[Flac-dev] the road to 1.0...

[Mike Wren]

This is a fantastic selling point, and one that I've never really thought
of.

Back in the early days of etree (a whole three years ago  ;)  ), before we
learned the virtues of MD5 sums for SHN downloads, I downloaded a Hornsby
show from someone.  Of course, an MD5 wasn't available, but when I
decompressed and Shoren didn't throw a sanity error my way, I figured all
was well.  I burned 5 copies, only to find out 3 days later that halfway
through one track, one channel cut out for the remainder of the track.

So, two ways that FLAC is far superior to Shorten.. incorporated checksums,
and much improved error recovery.

I see etree.org users as more of archivists than music fans, since we place
so much emphesis on bit-for-bit accuracy.  Using a codec that makes this job
easier for us is a very welcome thing!

If you (or anyone else on this list) can keep track of selling points for
FLAC over other current (and future) lossless codecs, I would like to
compile a list, since I will be running propaganda to convert etree users to
FLAC.  It won't be an easy sell though.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!


Wren



Josh Coalson wrote on 4/16/01 4:36 pm:

>--- Mike Wren
><mikew at etree.org> wrote:
>> ...
>>
>> I'm *still* working on
>getting some etree.org
>developers to help out,  but I
>> think as a whole, etree'ers
>are stuck in their Shorten
>frame-of-mind
>> (creating workarounds for
>an old and very limited
>codec).
>>
>One thing that might change
>some minds is shorten's lack
>of error recovery.  I don't
>know how much users have
>analyzed the format, but if
>you are using for archiving
>you should definitely know
>that if even one bit is
>damaged in the shorten file,
>the minimum damage is that
>the rest of the data for the
>channel is bad.  Shorten
>cannot recover from errors
>because it relies on the
>correct decoding of the
>previous frame to prime the
>predictor, whereas FLAC
>does not.
>
>Josh
>
>
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