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Topic: The dilemma - stay w/lossy or go lossless? (Read 7016 times) previous topic - next topic
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The dilemma - stay w/lossy or go lossless?

Reply #25 –
Yes, wavpack does this all in one go. In the other thread, someone made a MPC, then subtracted the difference between this and the original and made the difference into a FLAC.

In theory it should work, but IIRC there was a number of checksum errors when they tried to recombine them...

The other aspect of Wavpack is that the lossy file is very, very good. While some don't like the fact that is has no psychoacoustic modelling to improve the use of bits, I prefer this because you don't get artifacts like the others. It also has zero pre-echo, and encodes the full spectrum. The latter might sound wasteful, but I'm noticing much better treble, particular with high end percussion in my music, largely due to the lack of pre-echo or smearing of transients that you get from the other lossy codecs.

Also, my tests showed that Wavpack lossy is superior to transcode from compared to other lossy formats. I compared transcoding from Wavpack lossy 320, LAME insane, MPC beyond braindead and Vorbis q10. Wavpack was consistently the best for me, with zero introduced artifacts from transcoding. All the others added something when transcoded into ATRAC3, MP3 128kbit and Vorbis q4.

Wavpack, is also freaking fast to encode/decode so it is very convenient to use for both lossy and lossless encodes/decodes and transcodes.

I'm now combining it with PAR2 for the correction files to get the best of both worlds, and reduce the chance of losing my correction files on cdr from cd cancer... I have high quality lossy on hand all the time, and lossless when required from cdr.

Den.

The dilemma - stay w/lossy or go lossless?

Reply #26 –
@Den

Yeah, I have to agree. Thanks for the work you did in regards to Wavpack, it was your threads that first switched me onto it. Really interesting 

I had been looking for something better for transcoding to my portable payer and this was perfect without going full lossless. Planning to do some tests myself when I get home again.

Edit: because I posted it unfinished by accident. 

The dilemma - stay w/lossy or go lossless?

Reply #27 –
Quote
Look for some of Den's posts, he has done a lot of testing with Wavpack and says that the lossy file is more than good enough for transcoding to other formats, eg MP3, Ogg Vorbis etc.

If lossless could compress files small enough to fit 2 average CD's on a cd-r (for backup) then I would use FLAC but as it is just now you are as well making a copy of the whole CD uncompressed, from an archival perspective.

This I must criticize now. Doing a transcode from an already lossy file (and Wavpack is a hybrid, I know), if you still have the absolutely lossless original, is always a bad thing, which should be avoided.
And boy, the future backup-medium is DVD. For more than 9 months now I´m backuping every Original-CD I get from friends or libraries to DVD. I had no dropouts since today with it. On average there fit around 11 to 13 complete lossless single-interprete albums on a DVD-R (compressed with Monkey´s Audio in "high"-compression mode).
My used codecs and settings:
FLAC V1.1.2 -4 / APE V3.99 Update 4 -high / MPC V1.15v --q 5 / LAME V3.97b2 -V2 --vbr-new / OGG aoTuV V4.51 Lancer -q5

The dilemma - stay w/lossy or go lossless?

Reply #28 –
@R.A.F.
Your criticism is absolutely correct, but I have my reasons. I now have 100's of CDs archived on my PC as Wavpack lossy. Every day, I go to my PC, fire up foobar, pick 2 hrs 20 minutes of music to listen to, then dump these out as wavs from foobar and encode/transfer them into my Minidisc for a day's listening. If I had all of these files as wavpack/flac/monkeys lossless, I simply would not have the space.

The above process takes ~10 minutes to do, outside of the time required for me to actually make up my mind and pick my favourites. 

By using wavpack lossy I do have the space to keep everything handy on HD, and the thing is that wavpack lossy does not introduce significant artifacts when I transcode from it. Every other lossy codec I have tried does, even at ~320 kbits. The only one I haven't tried is AAC, but that's coming soon.

When I am compiliing something more important that just my daily tunes, such as burning a CD, I can dig up the Wavpack correction files from CDR, and get the truly lossless version. As you can imagine, to dig up all the correction files for different artists, transfer them back to the PC, dump them as wavs, etc, this takes a lot longer than 10 minutes.

The crazy thing is, that I find it very hard to pick any significant difference between the lossy and lossless versions anyway, and if I lost my correction files, I'm not sure if I would be all that cut up about it, because wavpack lossy is truly amazing to transcode from. Test it for yourself and compare against the other lossy codecs and see for yourself.

I also don't have access to a DVD burner.

Den.

The dilemma - stay w/lossy or go lossless?

Reply #29 –
Quote
Yes, wavpack does this all in one go. In the other thread, someone made a MPC, then subtracted the difference between this and the original and made the difference into a FLAC.


Using standard lossless encoders (tried on Monkeys Audio) on files with a lossy component subtracted results in files which are larger (the correction part on its own) than if you losslessly encoded the track on its own, this is because the lossless predictors cannot predict for lossy subtracted data.

That is why I like wavepack so much, it goes that extra hurdle.
 

The dilemma - stay w/lossy or go lossless?

Reply #30 –
I made a lot of tests when looking for the best trade-off between lossy and lossless, as lossless is for me waste of space and lossy is a disadvantage, because of the fact you're losing something. The fact is, I bet the most people wouldn't discern any difference beyond 352 kbps WavPack lossy (high quality) mode... As you may know, I am a little snobbish (when the sound matters...) so I wouldn't use anything, that wouldn't meet my demands. So after making very hard tests I set the border for me between 448-512 kbps WavPack lossy (HQ) mode. Just to have some overkill and to be sure. This is enough for archiving and possible transcoding later. And transcoding is no death in this case, you can believe me  You must have a real bat ears to hear any difference worth mentioning. As for classical music, I use WavPack lossless, as compression ration is about 2,5:1 in average, which is close to 512 kbps... So in the long run I don't need as much diskspace I would have needed with lossless or wavs and the quality is really "high" enough.
Just my two cents...