[Flac-dev] floating point

[Josh Coalson]

--- On Fri, 8/14/09, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Josh Coalson<xflac at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > it's unlikely flac will ever support floating-point
> > samples natively.  the main application for it is audio
> > engineering, which demands easy editing and very high speed
> > for both encoding and decoding above everything else.
> 
> thats not why floating point is used.

I'm not saying that, I'm saying float is mainly used in audio
engineering which has different requirements and tradeoffs

> > flac is designed as a consumer audio format.  it
> > trades ease of editing for a featureful, robust transport
> > layer more suited for playback, and encoding speed for more
> > compression and faster decompression.
> 
> flac seems more popular at present among high end audiophiles than
> mere consumers. its very regrettable that it doesn't support floating
> point natively. many of our users (http://ardour.org/) have asked
> about using FLAC as an option for recording format, but we have to
> explain that its not viable because of the lack of floating point
> support. and yes, that is audio engineering :)

for export it might be useful, but for recording and editing, a
simple, fast codec and easily editable stream format is much more
suited.  you cannot easily snip an arbitrary section out of a flac
or wavpack stream.  a very simple float-only codec could be very
fast and probably still get compression within 10% of say wavpack.

if by audiophiles you are talking about people listening to the end
product, properly mastered 16 bit material is mostly indistinguishable
from even 24 bit.  32 bit int is beyond overkill.  32 bit float is not
even necessary because the dynamic range is fixed in the end result.