Hi,
I've tried to find info about unofficial 32bit float support in FLAC, and found
several conversations.
Most of them were talking about a 24bit limit, but from the manual I guess that
this limitation is gone, as it supports up to 32bit integer.
So my question is, what would be the best way, or what is a common way to
FLAC-encode floating point audio?
The first idea is obvious, we have a 32bit float, FLAC supports 32bit integer,
and it's lossless. So I'd just make it encode 32bit float, it's lossless
afterall.
2 problems, first I would suspect it wouldn't encode very well, since the data
wouldn't be "audio" anymore, right? It would be like trying to FLAC-encode
random data.
So I tried FLACing white noise, and comp ratio was pretty poor, confirming
this. Interestingly, it still did a better job than ZIP!
The second problem would be that no other tool would read them correctly anyway.
The second idea is to truncate & use it as a lossy encoder, which can be
"audibly lossless" anyway. But what's a common practice here?
I would be tempted to leave 1 bit of headroom above 0dB, or maybe 2 bits.
Normalizing before encoding could be an option, but the gain would then have to
be inserted in a tag.
& finally, what bit depth? 24? 25, 26? 32?
I know there's no right answer, just asking if there are common practices.
Thanks.
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