[clug] Free Lossless Audio Codec

Martin Pool mbp at sourcefrog.net
Thu Jun 17 02:01:39 GMT 2004


On 17 Jun 2004, David Gibson <david at gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 12:39:42AM +1000, David wrote:
> > 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:

> > Average compression ratio is around 0.65, not quite as good as 2:1, but
> > still saves me >60GB as you can see.
> 
> Heh.. that's surprisingly poor.  My intuition would have been that you
> could do better with basic techniques on audio files.  So much for
> intuition.

Maybe the few-years-old compressor was less aggressive?  I wonder if
the more recent files are more compressed?

On the point of legality vs morality of making backups or sharing
music, I would like to point out Lessig's new book:

  http://www.honors.montana.edu/%7Ejjc/freeculture.html#page83

-- 
Martin


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