Did one more test, the bad news is it looks like la is not always lossless. I generated a 16-bit stereo WAV file of noise to work with:
$ ls -l noise.wav
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jcoalson jcoalson 1572908 Oct 24 11:34 noise.wav
$ chroot /work/chroot/ /la /noise.wav
Lossless Audio Compresser
Version 0.3b, copyright Michael Bevin '02
Finished /noise.wav - size: 1581517 ratio: 100.6% time taken: 14.3s
$ mv noise.wav noise-save.wav
$ chroot /work/chroot/ /la /noise.la
Lossless Audio Compresser
Version 0.3b, copyright Michael Bevin '02
Finished /noise.la - time taken: 13.5s
Warning: CRC check failed!
$ ls -l noise*
-rw-r--r-- 1 jcoalson jcoalson 1581517 Oct 24 11:36 noise.la
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jcoalson jcoalson 1572908 Oct 24 11:34 noise-save.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 jcoalson jcoalson 1572908 Oct 24 11:37 noise.wav
$ md5sum *wav
8f1f07f01bb5044759836e0207ecb22b noise-save.wav
2c009dd046c2729af451e18da28aa636 noise.wav
$ cmp *.wav
noise-save.wav noise.wav differ: char 46, line 1
$ cmp -l noise*.wav | head -20
46 62 262
48 210 10
160584 14 214
160585 75 323
160586 62 55
160587 231 60
160588 300 77
160589 105 122
160590 244 235
160591 322 352
160592 260 64
160593 140 54
160594 373 371
160595 352 143
160596 77 263
160597 261 162
160598 104 101
160599 345 274
160600 23 200
160601 54 200
So I tried the '-debug' option but it doesn't look like it'll be much help:
$ chroot /work/chroot/ /la -debug -overwrite /noise.wav
Lossless Audio Compresser
Version 0.3b, copyright Michael Bevin '02
Finished /noise.wav - size: 1581517 ratio: 100.6% time taken: 14.5s
$ cat debugenc.txt
Debug information ...
Layer 0 budget-crc: -43872
Layer 1 budget-crc: -20449
Layer 2 budget-crc: 39609
Layer 3 budget-crc: -16845
Layer 4 budget-crc: 8058
Layer 5 budget-crc: -15236
Layer 6 budget-crc: 2632
Layer 7 budget-crc: -1851
Layer 8 budget-crc: 4832
Profiling information ...
Entropy Coding: 1920000
Loading data from wav: 30000
entiretransforms: 12490000
everything: 14490000
stage0: 0
stage1: 120000
stage2: 1150000
stage3: 1650000
stage4: 1060000
stage5: 3440000
stage6: 1910000
stage7: 1740000
stage8: 1260000
$
Josh