[flac-dev] Higher compression modes from Flake

[Martijn van Beurden]

On 14-03-13 20:16, Marko Uibo wrote:
> One possibility is to broaden Flac subset. But I don't know is it good 
> idea or not.

It's not a good idea, except when you want to ruin FLACs reputation. One 
of the reasons FLAC is (alongside ALAC) one of the two most popular 
lossless codecs is because of the well-defined subset. I've tried Flake 
-9, -10, -11 and -12 on my portable years ago, and while -9 did 
reasonable, anything higher would just choke the player.

If you want more compression, you can do it yourself. The -0 through -8 
switches are just presets, you can use FLAC 1.0's -9 yourself with -l 32 
-b 4608 -m -e -E -r 16 -p on FLAC 1.2.1, there's just no shortcut -9 
anymore.

Changing things like the subset will get developers/hardware 
manufacturers nervous (because no one can tell them one the next subset 
change will be, which might render their device incompatible) so it 
should *never* be changed, only in case of a complete format overhaul, 
FLAC 2.0 or something, which is probably never going to happen.