Yet another lossless audio compressor..., Would it make any sense? Options

[TBeck]

Hi,

(sorry, my english isn't very good...)

i have been working (for fun) on lossless audio compression since about 1997. Finally i would like to bring this thing (especially the never-ending-search for just a tenth of a percent more compression...) to an end. In the light of the big bunch of existing Compressors, i am not quite sure, if it would be of any use to add one more Compressor to the public. The preparations for a useful release would be much further work, and i wouldn't like to waste my time for something not needed.

My Compressor uses similar techniques like FLAC, but far more elaborated. Compression ratios lie between Monkey's Audios High- and Extra-High-Mode (Can be better than Extra High at the expense of a considerable increase of encoding time). Encoding Speed is a bit slower than Monkey's, Decoding Speed is much higher on most Files. Seek-Times should also be better cause of the maximum (independent) frame length of 250 ms.

I would like to read some opinions. Would it make any sense to release it?

Thanks

Thomas

[boombaard]

IMHO Monkey's Audio is a poor codec simply because it is slow as hell if you want decent compression. If you are going to try to compete it would be more reasonable to try and get compression ratios like OptimFrog, MAC or LA, but with WavPack or FLAC's encoding/decoding speeds along with APEv2 tags, proper seeking and other nice features. Then you'd have something worthy of competition.

..define slow as hell, if you would.. this is just a near-troll..
MAC extra high decodes @18~22x on my pc (athlon 2800+), and is probably the best choice for decoding speed vs. compression ratios there out there..
sure, OFR gets better compression ratios, but that's decoding at 3x playback or slower.. flac -8 is faster at decoding, but the compression ratios are significantly lower.. wavpack is better at compressing than flac, but still worse than MAC extra high (in that you can save GBs of space on modern sized HD), which i consider the benchmark here (since imo 20x playback is more than fast enough)..
LA i haven't tested, but the benchmarks seem to suggest it's impractically slow at comparable compression levels (<5x playback)

regardless.. you want: awesome compression, combined with high decoding speeds, and preferably encoding too.. obviously well-taggable, without bugs in it..
so basically you ask the world of someone who hasn't even released a .01 version of his en/decoder yet..
how encouraging this must be

anyway, TSer.. feel free to do with your free time what you want, i'm sure there'll be people here that are interested without saying you should invent cold fusion before you're allowed to post about it here