[flac-dev] Higher compression modes from Flake

[Declan Kelly]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 08:31:34PM +0100, mvanb1 at gmail.com wrote:

> 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.

I found that flake at higher preset compression levels would not even
produce files that the FLAC command line tool could decompress.

And I 100% agree that we shouldn't change the subset, or do anything to
make any existing decoder fail.

> 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.

I haven't studied Zopfli closely, but a similar "find the absolute best
compression" iteration for FLAC is possible without altering the subset.
There was some discussion on this list a few years ago about a
preprocessor, but all I can find now is a preprocessor that makes WAV
data easier to compress smaller (in a slightly lossy way).


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