[clug] Free Lossless Audio Codec

[David]

Hi all,
I have been using flac for a few years now to backup my CD collection.
To give you a real world example of the compression, I wrote a little
program to calculate some statistics, the results are:

albums: 334
uncompressed bytes: 181292672736
compressed bytes: 117164817673
best: 0.439121(Kyuss - And the Circus Leaves Town.flac)
worst: 0.768185(Green Day - Insomniac.flac)
avg comp: 0.646274

(The uncompressed size is an approximation based on no. of samples *
bits per sample) actual uncompressed size may be a bit larger due to wav
headers etc)

Average compression ratio is around 0.65, not quite as good as 2:1, but
still saves me >60GB as you can see.

I flac my cd's to a single file per cd, with the cd toc (cuesheet)
embedded in the file as a metadata block(storing the cuesheet in
metadata is a standard feature of the reference flac encoder). To play
the files, I use a basic GTK virtual cd-player application which I wrote
myself, however I plan to add 'multiple tracks per file' support for
flac files into gstreamer when I get time, then rhythmbox, the goal is
to be able to import my flac CD files into RB, and have them show up as
multiple individual tracks, just as though they were individual MP3/OGG
files.

PS. I also wrote a fairly complete python wrapper for the flac C API
last weekend (swig rocks!) if anyone is interested, It allows you to
write a flac player in just a few lines of python. It also makes
metadata editing (eg, vorbis comments) very easy.

Dave

On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 13:07 +1000, Michael James wrote:
> Anyone played with FLAC?
> 
> Claims to get almost 2:1 compression of wav file without loss.
> At about 3 CDs / Gig it's viable for holding a CD library.
> 
> I tried ripping and compressing a CD with grip,
>  it gives me a bunch of .flac files with sensible sizes
>  but I can't seem to play them with XMMS
>  or anything else (noatun) for that matter.
> 
> michaelj
> 
> 
> -- 
> Michael James                         michael.james at csiro.au
> System Administrator                    voice:  02 6246 5040
> CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility             fax:  02 6246 5166
>