[flac-dev] Answering the Hydrogen Audio thread

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

There is a thread over on Hydrogen Audio forums:

    http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=99757

I will answer what I can here.

> mudlord says :
> As usual, Fidel Castro Loco ignored Windows. 

Wrong. As the git logs show, I have commited a bunch of windows
specific fixes myself as well as commiting windows fixes by others.

> zfox
> My own Linux build could not decode 1 file out of 4 that were tested. It ended with an error:
>
> 03.flac: ERROR while decoding data
> state = FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_END_OF_STREAM

I would like more information about this. Specifically I would need to
see a WAV or AIFF file encoded with flac-1.2.1 that doesn't decode
correctly with 1.3.0*.

> Case says:
> Compiling it with MSVC required some modifications and I'm unhappy to
> see that it still can't encode larger than 2 GB files. 

a) Still working on MSVC, thanks especially to Ben Allison.

b) This is not the case. The --ignore-chunk-sizes option was added in
   this commit:

    commit 5967f4981ec6ed719ca391165b4209bd2be354dd
    Author: Josh Coalson <jcoalson at users.sourceforce.net>
    Date:   Sat Jul 7 05:50:58 2007 +0000

   and I added documentation and --help output just today.

> ktf said:
> No unicode support for Windows either.

Somebody that knows about windows unicode needs to work on this and
supply a patch. I'm happy to help out with guidance and testing.

> C.R.Helmrich said:
> OK, so aside from the vendor string, will 1.3.0 produce exactly the
> same FLAC bit-streams as 1.2.1?

Yes, feature, not bug.

> I'm just wondering whether 7- and 8-channel support is the only new
> feature for end users like me.

Yes, pretty much. Oh, and support for 64 bit windows which did not
exist when flac 1.2.1 was released.

Finally, there was also some discussion about compression rate. Neglecting
the minor change in files sizes due to the difference between "1.2.1" and
"1.0.3pre1" there should be no difference in compression ratio or bit
streams.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/