Hi

My CD ripper has for compression options for wavpack: -f, nothing, -h, and -hh. I am considering adding -x6 to all of those options, transparently to the user.

But before I do that I'd like to ask if anyone knows of reasons why the -x6 option would be undesirable. I can live with the encoding speed penalty, that's only done once. For example are there any players that would have trouble with such files?

Thanks in advance

Very bad idea for -x6.. The only option I'd slip in transparently is -x1 or simply -x. This will optimise compression a bit (a lot for hi-rez) and give smart mid-side coding. Most people will want x1~3. -x4 gives some nice compression gain on very weird artificial material but is slower.. -x6 is very rarely better but much much slower.

The info on wavpack.com is good.

No one, even David, recommends x6. If your ripper doesn't have an advanced option, and you really want to default an x value, I'd recommend x1. The highest recommended value is x3, although there are some here that use x4 and x5.

But I'm sure that others have a different take on the issue.

I hope this helps.

Edit: Shadowking beat me to it.

Ok then, say I default to x3. Is there any downside to that besides encoding speed?

No.

Then that's what I'll do. Thanks!

I agree that -x6 is overkill and way to slow too be useful. I use -x4 a lot, but I agree that -x3 is about the most that you would want to force on someone. Since the user is ripping at the same time anyway they should not notice a big slowdown.

And, as was said, there is no cost associated with the -x modes. They are fully compatible with all decoders, and they actually seem to decode a little faster than the regular modes, although I've never really understood why.

BTW, I downloaded Asunder and tried it out and it works great on my system. Very nice!

I did run into something a little strange though. It seems like the compression levels don't quite match correctly. 0 and 2 seemed to give normal mode (no quality specifier) and 1 gave fast mode (instead of normal) and 3 gave high (instead of very high). You might want to check those again...

Thanks!

David

Grr that was stupid. A lousy -1 and the whoe slider is broken Thanks for noticing.