On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Josh Coalson<[email protected]> wrote: > it's unlikely flac will ever support floating-point samples natively. the > main application for it is audio engineering, which demands easy editing and > very high speed for both encoding and decoding above everything else.
thats not why floating point is used. the highest current feasible bit resolution for digital audio samples is 24 bits. most converters don't even fully provide that. 32 bit floating bit allows bit-for-bit storage of all 24 bits of the original sample as the mantissa, along with more bits available in the exponent. this provides astronomical "headroom" for use when summing multiple samples. if you only use 24 bits and add two values very close to the maximum 24 bit value, you will overflow. even if you use 32 bits, its not imposible to construct workflow scenarios where you would overflow. if you do this in float format, you lose a little precision in the answer, but you cannot overflow. this is why floating point is used. > flac is designed as a consumer audio format. it trades ease of editing for a > featureful, robust transport layer more suited for playback, and encoding > speed for more compression and faster decompression. flac seems more popular at present among high end audiophiles than mere consumers. its very regrettable that it doesn't support floating point natively. many of our users (http://ardour.org/) have asked about using FLAC as an option for recording format, but we have to explain that its not viable because of the lack of floating point support. and yes, that is audio engineering :) --p _______________________________________________ Flac-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev
