Re:FLAC 1.3.4
by astrange on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @04:33AM
(#30439332)
There's no way their proprietary codec is less black magic than Opus is. I've rarely if ever seen a closed source codec designed by people who really know what they're doing; they're usually just whatever the cowboy they hired thought would be cool. It's not like management is going to be able to tell if it's state of the art or not.
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Re:FLAC 1.3.4
by dale_glass on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @04:46AM
(#30439437)
Well, I say "black magic" because at least to me it's a quite mysterious creation. But I'm no audio engineer.
It's a lossy codec that's for some reason fixed rate, and shrinks audio by exactly 1/4th. The resulting quality is very good (works perfectly fine for music), and it's much faster than Opus. It retains stereo and high frequencies and sounds just fine. I'm sure there's a tradeoff somewhere, but it's certainly good enough to hold music events without people complaining.
I think it might be possibly related to codecs like AptX.
So far I've not found anything competitive that we could use -- stuff is either closed, or far more CPU intensive.
Yeah, it sounds like ADPCM with a fixed ratio like that. It's extremely simple and adds no latency, which are both good for streaming.
Usually a fixed compression ratio is a terrible tradeoff, but for streaming it kind-of makes sense.
Re:FLAC 1.3.4
by dale_glass on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @06:39AM
(#30440035)
I don't think it's ADPCM since it sounds really good. I'm not an audiophile or have done any comprehensive testing, but it' the kind of quality a normal person would use for music without complaining.