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Poll

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

FLAC
[ 325 ] (55%)
WAVPACK
[ 222 ] (37.6%)
Neither, I use another losless codec
[ 44 ] (7.4%)

Total Members Voted: 718

Topic: Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK? (Read 91326 times) previous topic - next topic
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Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #50
EDIT: I'm using 16384 kb of padding with flac. Could you tell me if there's a limit for padding? I thought I read once 16 or 32 Kb as limit, but I didn't found the information again.

the limit is 24MB

I see what you're saying.  there are disadvantages to tags being at the end which is why it's not done that way in FLAC or vorbis.  I agree if you're compressing whole CDs and adding a lot of metadata afterwards you need more padding.  in that case 40k on a 400M .flac is only 0.01% of the file.  but flac cannot detect that case automatically unless you give it a cuesheet during encoding, at which point you don't need as much padding anyway.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #51
I find the emphasis on speed and compression somewhat odd, given the difference between the two seem pretty insignificant.  Looking 5 years ahead, storage prices will be cheap enough to hold all your music in lossless format (in which case, why even have lossy?).  The more important issue to me is a standards setting issue. 

- Will there be devices to support it on your home stereo?
- Is the format supported by a portable player? Car?
- Can you purchase music in that format?

This standards war is already being fought out by Microsoft and Apple, two formidable players.  I just hope that some non-drm technology will be available as well.  But this will happen only if there is a big enough market for the lossless format, whether that be FLAC or WavPack. 

So right now, I believe FLAC is better in each of the departments above, so I use FLAC. 

If it ain't, someone let me know before I finish burning all my CD's to FLAC.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #52
This standards war is already being fought out by Microsoft and Apple, two formidable players.

It doesn't seems obvious to me that lossless audio is the favorite battlefield for Apple and Microsoft  Moreover, both format/compagny are providing lossless encoding tools without any form of DRM. Finally, don't forget MPEG-4 ALS (for interested people, it was apparently updated).

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #53
I find the emphasis on speed and compression somewhat odd, given the difference between the two seem pretty insignificant.  Looking 5 years ahead, storage prices will be cheap enough to hold all your music in lossless format (in which case, why even have lossy?).  The more important issue to me is a standards setting issue. 

- Will there be devices to support it on your home stereo?
- Is the format supported by a portable player? Car?
- Can you purchase music in that format?

This standards war is already being fought out by Microsoft and Apple, two formidable players.  I just hope that some non-drm technology will be available as well.  But this will happen only if there is a big enough market for the lossless format, whether that be FLAC or WavPack. 

So right now, I believe FLAC is better in each of the departments above, so I use FLAC. 

If it ain't, someone let me know before I finish burning all my CD's to FLAC.


I subscribe fully to your text.
This is the reason, why I changed in my Lossless career from Flac to wavpack to flac again. Wavpack is technically of better overall performance than flac, but flac got recently some major hardware device support by real companies.
But you and me don't need to worry, if you have your music  Losslessly as Wavpack or Flac, you made nothing wrong, in the case, one or the other format might be implemented in your next hardware device, you can transcode easily and quite (more or less) quickly.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #54
Flac because plugins were available at the time for the players/rippers I used under both Windows and Linux. Had grip (linux ripper) had wavepack, I might have gone that way.

That's a qualified "flac because of better cross platform support", I think...

Mark

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #55
Wavpack, good speed, better compression, actively developed here at HA.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #56
Can you purchase music in that format?

Another reason I like FLAC is this one - I collect (legal) live bootleg concerts, and a lot of traders use FLAC as a sorta-universal format for distributing these recordings.
voted 'Most likely to veer your thread' three straight years!

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #57
WavPack, because I get better compression with a pretty small tradeoff in encoding/decoding speed, even when using the -h option.  Since I use foobar2000 for playback, and don't have a lossless capable HW player, compatibility doesn't really concern me, so I made my decison based on filesizes, and WavPack consistently delivers smaller ones.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #58
Flac. Since my hardwareplayer supports it native. Before i used different compressors cause all i did was playing them in Winamp.
The first time i sorted this i came to Wavpack high cause of its fast and high compression.
Some weeks later i switched to flac cause of my player. Some weeks after i switched from flac to flac!
Ehm.. 1.1.2 to 1.1.2.1 --best
This is so beautiful  with this lossless stuff. When your CPU feels bored just let it reencode without a loss!
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #59
Wavpack - compression ratio mainly.  No player that supports Flac so I am either listening to them on PC or sending them to MP3 for my portable.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #60
Is it pretty easy to convert from FLAC to Wavpack or vice versa or do you require to decode back to WAV first? Any programs that automate this process?

A painless switch is always good when you are doing GIGs of data!

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #61
I use WavPack.
(Yes I like the red foobar2000 wv icon)

Unfortunately, I'm quite unhappy when I use Linux. There are few options then.
Basically I just dislike XMMS.
Quod Libet is a really nice piece of program but just refuses to play some of my wv files while other just play fine. Me being blind or something?

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #62
Is it pretty easy to convert from FLAC to Wavpack or vice versa or do you require to decode back to WAV first? Any programs that automate this process?
You could pipe from one to the other on the command line, e.g.:

FLAC --decode --stdout file.flac | WAVPACK - file.wv

... but by far the easiest way would be foobar (or dbPowerAmp which I don't use), as it will copy over the tags at the same time.  foobar would pipe to the encoder, so no temporary WAVE file required.
I'm on a horse.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #63
Is it pretty easy to convert from FLAC to Wavpack or vice versa or do you require to decode back to WAV first? Any programs that automate this process?

A painless switch is always good when you are doing GIGs of data!

foobar2000 and dBpowerPack are fine for this job (both are also keeping the tags and the latter also keeps RG gain and offer an option to delete the source file after encoding).

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #64
... but by far the easiest way would be foobar (or dbPowerAmp which I don't use), as it will copy over the tags at the same time.  foobar would pipe to the encoder, so no temporary WAVE file required.


Foobar only converts tracks though, not an image.  I have not found a way to have it properly convert a whole image with CUE sheet especially if there is a index 0 before track 1.

I still use FLAC -d....

-Robert

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #65
I use: WavPack (Normal, -m) via Speek's WavPack Frontend
Reason: Because I want to!

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #66
This is the batch file that I use to transcode between album images:

Code: [Select]
for %%i in (*.wv) do "C:\Program Files\WavPack\wvunpack.exe" "%%i" -d
cls
for %%i in (*.flac) do "C:\Program Files\FLAC\flac.exe" "%%i" -d --delete-input-file
cls
for %%i in (*.ape) do "C:\Program Files\Monkey's Audio\mac.exe" "%%i" "%%i.wav" -d
del "%%i"
cls
for %%i in (*.wav) do "C:\Program Files\WavPack\wavpack.exe" -h -m -w -d "CUESHEET=@*.cue" "%%i"

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #67
wavpack, better compression, it is very fast on my machine and it is the one I used first. When I firtst started investigating about the lossless format, one thing i made me decide towards wavpack was that it was the codec with most features. I recognize that FLAc is quite good too.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #68
I love both FLAC and Wavpack. Only reason i am favouring Wavpack for the time being is

- Hybrid mode. With TCPMP's upcoming Wavpack support in MKA, it could be very interesting to store the Hybrid + correction in one MKA, and extract the lossy part for mobile use in a very fast demuxing process then, if necessary

- frame accurate editing. Being a video freak, i hope we will have a video editing tool available one day that will allow us to cut videos with Wavpack audio, to compress them into the end format then.
It would be great for DV video editing, should we be able one day to extract Type 2 DV AVIs into MKV's with Wavpack audio, instead of PCM

Christian
matroska project admin

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #69
.WV in -h mode.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #70
Wavpack, with the -x6 command-line, because I like the .wv extension.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #71
I use WavPack.
(Yes I like the red foobar2000 wv icon)

Unfortunately, I'm quite unhappy when I use Linux. There are few options then.
Basically I just dislike XMMS.
Quod Libet is a really nice piece of program but just refuses to play some of my wv files while other just play fine. Me being blind or something?

Quod Libet uses the gstreamer-wavpack plugin and there are some problems with earlier versions (like 0.8) of that. I don't know my way around Linux yet to know how to upgrade, but that's what you need to do (you might need an updated app also, I don't know). The problem was that WavPack "high" mode files crash the plugin. And, files before 4.0 will not work either, in case you have some of those. I have the same problem with Rhythmbox.

Hope this helps... 

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #72
Not that my opinion counts or anything, but I use flac. I chose it originally for a few important reasons: While researching different codecs, it appeared that the flac format had been well-thought out right from when it was first conceived. By this I mean that it seemed that the format is the most "general" in terms of future expandability and upgradeability (had the best of these features). Already a few lossless codecs have come and gone, and I think the flac developers designed flac taking into account the shortcomings of those other formats (not that there's anything wrong with any format, but this is a learning process after all, right?).

Secondly, even though it doesn't get as good compression as the others, I decided that nowadays that's not really an issue because storage space is becoming quite cheap. For example, I bought a new Maxtor 200 GB hard drive a few months ago for $85 Canadian at Best Buy. So for me, another 3% savings isn't going to help too much. The trade-off for compression is the decoding speed; I can decode a 400 MB flac file coded with -8 compression in under a minute, and I think that's pretty good. Finally, it has good hardware support, which is a big plus.

My only beef is the metadata; I do wish that the cd-text info could be stored in the cuesheet metadata block instead of having to be in a cuesheet tag.

Edit: Actually I just re-tagged all my flac images to get rid of the cuesheet tag. I kept all the cuesheet metadata blocks, though. What I do now is just drag the cuesheet file (with song titles) into foobar, and it parses that and you get the names. So it's really no problem at all.

And very last, it's good to see that flac is still in development also. Of course it's fun to get on board with a new emerging format and adding your input into the development, but I'm not much of a software guru, so I appreciate having a finished working product that is essentially bug-free (at least I haven't found any), and reliable. I have tried wavpack and I think it's also good. I do think that hybrid-mode is really cool.

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #73
Hi,
the problem I mentionned is maybe a consequence of a bad support of padding in several application. It was the case in the past at least. For example, it's only after I complained about it three years ago that Case introduced padding support in the dedicated diskwriter component of foobar2000.

I complained for another reason: I was used to add several tagging fields inside lossless encodings. In a not-so-old past, my favorite hobby was to add EAC's extraction log file as a dedicated field.

Nonetheless, as I reported it in fb2k forum 2 days ago, there's a common (I'd say) situation where 4Kb is not enough: it's flac+cue situation in where one single file must endure the charge of information usually splitted in multiple tracks.


You know what solution i could offer to your needs, but i also do know that most of you guys are anti-MKA and there are also no good, automated file creation tools available still, so i better shut up here .....

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org

Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?

Reply #74
I'm using matroska for most of my videos needs  Matroska audio is not as convenient, has few support (not your fault), is not bug free (I'm talking about foobar2000 0.83 plug-in).
I'm sure that what you call "anti-mka" attitude is more trivially a consequence of the lack of tools for creating/using (playback, tagging, hardware support) this container for that purpose.