Quote from : http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/wer/liebchen/lpac.html

Very interesting news. Is LPAC really that good? (I am not suggesting that it isn't - just asking)

Old news:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....howtopic=17374&

Yes... "old" news... but different topic!

A small hint about this can be found even here, see C 5

Good news. Will this replace FLAC then as a lossless standard? Will it still be in a MPEG 4 conatiner file format and have a .M4A or .MP4 file extension or use something different?

Any time frame for this being "standardized" and finally approved?

Yes, MPEG-4 loseless will be part of the MPEG-4 standard, and it will be possible to mux it into MP4/M4A containers naturally.

How does the improved version compare to flac or monkey's encoding- and decoding speed and the compression rate of course?

Is it the same like version 1.41 as shown on speeks comparison page?

Well, Menno said this, but didn't provide any link to the results though.

How does error correction in LPAC, both in original and new MPEG flavors, compare with FLAC and Monkey's?

That is to say, I appreciate FLAC's ability to play through corrupted spots, and consider Monkey's inability to handle corruption a showstopper. MPEG standard-to-be or not, FLAC's error correction could still make it a better choice for true archival.

In one of the papers linked to on the MPEG-4 ALS page it says

LPAC is block-based, just like FLAC, so it should be able to act the same way.

-Eugene

I'm wondering what advantages will LPAC have over existing lossless codecs (FLAC, APE) because I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to LPAC. Anybody know?

I think the most important one is that it combines a high compression ratio (competitive with APE) to an algorithm that is usable in hardware (like FLAC).

So it combines the best of both worlds.

Now remains to Apple to add it to iTunes then the iPod.

At last lossless on iPod....

Who said useless?

Hmmm... that one to iTunes and iPod - must need the HD's to grow a bit to get listened more than one album per 'session' (150-250 megs) - same as having Sony Walkman and a lossless general Audio-CD - just the later case is more simple to organize

Still - good to hear of new standards - like this one combining FLAC's and APE's good points together and still adding some new to the stack - namely the full MPEG4 standard with container to M4A!

I'm just wondering how far can a lossless compression go in mpeg4 / audio containers, before the real limits are coming towards in coding - just like Zip, Rar and Ace are a bit competiting, who's getting best compression algorhitms for general data (year by year bettered a bit).

I suppose that 1:5 (or even 1:4)) compression could be a huge achievement (for nowadays 1:2 - 1:3 and 0.4 - 0.6++ percentually) and by that way would win for example 320 kbps MP3's, which many are still using as a 'near lossless' saving format (Maybe not knowing that VBR LC / MAIN MPEG4 M4A 192kbps sounds better with much more room to save in HDs!)

Antsa

Garf, thanks for the reply. LPAC certaintly sounds interesting. I'm going to be looking forward to seeing how it develops.

Yes ALS sounds good. I presume there aren't any patent licensing issues involved with being able to use it for an encoder/decoder without paying any patent royalties, can anyone confirm this?

BTW I wrote Tilman Liebchen asking about which file extension they planned to use and he wrote that presumably ALS will use the ALS file extension when not in an MPEG 4 container format and the standard MP4 file extension when used in an MPEG 4 container file.

Here is the quote of his reply to me:


Also why don't both dbPowerAmp and Foobar2000 support the current LPAC format? If this LPAC (current frozen version) is going to be the MPEG 4 ALS standard, and the author (Mr. Liebchen) on his web page says he will provide a tool to convert LPAC to ALS when the standard is finalized, why shouldn't the audio apps start to support LPAC now? Then we can convert from LPAC to ALS once the standard is finalized. According to the author's web site no recoding will be necessary to convert from LPAC --> ALS.

foo_lpac

Thanks for the link. Was unaware that foobar could support lpac. Didn't see any mention of lpac on the foobar2000.org site as being a supported format. Does dbPowerAMP have such a lpac converter plug-in available?

I tested LPAC when the first post of it becoming the MPEG-4 Lossless Standard and I'd have to say that I'm a bit disappointed. I don't see much size difference compared to FLAC, but the encoding time was a bit longer. It takes forever to skip through a song because the indexing support is pretty crappy.

I think I'll stick with FLAC for my archiving to DVD-R. Maybe once the final release is complete and working well, I'll change over. By that time, DVD-Rs will be cheap enough (because of Dual Layer discs knocking the prices down) that I wouldn't mind transcoding my existing FLAC collection to fewer DVD-Rs. That is, if they manage to make the size difference noticably smaller.

That is not what it says:

I guess I'll wait to use it too, until the standard comes out for MPEG 4 ALS.

It will be nice having a lossless international standard though so you know your files will playback and can be decoded for years to come...

Thanks Garf, I missed that. Yes I'll wait then and not use lpac in its current form.

any news about "MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coding" aka "MPEG-4 ALS"?