Comparison : 24bit/192KHz/stereo FLAC vs. APE, How can it be ? Options

[foorious]

Hi everybody,

I've just made a small comparison between Monkey's Audio 3.99 (Extra High Compression) and FLAC 1.21 (Compression level 8 ), using 24bit/192KHz/stereo files (the files were generated from a vinyl rip).

Of course I expected APE to perform slightly better than FLAC, like it usually does for 16bit/44KHz/stereo files (2-3%, maybe even 5%)... but I didn't really expect this !



Take a look at all the file sizes : we're talking about 20% difference here ! The total file size is 1,53 Go for APE vs. 1,88 Go for FLAC.

So I don't understand. I'm a genuine FLAC enthusiast (all my files are FLAC), but... how can it be ? Is there something wrong here ? Can we do something to improve all the FLAC file sizes ?

Thanks in advance for your explanation.

[foorious]

Thanks everyone for all your interesting answers.

Well, so it looks that FLAC isn't really well-suited at the moment for low-passed files, thus for 96 and 192 KHz files. Considering the results, I think it will be better for me to stick with FLAC for 16/44 files, but to switch to another format for 24/96 and 24/192 files. I don't like the idea of handling two different lossless formats in my collection, but the gap is huge, and I don't see any reason for losing almost 350 MB of disk space for a single album.

I secretly hope Josh Coalson has some ideas in store for improving FLAC's handling of HD audio files. We'll see !

Oh, one last question : in your opinion, is this issue related only to the frequency (96, 192 KHz) or also to the bits per sample ? In other words, would FLAC perform much better with 24bit/48KHz files than it does with 24bit/192KHz files ?

This post has been edited by foorious: Jul 27 2008, 16:41

[Dynamic]

Oh, one last question : in your opinion, is this issue related only to the frequency (96, 192 KHz) or also to the bits per sample ? In other words, would FLAC perform much better with 24bit/48KHz files than it does with 24bit/192KHz files ?

In conjunction with NickC's results, perhaps resampling (fb2k/Resampler) to 44.1 kHz and/or 48 kHz in the Convert DSP while retaining 24-bit output would answer that, and offer comparison between 16/44.1 and 24/44.1 when processed through lossyWAV (though it isn't certain the 16/44.1 is the same as a straight downconversion from the 24/96 files)

[Nick.C]

In conjunction with NickC's results, perhaps resampling (fb2k/Resampler) to 44.1 kHz and/or 48 kHz in the Convert DSP while retaining 24-bit output would answer that, and offer comparison between 16/44.1 and 24/44.1 when processed through lossyWAV (though it isn't certain the 16/44.1 is the same as a straight downconversion from the 24/96 files)

Taking onboard your comment regarding whether the 16/44.1 is a straight downconversion of the 24/96, I used the SSRC dsp plugin (ultra mode) in foobar2000 to resample the 24/96 version down to 48kHz and 44.1kHz and got the following:

24/96 lossless FLAC -5: 2954 kbit/s (926MiB); lossyWAV --standard|FLAC -5: 787 kbit/s (246MiB);
24/48 lossless FLAC -5: 1598 kbit/s (501MiB); lossyWAV --standard|FLAC -5: 517 kbit/s (162MiB);
24/44.1 lossless FLAC -5: 1489 kbit/s (466MiB); lossyWAV --standard|FLAC -5: 498 kbit/s (156MiB);

Also, I changed the bitdepth in foobar2000 and dithered the 24/96 version to 16/96 and got:

16/96 lossless FLAC -5: 1421 kbit/s (445MiB); lossyWAV --standard|FLAC -5: 776 kbit/s (243MiB);

This post has been edited by Nick.C: Jul 27 2008, 20:40