Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Feature request : double channel count (Read 4943 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Feature request : double channel count

Hello everyone !

I don't know if the "fathers" of the FLAC format reads here but the first thing I must do is to thanks them for giving birth to such a brilliant format !

It's just a blessing for the audio community to have such a high quality lossless audio format FOR FREE ! Imagine the royalties you have to pay when you're a professionnal and want to use for instance the MLP format, used for DVD-Audio's and by DOLBY on their DOLBY TRUE HD for Blu-ray's.

Now just look at the future of audio.

Listening to music have been dematerialized and the future is neither DVD-Audio nor SACD and not even Blu-Ray which will probably be the last hardware medium man will listen music on.

Future of music is NOW and it is the FLAC format.

Where do I want to go you wonder ?

Well, I'm a Sound Engineer and believe me or not the future of Pro Audio is not 5.1, 6.1, not even 7.1 but way much more. Thomlinson Holmann (mister THX) is working on a 10.2 channels surround sound system. NHK, japan national television is working on 22.2 surround sound format ! I, myself, plan to built in the near future a 12.2 channel studio for movie and music mixing.

So here is my open request : Please, you who invented the Free Lossless Audio Codec, can you do an update of your format and at least double the channel count FLAC supports ? I personnally would need the possibilty to encode at least 14 channels and I know that it would also benefits a lot of musicians who are doing Electro-Acoustical music and play their sounds on a lot of speakers.

I want to help the enventual developpers so I plan to make a donation through paypal to the good soul who will go through this project.

Thank you for taking time to read me, I hope that we'll make through this project soon.

Stéphane Blanchardon.

Feature request : double channel count

Reply #1 –
I hope my post isn't off-topic, but are your projects dependent on flac or could you use other formats also?

WavPack is a lossless compression format which supports among others MS 32-bit floating point, its license allows its use in a commercial environment and since version 4.60 you should have enough channels.

Also it has its own support forum here on hydrogenaudio.
This is HA. Not the Jerry Springer Show.

Feature request : double channel count

Reply #2 –
Thank you so much Robertina !

Hmmmm... I wasn't really aware of the possibilities of Wavpack and for the quick search I did it seem that so far, so good !

It's also a lossless format, it support high sample rates, compression ratio seems to be about as good as Flac and most important to me it supports up to 16 channels ! 

Why is it not as popular as Flac then I wonder ?

Anyway, thanks much again ! 

Stéphane.

Feature request : double channel count

Reply #3 –
Quote from: s.blanchardon on
Why is it not as popular as Flac then I wonder ?


Most of features that you want are useless for the majority of people and because most of us don't have 'awesome' audio equipment such used by Sound Engineer.

Most of people want a lossless format easy to use. A CD have 44.1 KHz, 2 channel and 16 bits/samples, then have more is useless for most of us when we rip our CD.

Why FLAC is most popular that WavPack ? Probably because his compatibility with most hardware player media. It's also a open source format compression.
Windows 10 Pro
fb2k v.1.3.16

Feature request : double channel count

Reply #5 –
Quote from: dv1989 on
WavPack is open source.


Okay, I don't know. But as well as having an open source format as well take one that has the most popular hardware compatibility, i.e. FLAC or this I believe.
Windows 10 Pro
fb2k v.1.3.16

Feature request : double channel count

Reply #6 –
I'm curious... What are the benefit of so many channels in music production? Assigning a pair of channels to each instrument?
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Feature request : double channel count

Reply #7 –
Quote from: odyssey on
I'm curious... What are the benefit of so many channels in music production? Assigning a pair of channels to each instrument?
This thread is about multichannel re-production (number of loudspeakers). The large numbers (7.1, 10.2, 22.2 etc.) are a result of attempts to recreate a three dimensional acoustical event as accurately as possible. It's generally accepted that two channels (stereo) are not enough but we don't know yet how many channels are required to produce a convincing holophonic illusion.
I find it interesting that surround sound in music has such a small market share, despite the fact that most people can hear the benefits. Perhaps the setup is too complicated, they don't bother, or current formats (mostly 5.1) are still not good enough.
Stéphane, who do you think can listen to your 10.2 mixes ? Are they intended for live performances ?

Feature request : double channel count

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Kees de Visser on
It's generally accepted that two channels (stereo) are not enough but we don't know yet how many channels are required to produce a convincing holophonic illusion.
I find it interesting that surround sound in music has such a small market share, despite the fact that most people can hear the benefits. Perhaps the setup is too complicated, they don't bother, or current formats (mostly 5.1) are still not good enough.

Personally I like the idea of having true multichannel music playing. Most of the time I listen to music I sit in front of my PC, so a surround-setup would not be hard to create.

But there are a few issues:

1. I have 45000 tracks in my collection, whereas a large portion of them I listen to regularly on shuffle play. None (or at least a very small fragment) of these are available as surround mixes, and those that are, are typically created from stereo-sources - That is, nothing I can't do myself with a DSP.

2. Music for me, is really mostly background "noise" to entertain me while I do other stuff. That said, I really enjoy music, but I don't sit and listen intensively to the music.

3. Really I don't think the majority of people care enough. Just look how many people that don't even care if their mp3s were encoded with artefacts...
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P
 

Feature request : double channel count

Reply #9 –
first see this:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/faq.html#general__channels

note that while flac and other codecs can be made to support any number of channels, it doesn't really matter for general-use playback unless some channel mapping has been assigned and afaik there is no such standard for so many channels, in any lossless codec.