Yalac: Miscellaneous Questions, release/license/etc.; split from #43494 Options

[Supacon]

Yalac should finally achieve compression ratios on par with Monkey's Audio High. Decoding speed should be at least two times higher than Monkey and never be significantly lower than with FLAC

Cool. It looks like you're set up to assasinate Money's Audio. It will have no use once your new codec is optimized.

(possibly Yalac will later be integrated into FLAC).

What does Josh Coalson think of this? Do you have a relationship with him?

Regarding the whole naming thing... perhaps FLAC2 would work?

This post has been edited by Supacon: Apr 12 2006, 05:54

[Synthetic Soul]

Cool. It looks like you're set up to assasinate Money's Audio. It will have no use once your new codec is optimized.

Hardware aside, it could take a share of the FLAC market as well, with comparable decode speeds but improved compression. That said, the hardware support does appear to be a major benefit to FLAC. Also, well... see below.

What does Josh Coalson think of this? Do you have a relationship with him?

Thomas and Josh have discussed this in Thomas' initial thread.

I guess we are still in the very early stages whatever the outcome.

[krmathis]

Sorry if this has been asked before. But I could not find the answer, so here it is:
Do you plan to port Yalac to other Operating Systems, or will it stay MS Windows only?

Mac OS X user.

[Shade[ST]]

Sorry if this has been asked before. But I could not find the answer, so here it is:
Do you plan to port Yalac to other Operating Systems, or will it stay MS Windows only?

Mac OS X user.

YALAC is, for now, developped in Delphi, traditionally one of the most supported languages on the mac platform. It will be later be ported, as I recall, to C or C++, the leading languages used in unix and windows developpement. As such, and since OS X is a unix offshoot, it will probably work without a sweat. For now, though, it's still a private pre-alpha testing period, and the encoder isn't even recursively backward compatible.

[krmathis]

Shade[ST], thanks for the explanation.
This looks like a encoder with potential, so cant wait for it to go public and non-Windows.

This post has been edited by krmathis: May 6 2006, 10:13

[Madman2003]

Eagerly awaits a public release (that works on linux). Good luck with your work.

[audiomars]

This is great, TBeck. I hope you don't mind me askng, any date........

[Shade[ST]]

This is great, TBeck. I hope you don't mind me askng, any date........

It's good news for a codec's popularity when you have groupies asking you when the next release is done

The answer is generally "when it's done", but in this case, Thomas has rarely taken over two weeks to make a new release.

This post has been edited by Shade[ST]: May 20 2006, 17:53

[scottder]

I apologize in advance if this has been asked already, what liscence will YALAC be released under?

[TBeck]

I apologize in advance if this has been asked already, what liscence will YALAC be released under?

Please read this older post:
Current plans for a public release

Currently i can not give a better answer. And there is still much work to do before a public release.

[philibuster]

I apologize in advance if this has been asked already, what liscence will YALAC be released under?

Please read this older post:
Current plans for a public release

Currently i can not give a better answer. And there is still much work to do before a public release.

So you're probably thinking to release it as a separate entity from flac as stated in the first post? I understand the desire for differentiation, but with the choice of so many lossless codecs already, it may be advantageous, and you may achieve wider distribution if you integrate with another well-recognized name. But perhaps FLAC's encode/decode method is so different that it doesn't make sense to integrate into it, as you'd lose backwards-compatibility.

Those are just my thoughts...

[audiomars]

I would like to thank Thomas for patiently answering questions regarding the license and release dates. I know it can get a bit irritating when people keep asking about this and that when development is in progress.

Thanks to Shade[ST] too for the pointer and Synthetic Soul for splitting the thread and organising it.

[Fiend Angelical]

A small question: is there a plan for a website for Yalac? Or even a small entry in the wiki?

(Anyone can do the wiki entry, but is anyone up for it?)

Just wondering.

[TBeck]

A small question: is there a plan for a website for Yalac? Or even a small entry in the wiki?

(Anyone can do the wiki entry, but is anyone up for it?)

I don't think, that there will be a wiki entry before a public release of yalac, because performance and features are continously changing while in the current development and evaluation state.

Sooner or later i will add info about yalac to my homepage. In the meantime i may open a faq post at hydrogen.

Is there something specific you would like to know?

Thomas

[Fiend Angelical]

I don't think, that there will be a wiki entry before a public release of yalac, because performance and features are continously changing while in the current development and evaluation state.

Sooner or later i will add info about yalac to my homepage. In the meantime i may open a faq post at hydrogen.

Is there something specific you would like to know?

Thomas

Not right at the moment. Much of what is discussed is out of my depth. I was just wondering if everything will be concentrated into friendly, easy-to-understand language sometime.

[Supacon]

Good to hear. It seems like you're a very thoughtful software engineer who puts a lot of attention to detail. I am just excited about the project and like to be made aware of any progress... don't mind me

I was curious about something though... there is a thread that is discussing the hybrid codecs available now, and how they are usually quite suitable for transcoding. (i.e. WavPack lossy @ 384kb/s, OptimFrog DualStream)

Do you think that something like this would ever be a part of your codec?

[TBeck]

I was curious about something though... there is a thread that is discussing the hybrid codecs available now, and how they are usually quite suitable for transcoding. (i.e. WavPack lossy @ 384kb/s, OptimFrog DualStream)

Do you think that something like this would ever be a part of your codec?

In the early years of the development (1997-98) there was a hybrid mode, that i found to be transparent at about 420 kbs. With the later compression improvements 384 kbs should be possible.

But the current implementation would not allow for a hybrid mode. I would have to implement a specialized and slower mode. Maybe, sometime...

[Supacon]

I think that at this stage of the game, I wouldn't worry about developing it, but try to implement a decoder than could support this kind of hybrid mode if it does come into existence in the future. It could potentially have use for some people who want a high-quality intermediate file for later encodings without the storage requirements of true lossless. (But people would probably expect complete transparency at around 320-384 kbit/s)

I'm sure you've already thought of this though... I just thought it'd be interesting conversation