[flac-dev] some report on type 3 wav

[Thomas Zander]

On 22 January 2016 at 07:09, Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+la at mega-nerd.com> wrote:

>> However, as a last attempt, I used Winrar on the original file and to my
>> surprise it was compacted to 79 Mb, only about 33% more than the FLAC
>> version representing a file with half the data.
>
> If the orignal 32 bit IEEE float file had been normalized so that all
> sample values are between -1.0 and +1.0 then the exponent part of each
> floating point value (8 bits out of 32 bits) would have been identical
> resulting in a very significant opportunity for a data compressor like
> WinRAR to do it's work.

IIRC WinRAR does not use one single general compression algorithm for
all file types but has its own specialised lossless compression
algorithm for wav files. Not quite as good as flac apparently, but
still.

Riggs