Hello, I'm curious whether ALS encoder is provided, and also if decoding plugins are available for major players (Winamp, foobar). I've heard it has a superior compression.
I've heard it has a superior compression.
Superior compression compared to what? It's not the best lossless compressor out there, it's not the fastest, and it probably isn't the most efficient either. The question is actually hard to answer, since ALS really is two completely different codecs under the same name.
There is a decoder for Winamp on the same site as the reference implementation. There is a command-line encoder, which can be used by foobar2000.
The format has no compelling advantage over alternatives. It's dead.
I'm not sure about the patent status but it's almost certainly engineered so patents do apply to it.
I have seen the comparison table in the thread to another compressor and ALS has beaten it in compression rate almost always.
But didnot know it's dead. If so then I'm not interested for it more.
I have seen the comparison table in the thread to another compressor and ALS has beaten it in compression rate almost always.
Probably not a very good comparison then. As I recall it compressed worse then APE/TAK/LA/etc while being much, much slower.
In my multichannel test its asymmetric mode was a bit stronger than anything else (with TAK second) and very slow with such settings. Symmetric, supposedly stronger, was overall weak, though significantly beat others on a few samples.
Assuming that stereo performance is comparable and my data set was representative of something (probably wasn't...), it should be the strongest asymmetric codec out there, slightly beating TAK and loosing to OFR / LA with really bad compression speed.