What are some lossless audio compressions?

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

So far I've only really heard of mp3, ATRAC and others that are lossy (very
lossy).

Thanks for the help.

Tom P.

"Henry Padilla"

What are some lossless audio compressions?


** No such animal.





............. Phil

Huh?

Sure there are. I'm hardly knowledgeable about them, but even I've
heard of FLAC, which stands for "Free Lossless Audio Compression". Do a
Google search and you'll find out more. From the very little I've read
I learned that you can achieve compression ratios of about 2:1 without
any loss.

Someone else please chime in with more up-to-date and in-depth
comments, because I'm sure there are others...

Thanks,

Dean

Phil Allison wrote:
"Henry Padilla"

What are some lossless audio compressions?


** No such animal.





............ Phil

drichard wrote:
Sure there are. I'm hardly knowledgeable about them, but even I've
heard of FLAC, which stands for "Free Lossless Audio Compression".

Quite right. I've used it too. The actual amount of compression cannot
be guaranteed but it does average about 50% on 16/44.1 stereo WAV files.

There may be others but it's unlikely that they'll be anything but
marginally better and as you say the FLAC spec is open and the software
is free so not much point in looking much further.

I use it occasionally for achiving stuff. I can easily get the audio
contents of a CD plus related documentation all on to one CDR if the
audio is FLAC compressed.

Conventional compression programs like ZIP are very bad at compressing
audio data because they are optimized for the wrong kinds of redundancy.

Anahata

"Henry Padilla" writes:

What are some lossless audio compressions?

MLP - Meridian Lossless Packing.
--
Randy Yates
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications
Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
, 919-472-1124

You can also try out Monkey Audio Lossless compression. I've used it
before. It works well, and you can even play the compressed file as if
it were uncompressed. There is a plugin for winamp I believe. Anyhow,
The compression is about the same as FLAC (i.e. 2:1). I don't know
much abuot FLAC, but I've used Monkey Audio and I think the ability to
play the compressed files is a big bonus.

www.monkeysaudio.com

"Phil Allison" wrote in message
...

"Henry Padilla" wrote

What are some lossless audio compressions?

These would be systems that significantly decrease
long-term data storage requirements, while reproducing a
bit-perfect form of the original signal.

** No such animal.

...."no such animal" as:

AudioZip
FLAC
MLP
Monkey
LPAC
Shorten
MUSICompress/WaveZIP
WaveArc
Pegasus SPS (ELS-Ultra)
RKAU
Sonarc
WavPack...

"Phil Allison" wrote in news:3f0tj3F5es9sU1
@individual.net:


"Henry Padilla"

What are some lossless audio compressions?


** No such animal.





............ Phil





Steinberg's Wavelab has a proprietary lossless compression(OSQ).

In article writes:

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?


--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Henry Padilla wrote:
What are some lossless audio compressions?

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

So far I've only really heard of mp3, ATRAC and others that are lossy (very
lossy).

Thanks for the help.

Tom P.



FLAC is good enough for Doug Oade, it's good enough for me.

Jonny Durango

"Arny Krueger"
"Phil Allison"
"Henry Padilla" wrote

What are some lossless audio compressions?

These would be systems that significantly decrease
long-term data storage requirements, while reproducing a
bit-perfect form of the original signal.

** No such animal.

..."no such animal" as:

AudioZip
FLAC
MLP
Monkey
LPAC
Shorten
MUSICompress/WaveZIP
WaveArc
Pegasus SPS (ELS-Ultra)
RKAU
Sonarc
WavPack...



** What does listing names prove ??

Just what a jerk-off Arny is again ??




............. Phil

"Henry Padilla" wrote in message
...
What are some lossless audio compressions?

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

So far I've only really heard of mp3, ATRAC and others that are lossy
(very lossy).


Sony apps have their own lossless *data* compression format for audio - PCA
"Perfect Clarity Audio".

Amnd there used to be WaveZip.

geoff

Mike Rivers wrote:

In article writes:

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?

A digital packrat ?

Graham

"Pooh Bear" wrote in message
...

Mike Rivers wrote:

In article
writes:

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?

A digital packrat ?

Graham


I think he's saying he doesn't need it in an immediately playable format.

According to the comparison table at the monkey audio site, they can
have the best compression ration. Anyone confirm this?

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/comparison_compression.html

Quite intrigued by this as I often record bass lines for a friend and
hate sending huge wav files over a 25k uplink!

Mike Rivers wrote:
In article writes:


I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.


What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?

I took "I don't need to play it" to mean that it would be OK if the
format required him to uncompress before playing, i.e. if it did
not support streaming straight from the file directly (through a
plug-in for some audio program).

- Logan

Anahata wrote:
drichard wrote:

Sure there are. I'm hardly knowledgeable about them, but even I've
heard of FLAC, which stands for "Free Lossless Audio Compression".

