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Topic: What's the point to all these lossless formats? (Read 22717 times) previous topic - next topic
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What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #25
A vast number of people have the capability to use lossless, as WMA lossless is part of the standard Windows Media Player, but you have to wonder how many of them have ever looked at that option screen.


What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #27
What percentage of BluRay releases use MLP?

~15%
Despite the late start DTS has won that battle.

To expand upon this, when DTS came up with its dts-master codec they made it an extension of the original DTS codec, meaning one stream that works with both dts-master and legacy DTS decoders. Dolby digital and truhd require separate streams which has turned major studios off of using Dolby. Oops. Whether there is any audible difference between any of them is for another thread.

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #28
A vast number of people have the capability to use lossless, as WMA lossless is part of the standard Windows Media Player, but you have to wonder how many of them have ever looked at that option screen.

I am one of the few that lives in a Microsoft world. I use windows phone because I dislike iPhone and find android s interface reminds me of windows 3.x with its icon driven interface. That being said I use a zune 120 strapped to a fiio e11k for portable listening therefore WMA lossless is what I use. I still swear zunes have the best most attractive interface of any portable player and as long as they continue to work I will use them. For my zunehd and lumia 830 I use WMA pro! How's that for non conformity!

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #29
Whether there is any audible difference between any of them is for another thread.


They're both lossless, what's to say? They can however include meta data to make level adjustments on playback etc afaik.

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #30
One potential difference I haven't seen mentioned is latency.  That is significant, for example, for a radio station doing live remote.

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #31
What percentage of BluRay releases use MLP?

~15%
Despite the late start DTS has won that battle.


Which means that most (?) Blu-Ray owners use MLP from time to time, I assume?

How many users does that make, compared to FLAC / ALAC / WMA?

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #32
I must say again I love wavpack because it supports 32-bit float which is great to archive DAW exports without worrying about dithering/clipping/normalizing.

Adobe Audition, for example, opens a 32-bit float file much faster than a 24-bit one with the same length and sample rate.

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #33
ALAC support is included in (at least?) the latest Windows 10 build.

It's a bizarre twist, if only because given enough time for Windows 10 to penetrate, ALAC becomes the "least problematic" method for sharing compressed lossless files on desktop.

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #34
I was under the impression Windows 10 will support FLAC natively as well.

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #35

I'd love to see stats supporting this. I would consider ALAC a niche product.


I wouldn't be surprised if its the most widely used lossless format.  Certainly more dedicated mp3 player have shipped supporting it than any other format.  For a long time it was one of the only options for lossless compression in mobile, although now thats changing thanks to Android.


I'm guessing that's based on the volume of iPods supporting ALAC.  Since it was invented to be the mobile compliment to iTunes, I wouldn't call it a dedicated mp3 player!

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #36
Late to the topic...

"Why lossless?"

Maybe we wanted to save space and preserve our recordings?

+1 WAVpack for supporting the widest range of bit-depths. We already ran Windows back in the early days. (Cheers Bryant! And long live Reaper!)

Then there's the CD archival persons. Lots less wear and tear to have backups rather than re-ripping everything to the latest/greatest lossy format and save an extra step trans-coding.

I attest that over here we usually do more performing than ripping.
"Something bothering you, Mister Spock?"


What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #38
I like FLAC because I have a portable media player that plays them and it's CD quality.  And 24-bit is available for computer files. 
I also like WAVpack because myintermediate home studio recordings/mixing format is 32-bit floating point. 
In the past I used WAVpack to archive those since FLAC can't contain floating point formats.  So yeah, some of us use both. 
Also some RockBoxed media players can play WAVpack.  I might try that at some point in the future. 

I don't use ALAC since I'm not on a Mac, and I don't use WMA lossless because I don't like Microsoft's style
Be a false negative of yourself!

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #39
As for "niche" products ... what would you say about Meridian Lossless? What percentage of BluRay releases use MLP? (And is that a niche? HD DVD and DVD-A are, I'd say.)

AFAIK MLP (used on DVD-A) was called Dolby TrueHD on Blu-ray (and allowed (even) higher bit rates there). When it is available, there is usually also a PCM and/or DTS-MA stream.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

What's the point to all these lossless formats?

Reply #40
As for "niche" products ... what would you say about Meridian Lossless? What percentage of BluRay releases use MLP? (And is that a niche? HD DVD and DVD-A are, I'd say.)

AFAIK MLP (used on DVD-A) was called Dolby TrueHD on Blu-ray (and allowed (even) higher bit rates there). When it is available, there is usually also a PCM and/or DTS-MA stream.


I was assuming it was used for DRM-ing. But I might have missed it completely. But you are saying that there is considerably overlap that http://www.blu-raystats.com/Stats/Stats.php does not reveal?