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Topic: Future of flac? Flac 2.0? (Read 48922 times) previous topic - next topic
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Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

I was wondering if anyone knows if there are plans for a flac 2, or are the developers happy with the current format?

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #1 –
I have no plans for a flac 2, which according to the numbering scheme would not be backwards compatible with flac.  there would be no need for that unless flac was failing.

there will probably continue to be minor improvements but my focus for a while has been on making flac ubiquitous.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #2 –
I am glad to hear that, as I would so much like to get a phone with Android being able to play flac files, and I would assume that would be easier to find (once Android becomes available), if the companies can see flac doesn't change.

That's at least the argument from the Vorbis developers.

It really amazes me how you can improve the compression and still be bit stream compatible!!

Keep the good work   

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #3 –
Does it mean FLAC has nearly reach it's limit? (like mp3)
Since there's no FLAC 2. If you want MUCH better compression, you have to wait another future codecs.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #4 –
AFAIK there won't be any codec with MUCH better compression. It's just not possible to compress audio much better without any loss.
Only lossy codecs (like AAC or MP3) really could be improved by optimizing the psymodel to the humen hearing.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Jillian on
Does it mean FLAC has nearly reach it's limit? (like mp3)
Since there's no FLAC 2. If you want MUCH better compression, you have to wait another future codecs.


Until now Mr. Coalson always found a way to make it better. Nothing of that needed a major name change like version 2.
I bet some minor improvements are again in the pipeline.
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Jillian on
Does it mean FLAC has nearly reach it's limit? (like mp3)
Since there's no FLAC 2. If you want MUCH better compression, you have to wait another future codecs.

I would say breaking the bit stream to be able to gain another 2% or perhaps 5% better compression if no worth it.

If you have 100GB of flac music, and being able to compress it by yet 5% means you save 5GB. 5GB is ~10 albums. + you have to spend the time converting the 100GB. Is that 10 albums worth is?

I'd it is much more important the that hardware manufactures regonize flac as being bitstream compatible for a long time to come, so they dare to implement it.

The Vorbis developers made a promise from the very start that Vorbis 2 would be able to play on Vorbis 1 devices.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #7 –
I don't see Lossless codecs getting MUCH better than they are right now... it's 99.8% perfect... I can't think of anything that will make FLAC and others compress another 35%+

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Jillian on
Does it mean FLAC has nearly reach it's limit? (like mp3)
Since there's no FLAC 2. If you want MUCH better compression, you have to wait another future codecs.
depends on what you mean by "much".  future flac encoders may get a couple more percent but I doubt 5% or more on cd audio.  I doubt any practical codec will get more than 10% better than state-of-the-art right now on cd audio.

Quote from: I am all FLAC on
I would say breaking the bit stream to be able to gain another 2% or perhaps 5% better compression if no worth it.
agree, this also explains why the few % advantage with some other codecs is not enough for most people to migrate from flac.  in fact with flac's current momentum I don't think a flac2 could compete with it either.  very few people will switch for a 5% or even 10% improvement.  flac has 5% over shn but in the early days flac had to get much more useful before starting to displace it.

codec adoption is driven by the network effect and incompatible changes interfere with that.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #9 –
i'm switching right now from TAK/MPC to FLAC/MP3... reason... there is no reason to swim against the tide...
 

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #10 –
Couldn't more compression come from a 'solid' compression mode, like that in the rar format?

I dread to think of how many moons it'd take to compress something with that though.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #11 –
Even if there were repetitions in an audio stream, imagine how much memory would be required for encoding?

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: seanyseansean on
Couldn't more compression come from a 'solid' compression mode, like that in the rar format?

I dread to think of how many moons it'd take to compress something with that though.

Try Flake and use the variable block size (method 1) switch. It's very fast and saves a couple megs on an album: flake -5 -v 1 input.wav -o output.flac
So far every FLAC I created this way was successfully tested with flac -t.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #13 –
Quote from: Bourne on
i'm switching right now from TAK/MPC to FLAC/MP3... reason... there is no reason to swim against the tide...


are you also switching from firefox to IE, and from whatever other DAP you have to an iPod?
honestly, i can't think of a worse reason to switch.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #14 –
Quote from: seanyseansean on
Couldn't more compression come from a 'solid' compression mode, like that in the rar format?

I dread to think of how many moons it'd take to compress something with that though.

