[Flac-dev] floating point

[Paul Davis]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Brian Willoughby<brianw at sounds.wa.com> wrote:
> When the ADC source and the DAC destination are both limited to 24-
> bit fixed point integers, it makes absolutely no sense to store
> recordings or final mixes in 32-bit floating point representation.
> The headroom you speak of is completely unavailable when storing the
> output of an ADC into a file.  Likewise, headroom is wasted when
> playing back a fully mastered piece of audio to a 24-bit DAC.
> Headroom is only an issue when you want to work on the audio and
> change it, which is something that 99% of audio consumers do not
> bother with or even understand.

You're assuming that you never store intermediate mixes that may
actually have overflowed a 24 or 32 bit representation. I would agree
that this might not be best practice, but its actually not as
un-useful as it might at first appear.

> inappropriate.  It would be quite interesting if someone were to
> create a lossless format which can handle 32-bit float, but I don't
> believe it has been done yet.

wavepak (pack?) does.

  In most respects, this would mostly be
> a tradeoff between storage space and processing power, since
> processing a compressed file is usually too expensive for most DAW
> software, and so they always uncompress source files before using
> their data.  Thus, even a space-saving format like FLAC would be
> pointless for Ardour, since you'd still need to take up disk space
> for an uncompressed copy of the data (like Ableton Live, which
> supports FLAC).

its always a tradeoff between CPU cycles and disk space. you don't
need an uncompressed copy if you're prepared to burn the CPU cycles.

i'm not an advocate for Ardour using FLAC as a native format. i just
don't like telling users "it can't be done".