Lossless codecs

Now that we have WAV support, I was wondering if there was any thought to implementing some lossless codecs, such as FLAC, LPAC, Monkey's Audio, etc.

Complain to ARM that we need one :-)

Now that we have WAV support, I was wondering if there was any thought to implementing some lossless codecs, such as FLAC, LPAC, Monkey's Audio, etc.

Some thought, yes, but not much more than that. I've looked at FLAC - the reference decoder is in integer-only C, so it should be fairly easy (for empeg) to integrate it with the player. The lack of plugin support in the player makes this hard as a third-party project but is in theory possible with on-the-fly translation to WAV.

Borislav

I've looked into those lossless compression ratios but haven't found the thing that interested me the most : what is the compression ratio?? With mp3 @ 128 it's about 1/12, @ 192 it's about 1/8.

What's it like for those lossless codecs?

As with most lossless compression algorithms, it's not static. It depends largely on the input. There's a comparison chart, though, that should give you some general ideas. It's far from MP3 or Ogg levels.

An average of just over 50% is pretty damn good. You're not compressing something as repeatable as text after all. I think these compressors will start to play very big roles as broadband speeds increase and as recording media increases in density. I've already seen quotes of 200GB for 2.5" drives and over 400GB for 3.5" desktop drives for 2003. Transfer speeds and interfaces are going to start to become a big bottle neck at that point. :)

Bruno

...and then they'll just find a new way of going about it, like they always have...