relen;139515 Wrote: > On the subject of lossless formats: they're the realtime audio > equivalent of Zip and Stuffit - what you get out is exactly, > bit-for-bit, what you put in (otherwise it wouldn't be "lossless").
Yes, that's it exactly. No one argues that a Word document obtained directly and the same one that's been extracted from a .zip archive aren't bit-for-bit identical. Yet somehow the same thing done to audio doesn't apply. Perhaps audio files are more magical? :-) > The penalty is somewhat larger files than perceptual coding produces. "Somewhat" is an understatement - most of my FLACs are in the 25-35 MB range (and I'm using maximum compression) while the equivalent MP3s are 3-5 MB. But disc space is cheap. > I am not aware of FLAC (for example) coding putting a bigger load on a > playback device than any other codec: in fact you might expect the > opposite to be true as FLAC files are not as highly compressed. Actually MP3 files aren't radically more compressed than FLAC files - the space reduction comes from -discarding- audio information entirely. I'm not sure what additional compression is done but it's possible that FLAC is actually more compressed - mathematically compressed that is, not audio compressed. Perhaps lossy formats are a little more mathematically compressed, but not radically so - you can't achieve the 80% reduction over lossless compressed through mathematical compression alone. A FLAC encoder at compression setting 8 is working quite hard to pack the bits in, it's hard to achieve 80% more. :-) So you have lossless uncompressed like WAV and AIFF, lossless compressed like FLAC and ALAC, and lossy compressed like MP3 and AAC. Lossless compressed and lossless uncompressed are bit-for-bit identical or else they wouldn't be lossless and the format would be quickly abandoned. Lossy compressed can never be bit-for-bit identical to the original because audio data has been lost in the encoding process. -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=27729 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
