Lossless audio with error correction.
Reply #14 –
Mustardman:
It makes sense to parity-protect optical media which could be scratched and corrupt only a little bit of it - indeed, CDs do have that sort of stuff.
It does not make so much sense to parity-protect a single file on a hard drive against a bit/byte/sample falling out, because IF AND WHEN an error happens it will usually corrupt so much more that file-level parity protection is useless.
Most often an entire drive dies. In old days, sector failures were more common (formatting utilities would check sectors and every now and then a bad sector would be left out of a new drive). I've had cases where one or a very few files are corrupted (and the file system howls CRC check error at me) - then first thing was too copy out everything newer than most recent backup and then retire the drive. And - surprising me - I had the above issue where Windows overwrote file segments, and with it corrupting some 20 to 50 percent of the file. You do not let the codec correct that. You use backup.
As for what the codec does / requires ... it should specify how a proper file should be decoded, right? (In fact, AFAIK mp3 is defined through decoder behaviour.) What happens if it encounters a part which is garbage? There is a long way from specifying how to playback a proper stream, to how to playback various degrees of garbage.
(I do not say that parity-protecting audio streams is useless, in fact it could be useful for streaming ... or for *cough* torrenting *cough*.)