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Full Version: Ape versus Flac compression size?
Hydrogenaudio Forums > Lossless Audio Compression > Lossless / Other Codecs
Fryguy
Well I just converted an album (simon and garfunkel greatest hits if you care) from ape to flac using foobar (the convert menu).

I used flac level 8.

The albumsize of the ape version was 211mb, flac was 226mb.

I was under the impression that flac was in general superior to monkey?
dreamliner77
FLAC is considered "superior" for some other reasons than just file size.
Duble0Syx
QUOTE (Fryguy @ Apr 8 2006, 09:28 PM) *
I was under the impression that flac was in general superior to monkey?

FLAC has lots of advantages over ape. Decoding is super fast for one thing. It also really nice on the CPU when playing. There are also several pieces of hardware supporting flac. If I recall, MAC also has some odd licensing for the source code, whereas FLAC is fully open sourced, or something like that. Multiplatform support for FLAC is easier and better than for MAC. Basically the only advantage of MAC over FLAC is the compression ratio. Speed of encoding/decoding and overall support and functionality falls short of FLAC. If size is your only concern something like LA or OptimFrog do more than MAC for compression if my brain isn't malfunctioning. biggrin.gif

EDIT: by the way, WavPack, IMO falls right in middle. Can encode/decode very fast. Decoding is a bit slower than FLAC, but compression is a bit better. Encodes much faster than MAC, even on High mode, although file size is still a bit larger. CPU useage is quite low on playback as well, comperable to flac.
shadowking
Nope. MA is one of the most efficient compression machine out there. Compression is very good and decompression is also very competitive (read 'fast' in wiki comparison).

The CPU usage is critical if you want to use a DAP or a Commodore 64, but on a modern PC ? - C'mon.
sld
It matters if you're in a hurry to transcode files for use on a DAP in a severely limited timeframe.
boombaard
QUOTE (sld @ Apr 9 2006, 11:24 AM) *
It matters if you're in a hurry to transcode files for use on a DAP in a severely limited timeframe.


so it matters if you're too lazy to plan ahead? tongue.gif
anyway, dubleOsyx: LA/OFR are far less interesting than MAC in that they're use about 10-15x more cpu just to decode (the ~1 to 2.5x encoding/decoding speeds), on the highest compression levels.. while MAC -c4000 at least still is playable while in the background.. compression isn't everything, it just counts for a whole lot when you've got a sizeable collection ;-) (that i also want to be able to play songs back from)
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