Any encoders which will 'accept but crop' too high resolution , ... so that the user will notice that not all formats are equal? Options

[Porcus]

Q: Will all (at least all widely used) 'lossless' audio encoders abort with the appropriate error message if the user tries to feed unsupported audio? Or is there any which will discard channels, downsample, crop bits or just produce nonsense?


The reason why I ask, is that this forum fairly often gets the n00b question of whether 'lossless' is indeed lossless -- and get no more than a simple 'Yes' (or 'Yes, thread closed'). The devil in the detail is hardly ever mentioned, and most users will anyway never encounter that mismatch. But if the situation is 'in the few instances where the usual answer is inadequate, the encoder will warn the users rather than eating audio information', it would certainly be A Good Thing.

[googlebot]

I stand corrected by practice, it seems.

I still think that Foobar or the Flac encoder is far from behaving as it should, here, and that this rather belongs into a bug report than into the Flac Wiki. In programming there is no implicit Float->Int conversion. So an explicit conversion is happening here - this is where the information loss occurs (not in the encoder) - and the developer is not telling you about it! It's only slightly less worse in the 32 bit integer case, where the 8 LSB are probably just omitted without checking whether they are empty.

Float preservation is hard to accomplish. It's not impossible, though. Developers must just not rely on a specific hardware's float capabilities for the correctness of their program.

Then, arrgh, decoder bugs: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=84101

This is seems to be a common range offset bug (start counting from 0 instead of 1 and vice versa). While this is certainly annoying and a sign of bad QA, the same could basically happen to any WAV implementation. It is not specifically related to the math of lossless compression.

This post has been edited by googlebot: Jan 4 2011, 11:17