lossyWAV 1.1.0 Development Thread.
Reply #210 – 2008-05-30 12:44:22
Echoing what halb27 has said... The lack of efficiency in these cases in mainly down to FLAC blocksize, rather than lossyWAV itself. As long as you don't apply positive ReplayGain values, increased bitrates of lossy vs lossless are nothing to worry about, even if you deleted your lossless original. Just take the lossy.flac file and re-encode it with normal FLAC - there will be no further loss (FLAC is lossless!) but it defaults to a different block length, which probably reduces the bitrate for such tracks. You can go back to the lossless original, and re-encode it with a different block size via lossyWAV and then FLAC, potentially giving a slightly lower bitrate still - but if this isn't possible, don't worry - the above approach will still bring the bitrate down (usually). Do you think it would be worth adding a utility to check for this? e.g.If original = FLAC, then If filesize lossyFLAC > filesize lossless FLAC, then re-encode lossyFLAC with same parameters (blocksize, compression) as lossless FLAC to generate new lossy FLAC. If lossless FLAC still smaller, replace lossy with lossless; endif endif endif If the original isn't FLAC, it's not worth encoding everything to lossless FLAC just to check - but if it's already there, the speed hit should be tiny. You could, of course, do the whole lot (lossyWAV and FLAC) with multiple block sizes and pick the smallest, but this would be overkill (though you could add an --overkill option Nick!) - whereas the above almost comes for free, and would solve the problem neatly if transcoding from FLAC. Cheers, David.