Format War: Your Favorite Lossless Format

Originally Posted by Eleo

WavPack does everything FLAC does and more. The only drawback is that it's not supported on many devices.

Rockbox supports FLAC and Wavpack. Rockbox is alternative firmware for a number of portable audio players. I got it on my iRiver H140 and it's awesome.

They wanted to include the Monkey's Audio format but they stumbled on these problems:

Quote:

Problem: The Monkey's Audio license is not open source compatible, since you are not allowed to use it without express written permission from the author. Discussions have been held about relicensing under LGPL, but no progress since may '04. -- BjornStenberg

The codec is heavily x86-centric with lots of x86 assembly to speed up parts of the code - particularly a neural network. Unless it's very heavily optimized for 68K, it won't run real-time. And some compression modes (Extra high, Insane) probably won't run no matter how much you optimize it - RobertoAmorim

That's a good reason not to like Monkey's Audio, i'd say.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Which Flac encoder from that comparison is that? "Flac - CVS" or "Flac - Garf"?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I guess the link to the mp3 should be: smc.sq7.org/assorted/12.%20Ice%20Ridge%20of%20Noltia.mp3

I don't know what happened to that mp3 but the soundstage is much narrower than the ogg. It's encoded with Fhg instead of LAME. Although the fhg enocder is worse than lame, I don't believe the Fhg encoder gives such bad mp3s as this one. So i think the source wav was just not the same.

If you encode your wav with Fhg or lame @160cbr the soundquality will be much better and much closer to that ogg.


But still VBR is better than CBR, although the difference is not as big as your example.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.