Hi,

I just want to clear some things up regarding Flake (and Winamp's FLAC
encoder) since there seems to be a little confusion.  I've searched the
forum and this seems the best thread to reply to.

Here are a few things to consider.

Encoding at levels 11 and 12 generate perfectly valid FLAC files, but
they are not within the more narrowly-defined FLAC Subset format which
is recommended for hardware decoders.  Levels 11 and 12 use a
prediction order of 32 to achieve higher compression, which is higher
than the Subset limit (order 12).

I am not sure about levels 9 and 10.  When Winamp first included Flake
as their FLAC encoder, they used a non-release version SVN-r117.  At
that point, levels 9 and 10 generated the exact same types of FLAC
files as level 8, but used better prediction order search methods to
give better compression.  The current version of Flake also uses
variable block sizes, a more experimental feature, in levels 9 and 10. 
It is, strictly speaking, within the Subset format, however, it is still
a gray area as far as compatibility.  It is clearly allowed in the
specification, but the official FLAC encoder does not implement it.

Josh is correct about Flake not being tested nearly as extensively as
the official FLAC encoder, but I imagine Nullsoft has done more testing
than me.  Most of the issues that have been found in Flake have been
with how the WAVE decoder handles oddball cases, but Winamp uses a
different WAVE decoder, so there should be few (if any) issues there.

Well, I hope that clears some things up.

-Justin


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jruggle
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