Which is the best lossless codec?, Discussion thread Options

[Digga]

Oops, sorry about that. Actually 57% is the line.

^^

In the comparision, I replaced "Compression efficiency not on par with other lossless codecs" with "Relatively slow encoding" (that is, comparing to other codecs that compress much more at same speed). I think it's fairer towards FLAC. Do you agree?

that's one (nice) possibility. however, it seems that compression efficiency is really not on par, so I would have just added this to WavPack also

[smack]

Well I don't want to say that you lie but probably you're just little bit confused. I've tried MultiFrontend and LA Frontend with APEv1/APEv2 tags and also Foobar's Diskwriter Commandline Encoder with selected APEv2 tag and found that Winamp doesn't support APEv2 tags. Tried both 0.4 and 0.4b. Foobar does but it's more native Foobar functionality than support from format. Furthermore official documentation of LA says: ID3 v1.1 tagging support

Uhm, you are right. LA's Winamp plugin does NOT recognize the APE2 tags. Sorry, I didn't intend to spread false information...

[rjamorim]

that's one (nice) possibility. however, it seems that compression efficiency is really not on par, so I would have just added this to WavPack also 

Well, feel free to edit the Wiki article. That's another reason I moved there - that is, so that it doesn't stay in one man's hands and therefore is subject to his bias.

[Jan S.]

Wiki page is here now: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...less_comparison

comparison was misspelled before.

[jcoalson]

BTW: It's important to mention that efficiency is not compression ratio. Efficiency is a relation between compression ratio and encoding speed.

efficiency is not defined in the doc, it might clear things up. more helpful I think would be rating "encoding efficiency" and "decoding efficiency".

Josh

[Digga]

BTW: It's important to mention that efficiency is not compression ratio. Efficiency is a relation between compression ratio and encoding speed.

efficiency is not defined in the doc, it might clear things up. more helpful I think would be rating "encoding efficiency" and "decoding efficiency".

decoding efficiency = fast decoding / decoding complexity (system resources usage)?

[rjamorim]

Hello. I'd like to inform you that I replaced the PNG table with a Wiki table, with lots of help from Jan S.

Check it out here:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...omparison_Table

So, no more need for the Excel spreadsheet and the PNG image. People can edit the table directly (but be very careful when doing so, as it is easy to break everything with a misplaced |).


The only modification from the recent PNG table is that now TTA has "average" software support. I changed that after it came to my attention that no audio editor supports it.

So, clarifying how each codec gets the software support ranking:

"Bad" is when only a handful of players support this format, or even worse, only the player provided by the manufacturer (E.G, Real Lossless and, until recently, ALAC)

"Average" is just average support. A few players, no editors, etc.

"Good" ranking requires that a) the format can be played on more than one platform, preferably with several players and b) it can be imported and exported by an audio editing application.

"Very good" is not really quantifiable. You just know that format has that ranking, from the amount of applications supporting it in several different platforms.


Questions? Comments?

Regards;

Roberto.

This post has been edited by rjamorim: Apr 15 2005, 23:37

[saverio]

Hi, Roberto. Great guide. I'm starting a lossless conversion (in the sense that I'm starting to encode new things in lossless, almost like a religious conversion). As I'm on a mac, I'll stick with ALAC.

Just a pair of comments and a question:

1) ALAC is supported in linux (and maybe in gnu/hurd) there is a debian package called "la" that decodes apple lossless. Oh, well it is decoding. Said nothing.

2) ALAC is very fast on encoding. For me (G5@1,8GHz) it is 16x minimum when I'm not encoding H.264 video.

Now the question:

What is ALS? I could not get sensitive info using the search function. Is this a new format? (I thnk not, because it is not on the table) or just a cuesheet-like thingie for some other format?


Wish-list: ALAC/MP4 (and AAC/MP4) supporting internal cuesheet, as to have one file in the hard disk, but the whole album in the library (implementing also gapless automatically).

[Busemann]

ALS is a new lossless format that is developed for the MPEG 4 group to be a new ISO standard. Too bad it hasn't been standardized yet, as all major companies have made their own codecs by now.

Perhaps more interesting is the other effort by the MPEG4 group, the SLS codec. It is a hybrid codec based on AAC, so it can be played back on anything that plays AAC.

[Mr_Rabid_Teddybe...]

I see you added an "Oddball Formats" section to the Lossless comparison Wiki page. But not even there did Bonk or RKAU make it.... Poooor things!

[Busemann]

ALAC should be updated to reflect the changes made in QT7. This has to go at least:

Doesn't support multichannel audio and high resolutions

[rjamorim]

I see you added an "Oddball Formats" section to the Lossless comparison Wiki page. But not even there did Bonk or RKAU make it.... Poooor things! 

Haha. That just shows it's about time I add those formats to ReallyRareWares

Thanks, I just added them to the lists.

