Yet another proprietary lossless codec anyone?
It was in this thread I first heard about RealAudio's lossless codec. The very little information I found about it was this single page on real.com. Has anybody here ever given it a try? Any idea how long RealAudio lossless has been around? Pros/cons compared to other lossless codecs?

I have this really funny feeling that it isn't lossless on all songs, as the bitrate is a constant 705kb/s. I don't feel like doing a test right now, just coming from the fact that most lossless codecs need about 850-1000kb/s average for the music I encode with them.

I don't think that is the constant bitrate. I think Real doesn't even calculate the bitrate they display, they just display 705 because it's a generic goal of lossless codecs (CDDA/2)

A test can be done easily: encode some songs, decode them, compare. Then you can be fairly sure the codec is lossless or not.

And yes, this is yet another proprietary lossless codec.

RealAudio Lossless is of course lossless If it shows 705 kbps anywhere this is just an approximation of expected average, and may not even be that accurate. When I tested its compression performance on the clips from the previous listening test, it fell right inbetween Monkey's and FLAC for almost all the clips, if not all.

Meh, I may have jumped the gun a bit, and for that I apologize. Usually, you see an average bitrate there instead of one said bitrate. I'll go and look into it and see how big it is on a file that took like 1000kb/s on WML.

Here's the thing, it seems to take up MORE space on lossless RealAudio.

WML- 25.1 MB (26,334,209 bytes) (the file averaged 1041kb/sec)
RAL- 25.3 MB (26,569,757 bytes)

Could someone post a short sample of RA lossless so I can take a look at the file format, please? (1 second long is fine for me). Or point me to a free encoder

The free version of Real Player 10 encodes from CD to RA lossless.

And the free command line encoder from helixcommunity.org also does the same.

Oh, so it does
That's what I get for reading the linked page and not trying the free version myself

So this commandline encoder also converts only from CD to Real lossless, or did you mean from wav file?

Otherwise, one either needs to buy RealPlayer Plus, or get the free 14-day "RadioPass" that includes giving a credit card number, right?

I want to add Real Lossless to my comparison page...

It should be pretty easy to find the free player from http://www.real.com these days, and it does not require any credit card to install and run. Follow the download link on the frontpage. Then 1/3 of the next page is the Free Player, with a Bold Blue link to download. Finally, I have written this information post about making it well behaved.

Alternatively, Helix Producer 10 Gold is available from the Helix Binaries page. This requires a Helix account, and there are plenty of free 3rd party GUI front-ends, all listed the RealVideo info thread, mostly video related helper tools though.

And with the cmd line producer, batch encoding lossless is very easy even without any GUI helper programs. Just unzip producer in its own folder, goto this folder, and type:

producer -i <folder_w_wav_files> -ad "audiences\Lossless Audio.rpad"

You can set up foobar2000 CLI encoder with this command, to fully automate the process of batch converting audio files.

Karl, yesterday I installed the "Free Player". Installation went troublefree. In the about box it's RealPlayer™ (Plus), Version 10.0, Helix powered, build 6.0.12.857.

When I right-click on a wav file in the library, choose "convert media format", a box pops up about requiring a premium upgrade.

To convert media, you need premium.

To rip from CD, the free version is enough.

Quoting me:

That's too bad then, to rip and compress simultaneously would not give representative results of course. Karl's reply gave me the idea wav->lossless is supposed to work in the free version.

It works - in the free version of Real Producer

https://helixcommunity.org/beula/download/

unfortunately I am not the one to decide which options are free or not, and you are right "Convert Media" is a Plus option.. Rip to RA Lossless and AAC are both free.

Like Roberto says, you can use Helix Producer cmd line to batch convert WAV files for free. It's easy to automate, the CLI encoder in foobar is one example -- works great for cmd line producer.

Downloaded helix producer, and encoded an album with the commandline above.
Out came a .rmvb file. It took about 5 seconds to load in RealPlayer, then it plays, shows it's a 706 kbps lossless file, ...but it stays quiet!
Well i'll figure out eventually what is wrong (and it's not the volume slider), thanks for the help so far.

HansHeijden: I am afraid I do not know what the problem could be, but there are number of steps you can take to try to figure it out.

0) Did your RealPlayer auto-update with a couple of DLLs to play back RA Lossless?
1) is there sound when you play any other file in RealPlayer 10? (like an MP3, or AAC)
2) can you try to convert one or more of your WAV files to another format with Producer, for instance AAC (with "150k LAN.rpad" audience)? Is there sound?

That should isolate the problem to the player or Producer

Karl,

0) Yes, 2 auto-updates came at first playback of the lossless rmvb, one had "SDK" in the name.
1) Yes, wav's and mp3's play fine.
2) Yes, the 150k LAN audience plays fine.

First I thought the album-sized file might be too big, but also a 5 min song doesn't play.
The rmvb of the album has a compression of 56,7%, that's more than 1% better than Apple lossless. So at least the file size appears correct.

In version information, RealAudioLossless 10.0.0.225 is listed.

Didn't kwew Real also had a lossless audio format.
Just added it to my test, its between WMA Lossless and LPAC:

http://studwww.ugent.be/~jdebock/lossless_...ession_test.htm

So, what exactly is the point of *another* proprietary lossless format? FLAC is completely open, works well, and is supported in a lot of hardware and software. WavPack is also completely open and getting better support all the time.

Is it intended for use in online sales with drm? I don't get that either. The whole point of lossless is that it's future proof and archival quality. There's no way I'm going to archive data in a format I very well might not be able to read because the tools don't work in 10 years or the DRM bites me by mistake.

What am I missing?

kuniklo: That Real wants a piece of the lossless audio cake?

The point is simply that Real users now can encode some lossless tunes. FLAC and WavPack are open, yes, but that isn't the same as being a ISO standard such as mp3. There is actually no standardized lossless format yet which is why there are so many proprietary/open source codecs out there.

RealAudio Lossless was developed as a result of research and experiments related to the MPEG-4 Lossless audio coding standard (or soon to be). RealNetworks made significant contributions to this. Now, whether or not yet another lossless format is needed, that's a good question

...so REAL somehow made significant contributions to LPAC (ok, MPEG4 lossless, whatever) and then switched gears to create another lossless format?

why do either? what's the point?


later

Probably in order to offer to their customers a lossless format (MPEG-4 lossless is not finalized yet AFAIK). Apple did apparently the same with ALAC. As a consequence, people using Real products have the possibility to encode in a lossless format since 2004, and they don't have to wait to the finalisation of MPEG-4 lossless format (2006).

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but there are some samples here.