Perfect Clarity Audio Codec

This technology allows users to compress music in a format that will not sacrifice the fidelity of the original source audio recording. While most audio compression technologies such as MP3 and WMA are considered "lossy," Perfect Clarity Audio delivers audio output that is identical to the original source and supports both 16- and 24-bit audio. During the editing process, Perfect Clarity Audio files can be modified and recompressed without degradation that lossy codecs add to every generation. Test files have shown compression ratios of 2:1 and as high as 5:1 with no loss in audio quality.

Perfect Clarity Audio is currently included in Sonic Foundry's SIREN express

Download here

Seems interesting

And I'd touch a closed source, Sony backed codec why???

Actually this is a rather old codec Sony merely acquired from their purchase of SoFo. I believe it has been discussed previously on these forums.

Because you would never know if it has some feature that makes in interesting for you.

Thanks for mentioning this codec, Blue Inferno. But, indeed, it's a quite old codec. It doesn't compress very well and software support is pathetic.

It is interesting that I have software (ACID Pro 4) that supports the import and export of PCA but to encode a WAV requires me to "paint" it into their program. To decode the PCA I must also "paint" and export. I suspect this process is slightly lossy--resulting in an MD5 mismatch. Is there a standalone encoder and decoder somewhere (am I obtuse and it is this "SIREN" program)?

That "painting" doesn't affect the waveform, it's just a graphical representation of it pretty much like a spectrogram.

I would suspect the MD5 mismatch is actually being caused by ACID writing a different wave header to the decompressed wav. I suggest you use riffstrip to compare only the raw data of the original file and the decompressed one.

I did and there was a mismatch on the stripped files. I may be a little hasty, let me retry the process.

EDIT:

You are correct. I was too hasty. I had forgotten to correct ACID's default volume boost of 6 dB. Retrying the test resulted in a completely lossless process.

Well, I don't know how ACID works. When I tested PCA on SoundForge, it worked, but it was years ago, when it was still owned by SonicFoundry.

I tried the free Siren Jukebox Xpress. It is the only program I know of that plays PCA but the free version will neither encode nor decode the format. Furthermore I have seen no version of the codec yet that supports anything but 16 bit and 44.1 or 48 kHz.