ALAC should be updated to reflect the changes made in QT7. This has to go at least:

Doesn't support multichannel audio and high resolutions

Ah, that's very interesting indeed. You tested it on multichannel and high resolution (96kHz/24bit) streams?

[Busemann]

You tested it on multichannel and high resolution (96kHz/24bit) streams?

I tried a 96kHz stereo stream from archive.org, but it lists up to 192kHz and 5.0/5.1 in the settings window. If anyone know where to find multichannel files I'd be glad to test

This post has been edited by Busemann: May 8 2005, 19:35

[rjamorim]

I tried a 96kHz stereo stream from archive.org, but it lists up to 192kHz and 5.0/5.1 in the settings window. If anyone know where to find multichannel files I'd be glad to test

Well, there's this multichannel stream I created to verify speaker positioning:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/upload/test.m4a

It can also help test QuickTime decoding multichannel AAC

[Busemann]

Ok, the file plays back fine and it reports it as "AAC, 6 Channels, 48,000 kHz". But for some reason, QT freezes when pressing the "settings.." button in the export pane, so I can't convert it..

[rjamorim]

Meh. Buggy.

Try this then: It's a wavpack of that same multichannel stream
http://www.rarewares.org/rja/test.wv

You can decode it with the MacOS binary:
http://www.rarewares.org/files/lossless/wa...k-4.2-MacOS.zip


Edit: actually bzip compressed it nearly as well as WavPack, so you can use this if wavpack won't work for you:
http://www.rarewares.org/rja/test.wav.bz2

This post has been edited by rjamorim: May 8 2005, 20:05

[Busemann]

That did the trick!

I converted it to both AAC & ALAC as .mov's, but it doesn't seem to passthrough multichannel to the mpeg4 container The alac file ended up as 174KB.

Should I upload the two .mov files?

This post has been edited by Busemann: May 8 2005, 20:34

[rjamorim]

I converted it to both AAC & ALAC as .mov's, but it doesn't seem to passthrough multichannel to the mpeg4 container   The alac file ended up as 174KB.

Thanks for testing!

Should I upload the two .mov files?

Yes, please. I'm curious about how my QuickTime 6 will behave with a multichannel ALAC.

[Busemann]

Yes, please. I'm curious about how my QuickTime 6 will behave with a multichannel ALAC.

Posted them here. I bet QT 6 will choke on both, but it's worth a try anyway.

This post has been edited by Busemann: May 8 2005, 22:03

[rjamorim]

Heh, it's interesting. It loads both files and recognize both as multichannel. But no sound comes out when playing them back.

[Skymmer]

I have updated WIKI page with this info:

- LA's error state changed from white to red just because

CODE

c:\Shifter\Software\MUSIC\Packers\Lossless\La v0.4\tools>la test1.la

Lossless Audio Compressor
Version 0.4b, copyright Michael Bevin 2002-2004

Decoding test1.la [**********..............]
This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.

- TTA's error state changed from red to green because

CODE

c:\Shifter\Software\MUSIC\Packers\Lossless\TTAEnc v3.3>ttaenc -d test1.tta
TTA1 lossless audio encoder/decoder, release 3.3
Copyright (c) 2005 Alexander Djourik. All rights reserved.
For more information see http://tta.sourceforge.net
------------------------------------------------------------
File:    [Test1.tta]
Decode:  checksum error, 46080 samples wiped
Decode:  wrote 1408192 bytes, done, ratio: 0,74, time: 0
------------------------------------------------------------
Total:   [1/1, 1,3/1,0 Mb], ratio: 1,377, time: 0'00
------------------------------------------------------------

I also added a note about error robustness in TTA's pros

[rjamorim]

Very good. Thanks

Edit: I added "Fits the Matroska container" to WavPack.

This post has been edited by rjamorim: May 17 2005, 02:43

[Defsac]

I added streaming support to MAC since the changelog for the latest release seems to indicate streaming is supported.

Changed: Decoding engine better at handling corrupt streams / loss of internet connection while playing

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/versionhistory.html

Edit: I just noticed that the wiki indicates Monkey's Audio doesn't support ReplayGain. I've edited that as well.



This post has been edited by Defsac: May 29 2005, 11:47

[Defsac]

Jan S. has since informed me "Some programs support replaygain thru tags but that is not the same as it being supported by the format.". I'd like to know what constitutes ReplayGain support.

Granted MAC doesn't conform to the ReplayGain standard (8 bit field in the header file), using APEv2 tags instead. FLAC also uses tags (vorbis comment) for ReplayGain and is listed as ReplayGain supported. So, are we defining ReplayGain support as standard compliant or tag support? If the former FLAC should be changed to "no", if the latter MAC should be changed to "yes".

This post has been edited by Defsac: May 29 2005, 11:53

[dobz]

When you encode with FLAC you can use "--replay-gain" option, so i guess that this is the reason for FLAC's support.

I had a quick look to see if Monkey Audio can do this but couldnt find the info and gave up looking.
Just because foobar can replaygain an audio file doesnt mean it nativly supports it?