Quite right. I've used it too. The actual amount of compression cannot
be guaranteed but it does average about 50% on 16/44.1 stereo WAV files.

As it turns out, one of the properties of any kind of lossless compression
(not just audio) is that the ratio can never be guaranteed for all
possible inputs.

If it could be guaranteed, then you could re-run the compression
algorithm on its output over and over again until you got any file
down as small as you wanted it. Getting a bigger hard disk would
never be necessary again, as you could always just compress the
files you have further and further if you were running low on space.
Also, there would be no limit to the amount of audio you could fit
on a CD-R, for instance.

On the other hand, if you have lossy compression, then you can always
design your algorithm to get a guaranteed ratio. If the ratio starts
getting too bad, just sacrifice quality. (At the very worst, all you
have to do is start chopping down the sample rate, although there are
probably better ways.)

Anyway, the key with lossless algorithms is to invent an algorithm
that is likely to get a good ratio with the type of inputs people
tend to throw at it. Then, in a way, you get around the mathematical
property that a lossless compression algorithm must actually sometimes
expand instead of compress.

- Logan

StraightEight wrote:
According to the comparison table at the monkey audio site, they can
have the best compression ration. Anyone confirm this?

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/comparison_compression.html

I've seen tabulated results for FLAC for several samples of different
types of music and they vary quite a lot. I suspect that different
compression algorithms do best on different samples, so monkey audio may
have been carefully selective in their listing - but as you can see
there's very little difference between any of them (except zip which is
looking for all the wrong kinds of redundancy in the data and hence
fails miserably)

Quite intrigued by this as I often record bass lines for a friend and
hate sending huge wav files over a 25k uplink!

Unless it's for absolutely no-compromise top quality commercial
recording, you'd do better with a high bit rate MP3 or Ogg Vorbis.
Especially for bass lines - most of the compromise in quality for
perceptual encoders is at the high end of the spectrum where the data
rates are necessarily higher; also a single line instrument has a
spectrum that's very easy to encode accurately. Try it with various ogg
quality settings or mp3 bit rates. My guess is you'll get much smaller
files that won't sound any different.

Anahata

On Thu, 19 May 2005 16:23:17 +1200, Geoff Wood
wrote:

"Henry Padilla" wrote in message
...
What are some lossless audio compressions?

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

So far I've only really heard of mp3, ATRAC and others that are lossy
(very lossy).


Sony apps have their own lossless *data* compression format for audio - PCA
"Perfect Clarity Audio".

Amnd there used to be WaveZip.

geoff


You can also use .rar, .zip, .gzip, .bzip or anything else you might
wish.

Things like Monkey Audio are optimized to have good speed performance
with audio data to minimize CPU load for realtime playback.

If you don't need to compand data realtime, you can use most anything.

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1116429562k@trad...

In article
writes:

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?

The point is I have over 1100 CD's worth of music and my brother has over
2000. Some of them are getting old and I've lost two or three to pitting
already. It's making me nervous.

I want to store the music as clean as I can then I can translate it into
whatever format I feel is good for listening later.
That's what I meant by "I don't need to play the music" I meant "I don't
need to play it NOW".

Tom P.

On 19 May 2005, Charles Krug wrote in
:

You can also use .rar, .zip, .gzip, .bzip or anything else you
might wish.

ZIP does a very poor job of compressing wav files. FLAC and APE are
much more efficient. Here's a quick comparison I just did (most of the
compressors have more extreme settings that will save you a few extra
bytes):

44,410,508 test.wav
40,787,357 test.zip
29,019,094 test.rar
27,213,759 test.flac
26,308,116 test.ape

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...

"Phil Allison" wrote in message
...

"Henry Padilla" wrote

What are some lossless audio compressions?

These would be systems that significantly decrease
long-term data storage requirements, while reproducing a
bit-perfect form of the original signal.

** No such animal.

..."no such animal" as:

AudioZip
FLAC
MLP
Monkey
LPAC
Shorten
MUSICompress/WaveZIP
WaveArc
Pegasus SPS (ELS-Ultra)
RKAU
Sonarc
WavPack...

Thanks everybody, I'll give these a try and report back some findings (for
those that care).

Tom P.

Charles Krug wrote:
You can also use .rar, .zip, .gzip, .bzip or anything else you might
wish.

You can , but they don't work well.

Things like Monkey Audio are optimized to have good speed performance
with audio data

No (well maybe that as well, but...) they're optimized for better audio
compression performance.

ZIP, RAR etc. are based on the assumption that certain sequences of
consecutive byte values tend to occur frequently in data. It's obvious
how that's true for text where words and word fragments recur all over
the place, but it happens a lot for executable code and many kinds of
binary data too, where certain 16 bit and 32 bit data values, strings
or instruction sequences crop much more frequently than they would in
random data.

