[Flac-dev] Compressing sound fonts with FLAC

[Josh Green]

Josh Coalson wrote:
> 
> ok, in the case where each 'sample' is long (like
> >64k samples (sorry to mix terminology here)) the
> blocksize is probably not going to matter too much,
> since the optimal blocksize for the way FLAC models
> at CD audio rates is around 1k-4k samples.
> 
> unless sfArk has a much better compressor (ala
> Monkey's audio), I can only think of one thing
> that would give them much higher rates, and that
> is if they take advantage of inter-sample
> correlation (by 'sample' I mean sample in the
> soundfont terminology).  for example, if your
> soundfont was storing 88 'samples' from a piano
> (one for each key), an inter-sample decorrelator
> might model all the octaves together since it knows
> the structure of the font, which FLAC cannot.
> 

I was thinking about that. I wasn't thinking correlations between
samples of the same instrument, but rather 2 samples used for stereo
purposes. I wonder how much one could compress using correlations
between samples of the same instrument. Interesting.

I can see taking advantage of stereo correlation as being kind of hard
to take advantage of with FLAC though.
There aren't any interleved stereo samples in a sound font. Only mono
samples which have specified panning at the instrument level allowing
for stereo. These 2 samples can be anywhere in a sound font.

Supporting something like that in FLAC would mean allowing 2 different
data areas to be checked for stereo correlation and extraction to the
same different points in the output. Weired. Lates..
	Josh Green