One problem would be that you would have to wait a couple of seconds before the songs starts, and that would only get even worse when you want to listen to an album from start to the end.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #15 –
Quote from: boombaard on
Quote from: Bourne on

i'm switching right now from TAK/MPC to FLAC/MP3... reason... there is no reason to swim against the tide...


are you also switching from firefox to IE, and from whatever other DAP you have to an iPod?
honestly, i can't think of a worse reason to switch.


The point is that there is not enough of an advantage to TAK over FLAC considering how much more compatible FLAC is with media players and DAPs. Your analogy between firefox and IE is not a good one, since there are no compatibility issues running either one (under windows). The added functionality of firefox over IE means that I would choose firefox, since there is not a disadvantage to running it (only advantages). That analogy breaks down with FLAC and TAK precisely because of the compatibility issues; TAK is "better" than FLAC, but its not that much better, and TAK will play on foobar2000 and pretty much nothing else. Use Linux or Mac? No TAK for you! If you are only using foobar2000, then TAK is a good choice. But In my mind the transportability of FLAC is a huge advantage.

Mp3 vs other lossy codecs is another can of worms, since the differences between the formats are more striking. I use AAC because I think the quality difference is worth the compatibility problems. But mp3 is a perfectly acceptable choice because it just works.
Dissent!

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #16 –
Quote from: Daniel Beaver on
Mp3 vs other lossy codecs is another can of worms, since the differences between the formats are more striking. I use AAC because I think the quality difference is worth the compatibility problems. But mp3 is a perfectly acceptable choice because it just works.


AAC's advantage is that can achieve 'transparent' quality at a lower bitrate than MP3.  It is even more noticeable in streaming radio where CBR is required.  It is not, however, 'higher quality' as LAME MP3 is capable of achieving transparent quality in a vast majority of cases.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #17 –
I think that OPERA was the pioneer in pretty much everything that IE and FIREFOX have incorporated. OPERA is my browser right now. It has speed dial, and it's much better and faster than FIREFOX (wanna check it? go back and forth when browsing the net, you will see). FIREFOX was slim in the beginning but it's just plainly bloated now. But leaving the browsers talk... I understand why a programmer won't release the source code, but I only see TAK's future is relying on pretty much what FLAC did to construct its user-base. So unless it is developed in Linux and Mac, unless people make plugins out of it, it can be dodgy. The hardware support is surely something to determine, and although in practice FLAC devices are a bit unaccessible (I would have to import ZIOVA or Squeeze-Box), it takes a little advantage on TAK.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #18 –
well onto opera, i'd say that flac would be doing just as poor if it decided to be closed

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #19 –
Well I WAS switching to FLAC... got these "Error flushing file..." in FB2K.... LOL, and I can't do piping as well, because of the converter bug which will put 3000 seeks points or so in the file.

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #20 –
Quote from: benski on
AAC's advantage is that can achieve 'transparent' quality at a lower bitrate than MP3.  It is even more noticeable in streaming radio where CBR is required.  It is not, however, 'higher quality' as LAME MP3 is capable of achieving transparent quality in a vast majority of cases.

What I meant was that at the same bitrate, other lossy codecs sound better than mp3. But your right, "quality" is an ambiguous choice of words.
Dissent!

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #21 –
Quote from: Bourne on
But leaving the browsers talk... I understand why a programmer won't release the source code, but I only see TAK's future is relying on pretty much what FLAC did to construct its user-base.
the problem is it's probably too late.  flac filled the need at the right time the same way mp3 did.  the only 2 things I think that can replace either of them are 1) agreement by all the big labels to distribute in some alternative format; 2) technology change in audio distribution (e.g. non-pcm coding like dsd)

note apple did 1) with aac but still it is not more popular than mp3

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #22 –
There has been some discussion on exploiting long-term correlation for lossy compression.

I guess the same holds true for FLAC: if one could assume infinite decoder memory and encoder processing power (both seems perfectly sane in the very distant future), then at least some kinds of music ought to be more compressible?

-k

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #23 –
How can you say that infinite decoder memory seems perfectly sane?
Our Sun will expand and destroy the Earth in the very distant future.
If age or weaknes doe prohibyte bloudletting you must use boxing

Future of flac? Flac 2.0?

Reply #24 –
Quote from: knutinh on
There has been some discussion on exploiting long-term correlation for lossy compression.

I guess the same holds true for FLAC: if one could assume infinite decoder memory and encoder processing power (both seems perfectly sane in the very distant future), then at least some kinds of music ought to be more compressible?

Mpeg4Als (lossless) has an option to exploit long-term correlation. It's very slow and the advantage is rarely bigger than 0.15 percent.