None of this applies to audio, but audio does contain other kinds of
redundancy. I haven't strudied the subject but I'm sure that FLAC,
Monkey etc. need to know about the data size and format of an audio file
(16/32 bits, how many channels etc) and I'd expect that much of the time
the difference between consecutive sample values is quite small, so
encoding the differences with a variable-length encoding can take
advantage of that.

That's why typical 16 bit WAV files only reduce to about 90% using ZIP,
but more like 55% using FLAC etc.

Anahata

The point is I have over 1100 CD's worth of music and my brother has over
2000. Some of them are getting old and I've lost two or three to pitting
already. It's making me nervous.

I want to store the music as clean as I can then I can translate it into
whatever format I feel is good for listening later.
That's what I meant by "I don't need to play the music" I meant "I don't
need to play it NOW".


Also consider the longevity of the compression tool. Ten years from now will
you be able to get decompressors for some of these tools? Zip might not
compress so well, but it'll be around forever.

-John O

In article kSXie.7149$796.6862@attbi_s21 writes:

I think he's saying he doesn't need it in an immediately playable format.

If it's not in an immediately playable format, how likely is it that
it will be in a playable format some time in the future?



--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Pooh Bear writes:

Mike Rivers wrote:

In article writes:

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?

A digital packrat ?

WOM - write-only memory.
--
Randy Yates
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications
Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
, 919-472-1124

"Henry Padilla" writes:

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1116429562k@trad...

In article
writes:

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?

The point is I have over 1100 CD's worth of music and my brother has over
2000. Some of them are getting old and I've lost two or three to pitting
already. It's making me nervous.

I want to store the music as clean as I can then I can translate it into
whatever format I feel is good for listening later.
That's what I meant by "I don't need to play the music" I meant "I don't
need to play it NOW".

I still want to know how you met that perfect knat...
--
Randy Yates
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications
Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
, 919-472-1124

"Randy Yates" wrote in message
...
"Henry Padilla" writes:

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1116429562k@trad...

In article
writes:

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard
drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?

The point is I have over 1100 CD's worth of music and my brother has over
2000. Some of them are getting old and I've lost two or three to pitting
already. It's making me nervous.

I want to store the music as clean as I can then I can translate it into
whatever format I feel is good for listening later.
That's what I meant by "I don't need to play the music" I meant "I don't
need to play it NOW".

I still want to know how you met that perfect knat...


Umm.... What?

Tom P.

"Henry Padilla" writes:

"Randy Yates" wrote in message
...
"Henry Padilla" writes:

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1116429562k@trad...

In article
writes:

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard
drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?

The point is I have over 1100 CD's worth of music and my brother has over
2000. Some of them are getting old and I've lost two or three to pitting
already. It's making me nervous.

I want to store the music as clean as I can then I can translate it into
whatever format I feel is good for listening later.
That's what I meant by "I don't need to play the music" I meant "I don't
need to play it NOW".

I still want to know how you met that perfect knat...


Umm.... What?

First movement of last song on Kansas' Leftoverture.
--
Randy Yates
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications
Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
, 919-472-1124

I still want to know how you met that perfect knat...


Umm.... What?

First movement of last song on Kansas' Leftoverture.

"Father Padilla Meets the Perfect Gnat"

-John O

Randy Yates wrote:

Pooh Bear writes:

Mike Rivers wrote:

In article writes:

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store it?

A digital packrat ?

WOM - write-only memory.

Decades ago one of the major US semi manufacturers dreamt up a spoof WOM IC data sheet !

Graham

I don't need to play the music but I do need to store it on hard
drive.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to play it, why store
it?

A digital packrat ?

WOM - write-only memory.

Decades ago one of the major US semi manufacturers dreamt up a spoof WOM
IC data sheet !

That sheet made it into their data books, or so the legend goes.

http://www.ganssle.com/misc/wom.html

-John O

"Henry Padilla" wrote in message news:Gh0je.2719

I want to store the music as clean as I can then I can translate it into
whatever format I feel is good for listening later.
That's what I meant by "I don't need to play the music" I meant "I don't
need to play it NOW".

Your old CDs will likely last longer than any hard drive.

geoff

In article writes:

The point is I have over 1100 CD's worth of music and my brother has over
2000. Some of them are getting old and I've lost two or three to pitting
already. It's making me nervous.

I want to store the music as clean as I can then I can translate it into
whatever format I feel is good for listening later.
That's what I meant by "I don't need to play the music" I meant "I don't
need to play it NOW".

That's a lot of transferring, both to an intermediate medium and to
the medium you'll eventually use for playback. Perhaps you should just
not get so nervous. Three bad disks out of 3200 is unfortunate, but
not a heartbreaker. Put out a call for replacements.

