--blocksize: info on its impact on strength and how to use correctly?, Was: --blocksize (TOS #6) Options

[_m²_]

Recently I discovered --blocksize.
Bryant, could you tell some more about its impact on strength and how to use it correctly?
I saw some topics mentioning that setting it very low can have positive impact on some sources.
I tried the opposite, setting it to maximum on my quick and dirty high-res, multichannel dataset and it turned out to be slightly better than default, 0.05% on average, winning on 22 of 29 samples. Still, it was 0.71% worse than flake. Taking the best result from default / --blocksize reduced the flake's advantage to 0.63%.

[DARcode]

-hhx6 rather fast?! Are you using a supercomputer?

[_m²_]

-hhx6 rather fast?! Are you using a supercomputer?

Nah. It's a matter of throughput and latency. Slow compression increases the time from getting some music to having it integrated with the library. That's latency. But for the throughput, the bottlneck is me. I don't acquire music faster than my computer compresses it. For this reason I have most of my library compressed with OptimFrog --bestnew --optimise best. I call it 'very slow', but wavpack is still rather fast in comparison.
I'm moving to wavpack because OptimFrog is not portable enough. And I find wavpack to be the most reliable portable codec around.

This post has been edited by _m²_: Feb 8 2012, 20:26