Why’s FLAC ‘the’ lossless codec? Is it future-proof(able)? Comparisons, [TOS #6: was “Future proof lossless audio/codec” in General Audio] Options

[eahm]

I am trying to understand why is FLAC standardizing in the lossless world? Reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of...chnical_details isn't True Audio more future proof? All these channels and huge range, isn't it the "best" option for the next "100 years"?

If one day everyone will start using FLAC, will there be a way to expand the number of channels available? For expample the "new new" 12.1 Surround System or whatever they will come up with.

Just some thoughts, don't want to get anyone upset, I use FLAC and I love it.

Thanks.

This post has been edited by eahm: Jun 23 2012, 18:03

[pdq]

I doubt that any lossless encoder would do well with 24 bits. Those 8 extra bits are essentially uncompressable, uncorrelated noise.

[Porcus]

I doubt that any lossless encoder would do well with 24 bits. Those 8 extra bits are essentially uncompressable, uncorrelated noise.

I did a test after applying a de-emphasis EQ filter and writing the output to 24-bits. (Which means, there wasn't noise in those 8 extra bits until the EQ moved the original noise in there, so I suppose that filling up with noise from the beginning, would not benefit the figures?) Then I took the FLAC file, reduced to 16 (without dithering) and measured the ratio.

With FLAC -8, the 16 bits filesize was only 52.1% of the size of the 24-bit file. Those extra 8 bits were fairly expensive.

I didn't compute the corresponding ratios for other codecs, but I converted the 24-bit file to other formats in order to see if there was any that would perform 'by eyeballing' unexpectedly better or worse. Nope:

7 761 846 272 bytes - flac -8
7 672 954 880 bytes - WavPack high, x5
7 629 369 344 bytes - Monkey's extrahigh
7 582 380 032 bytes - TAK -p4
7 533 199 360 bytes - ofr extranew

The respective percentage improvements over flac -8:
1,1 %
1,7 %
2,3 %
2,9 %

Probably a bit less than what one would expect for 16-bit files, which is natural from the hunch that the least-significant bits are more like white noise, which is incompressible regardless of codec and will push results towards equality.


(Test corpus ... WTF did I really intend to write? Anyway, the filesizes are easy to read.)