With hard disks as cheap as they are today, if you really want to go
through with this project (and you realize that if you don't do it
completely, you haven't done it) I'd recommend that you bag the
compression and "rip" the CDs as 16-bit WAV files. It will save you
considerable time and will at worst double the amount of disk space
you'll need.

In order to really save space, you'll need to use some heavy duty
lossy compression, but take the hit in sound quality. Frankly,
though, I don't think you realize the magnitude of the task of
transferring 3000 CDs on alternate media, and then actually finding
what you're looking for once they're transferred.

--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

On Thu, 19 May 2005 20:30:36 GMT, "John O"
wrote:

A digital packrat ?

WOM - write-only memory.

Decades ago one of the major US semi manufacturers dreamt up a spoof WOM
IC data sheet !

That sheet made it into their data books, or so the legend goes.

http://www.ganssle.com/misc/wom.html

I've seen that link a few times in recent years, but there must
have been a similar data sheet if not another page of that one, as I
distinctly remember a graph not on either of those pages, called the
"Female Follower Response" that showed a curve that, while perhaps not
mathematically possible, showed a recognizable outline. I saw this
circa 1978-1980. Does anyone know of any other such data sheets? That
one is from Signetics, the one I'm thinking of may have been from
National Semiconductor.


-John O


-----
http://mindspring.com/~benbradley

Mike Rivers wrote:

In article writes:

The point is I have over 1100 CD's worth of music and my brother has over
2000. Some of them are getting old and I've lost two or three to pitting
already. It's making me nervous.

I want to store the music as clean as I can then I can translate it into
whatever format I feel is good for listening later.
That's what I meant by "I don't need to play the music" I meant "I don't
need to play it NOW".

That's a lot of transferring, both to an intermediate medium and to
the medium you'll eventually use for playback. Perhaps you should just
not get so nervous. Three bad disks out of 3200 is unfortunate, but
not a heartbreaker. Put out a call for replacements.

With hard disks as cheap as they are today, if you really want to go
through with this project (and you realize that if you don't do it
completely, you haven't done it) I'd recommend that you bag the
compression and "rip" the CDs as 16-bit WAV files. It will save you
considerable time and will at worst double the amount of disk space
you'll need.

In order to really save space, you'll need to use some heavy duty
lossy compression, but take the hit in sound quality. Frankly,
though, I don't think you realize the magnitude of the task of
transferring 3000 CDs on alternate media, and then actually finding
what you're looking for once they're transferred.

Hmmmm. Approx 1.8 terabytes of data uncompressed.

That should be fun !

How many months free do you have to do this ?

Graham

Anahata wrote:
StraightEight wrote:

Quite intrigued by this as I often record bass lines for a friend and
hate sending huge wav files over a 25k uplink!

Unless it's for absolutely no-compromise top quality commercial
recording, you'd do better with a high bit rate MP3 or Ogg Vorbis.
Especially for bass lines - most of the compromise in quality for
perceptual encoders is at the high end of the spectrum where the data
rates are necessarily higher;

On the other hand, precisely because there is much less high-frequency
information, it might be a much easier task for a lossless encoder to
achieve much better compression ratios than it would on normal music.

So, while the loss with a lossy encoder would probably not be too bad
(the normal bad feature of lossy encoders), the bad compression ratio
of a lossless encoder (the normal bad feature of lossless encoders)
might not be as bad as normal either.

Just out of curiosity, has anyone tried encoding a bare bass line with
a lossless encoder? If so, how does the compression ratio compare to
when you compress music with more high frequency content?

- Logan

Mike Rivers wrote:
In article kSXie.7149$796.6862@attbi_s21 writes:


I think he's saying he doesn't need it in an immediately playable format.


If it's not in an immediately playable format, how likely is it that
it will be in a playable format some time in the future?

Perhaps "immediately playable format" means "format that you can start
playing before you've finished decoding", i.e. "format that you can
stream".

- Logan

On Fri, 20 May 2005 03:28:25 GMT, Logan Shaw
wrote:

On the other hand, precisely because there is much less high-frequency
information, it might be a much easier task for a lossless encoder to
achieve much better compression ratios than it would on normal music.

I'm not really convinced by the theoretical argument. Electric bass
amplifier/speakers usually have very nasty little tweeters included.

The nastiness alone has just *got* to be significant.

But in the mix... well...

Chris Hornbeck
"They're in *everybody's* eggs."

John O wrote:
Also consider the longevity of the compression tool. Ten years from now will
you be able to get decompressors for some of these tools?

For any kind of backup medium: Archive the reader with the data. And be
prepared to recopy/reformat to new media on a regular basis, to guard
against "bit decay" (both aging of the actual medium, and obsolescence
of the technology.)

The nice thing about lossless compression is that you can move to a
different lossless compression later without ahem/ losing anything.