On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Brian Willoughby<[email protected]> wrote: > When the ADC source and the DAC destination are both limited to 24- > bit fixed point integers, it makes absolutely no sense to store > recordings or final mixes in 32-bit floating point representation. > The headroom you speak of is completely unavailable when storing the > output of an ADC into a file. Likewise, headroom is wasted when > playing back a fully mastered piece of audio to a 24-bit DAC. > Headroom is only an issue when you want to work on the audio and > change it, which is something that 99% of audio consumers do not > bother with or even understand.
You're assuming that you never store intermediate mixes that may actually have overflowed a 24 or 32 bit representation. I would agree that this might not be best practice, but its actually not as un-useful as it might at first appear. > inappropriate. It would be quite interesting if someone were to > create a lossless format which can handle 32-bit float, but I don't > believe it has been done yet. wavepak (pack?) does. In most respects, this would mostly be > a tradeoff between storage space and processing power, since > processing a compressed file is usually too expensive for most DAW > software, and so they always uncompress source files before using > their data. Thus, even a space-saving format like FLAC would be > pointless for Ardour, since you'd still need to take up disk space > for an uncompressed copy of the data (like Ableton Live, which > supports FLAC). its always a tradeoff between CPU cycles and disk space. you don't need an uncompressed copy if you're prepared to burn the CPU cycles. i'm not an advocate for Ardour using FLAC as a native format. i just don't like telling users "it can't be done". _______________________________________________ Flac-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev
