Here's what's new:


[*] Better compression in the default and "high" lossless modes

[*] Full support for stdin and stdout (RIFF wav and raw audio data)

[*] Couple of minor bug fixes

http://www.wavpack.com

Also, I would really appreciate if anyone out there running NT 4.0 would give WavPack a quick test. I got a report that there was a problem (endless newlines after completion) but I couldn't reproduce it on two different NT machines that I tried.

Thanks to everyone for your support.

... and thank YOU for continuing to develop a wonderful codec! Any word on when a SHNTool module might be available? I know the stdin/stdout issue may have held this up a bit earlier, but now that it's working would you consider making one available? Many sincere thanks.

- M.

I've updated my Performance comparison of lossless audio compressors. WavPack 3.96 has 0.4% better compression on average over the 10 test albums than 3.95.

Tnx Bryant for improving WavPack.
With full support to stdin & out(compress & decompress) I
can use it with Speek's Multifrontend!

LIF

Well then, I updated the graphs too!
Wavpack's normal and high modes both had 0.24% better compression.
High mode became somewhat slower though.

Added john33's compile for shorten, indeed faster than the shnutils version.
Links: here or here

To transcode to WavPack you need the latest version of Multi frontend (0.91 beta). Older versions give a warning that WavPack doesn't have stdin and therefore cannot be used for transcoding to it.

M:
I downloaded the Windows version of SHNtool and it's definitely a pretty cool program. However, it seems like it's primarily (or at least originally) a Linux program and all the lossless codecs supported (flac, ape, and shn) are all available in both Windows and Linux binaries. I also downloaded the source and it looks like it's based on the Linux development environment, which makes it pretty difficult for me to work with.

I am not sure whether Jason would be interested in working on support for a [currently] Windows-only codec, but I will shoot him an e-mail. It would be a huge learning curve for me to do alone, but if he was interested I'm sure we could knock it out together pretty quickly.

Sorry I don't have a better answer than that.

Speek and Hans:
Thanks for updating your comparisons so fast! If only I could get improved versions out that quickly... B)

BTW, no NT users out there...?

Thank you! We can hope... and since SHNTool support is module-based, he'll probably go along with it. BTW, does the word "currently" in your post imply that you are working on ports of WavPack?

For anyone not already familiar with SHNTool (this is a new URL and e-mail address for the software; the ones I've posted before are out-of-date), the program is currently testing 1.2.0-rc1. Here's what's new:

version 1.2.0 (2002-09-??)
+ added support for aiff, flac and ape file formats; dropped kexis support
(aiff format supports only AIFF and uncompressed AIFF-C, not compressed
AIFF-C)
+ added new mode 'conv' (converts files from one format to another)
+ improved functionality in cmp mode (new -s, -l and -f options)
+ join mode can now write to stdout (only with 'wav' output format)
+ shntool now waits for child processes (prevents shorten 3.4/md5sum race
condition)
+ fixed bug in join mode that caused output file to have incorrect data size
when the data was not sector-aligned, and -nopad was specified
+ some debugging output now shown if SHNTOOL_DEBUG environment variable
is set (currently limited to the status of child processes - useful if shntool is
hanging)

- M.

I am not working on any ports currently, but I am getting the source code into a state where someone else should be able to do this fairly quickly.