alternatives, they all perform pretty much the same in terms
of compression level, they all give a decompressed output bit-for-bit
the same as the original. (As they should, being lossless.) flac seems
to be the "standard" as far as Linux is concerned.

> :)  I wonder it isnt  bzip2 <wavfile>

Music data "looks" pretty random and conventional compressors like
bzip2 don't find the redundancy in it. Have a look at the homepages of
flac and similar things - some of them have detailed explanations of
their compression algorithms - googling for "lossless audio compression"
is a good place to start.

Background noise is a source of randomness, so the cleaner the
recording, the more efficiently compressible it should be. Some day
I'll have to do some tests and see exactly how much difference it makes.

Pigeon

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