Are there any recording applications which create files with more than 8 channels? For that matter, are there any recording applications which create files with more than 2 channels?
I do a great deal of live multi-track recording. Every tool I use creates mono recordings. At most, I combine microphone pairs or stereo electronics channels into stereo files after recording. Then, when backing up, I use FLAC to compress the mono and stereo files. My recording software already organizes the files for one session into a directory, so the FLAC files live in that directory, too. One way to save space is to use the "--no-padding" option. Apart from padding, there is very little overhead in a FLAC file. A theoretical 16-channel FLAC file would not take any more space that 16 or fewer mono/stereo FLAC files, at least not if you combine related channels into stereo files. How do you know what the storage requirements would be reduced? The most savings comes from inter-channel correlation. I doubt you'll really ever have more than four channels that actually have real correction in the audio. NOTE: Adding support for more than 8 channels would increase the FLAC overhead by increasing the size of the header! Brian Willoughby Sound Consulting Begin forwarded message: Hello, 1. Would it be possible for FLAC to support more than 8 channels? 2. If (1) is not desirable because it would break compatibility or some such, then is it possible to build a local copy supporting more channels by simply increasing FLAC__MAX_CHANNELS in include/FLAC/format.h? Either of these would greatly help in reducing the storage requirements for recording sessions. Thanks again. Pascal. _______________________________________________ Flac-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev
