lossyWAV Development
Reply #117 – 2007-09-17 10:15:29
btw., do you take care, that lossyFlac cannot be mistaken as *.flac ie. Lossless flac ? (or exchange flac with any lossless format, which this algorithm is used on) The difference between lossyFlac and Flac should be recognizeable already by file extension .flac vs. .lfla or whatever. it is somehow bad wording also, if you call something: lossy free lossless audio codec. Either it is lossy or lossless. A FLAC file is a FLAC file - how the input WAV file has been processed is anybody's guess. At present, how do you know that a FLAC file has not been created from MP3? Yes, the extension is changed from ".WAV" to ".lossy.WAV", but apart from that there is no change other than to the WAV data itself. I am probably going to write a test program to determine if a WAV file has been processed with this method - however with variable codec_block_size this may take quite a while to determine with accuracy for a given WAV file. For me, this processor is for someone (i.e. me, and others) to use on their own lossless files to create processed FLAC files. It is not intended for files to be distributed in this manner - but that would be probably be illegal, wouldn't it. In the same way as Wavpack has a lossless and lossy mode, this processor allows a user to decide for themself to use a processed WAV file to create a (smaller) FLAC file (than unprocessed, most often) for personal use. Another option is to create a Wavpack style correction file to allow the processed data to be restored to fully lossless.