[Flac-dev] 0.6 release

[Mark Powell]

Josh,
  Those speed improvements are great. Quick test on an 365MB wav of Neil
Young's eponymous 1st album on a PIII 650E (Coppermine) under FreeBSD 4.2:

		User	Sys	MB

shorten23	0:46s	4.0	208.3
shorten31	1:24s	5.3	208.6
flac CVS	4:21s	7.5	199.2

It's getting near to be a useful replacement for shorten. Only 3x slower.
  Any idea why it uses so much more sys time? I would've thought they'd
all be about the same. I can see why shn31 uses more than shn23, because
it goes and appends that seek table after the encoding.
  In my limited testing I note that it usually gets a few percent better
than Monkey Audio, but that MA occasionally gets a few percent better than
flac. I've been chatting with the MA author to get him to release a
version of his command line compressor MAC.exe to put support for pipes
in. He says that it will be able to decode to a pipe. However, it won't
encode from a pipe, because it has to know how much data it is going to be
compressing first and then it needs to seek around to update header info.
This is a big win for the obviously more elegant design of flac.
  Keep up the good work Josh. I just with I knew some x86 assembly so I
could help out with the optimisation.
  Cheers.

Mark Powell - UNIX System Administrator - The University of Salford
Academic Information Services, Clifford Whitworth Building,
Salford University, Manchester, M5 4WT, UK.
Tel: +44 161 295 5936  Fax: +44 161 295 5888  www.pgp.com for PGP key