[Flac-dev] A-law and mu-law

[Giulio Paci]

Thank you all for your answers. They were all useful.

Il 21/11/2011 07:37, Erik de Castro Lopo ha scritto:
> Giulio Paci wrote:
> 
>> 	thank you for your answer. So the problem would be suboptimal
>> compression due to suboptimal assumption about the input signal, right?
>> What I do not understand is how the format of a FLAC format would be
>> affected by supporting A-law and mu-law files as input (and thus
>> output).
> 
> FLAC is in maintenance mode. Good luck getting new features.
> 
>> For my needs converting them to 16bit linear PCM is an option, but I
>> will need to keep track of the original format outside the file, which
>> is something that I would prefer to avoid. I would prefer to avoid
>> having multiple file format around (I mean containers format here) if
>> possible. Do you know of any container that supports both flac and *-law
>> streams?
> 
> Apple's CAF format supports both ALAC (Apple's lossless audio format, not
> FLAC) and ALAW.
> 
> I am currently in the process of adding CAF/ALAC support to libsndfile:
> 
>     http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/

These are good news.
Do you know if there is any patent pending for ALAC and CAF?

Bests,
	Giulio.