[Flac] Feature request FLAC

[Brady Patterson]

Another option for 1b is to have an option to detect and discard empty
channels. That way, header information could be lost, but audio data could not.
This option would require reading the entire empty channel before encoding.

OTOH, this is arguably a ripping issue, not a compression one. And besides,
shouldn't an empty channel compress to negligible size?

1a seems clearly lossy. There's usually a reason for a period of silence (as
opposed to an entire channel that's always silent).

IMHO.

--
Brady Patterson (brady at spaceship.com)
RLRR LRLL RLLR LRRL RRLR LLRL

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, Devon Holcombe wrote:

> I don't see the options in #1 as strictly going with the philosophy of FLAC
> being a lossless codec although neither one seems like a bad idea if
> implemented properly. More generally part b of #1 would allow you to select
> any channel(s) from a source and just encode those channels. For example you
> may want to encode only 3 channels of a 4 channel source or 5 of 8 or 1 of
> 8, etc. This seems like it would be the best way to do things, given what I
> know of the current FLAC architecture.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: flac-bounces at xiph.org [mailto:flac-bounces at xiph.org] On Behalf Of
> Alexander
> Sent: Monday, November 07, 2005 1:38 AM
> To: flac at xiph.org
> Subject: [Flac] Feature request FLAC
>
> 1. Add encoder options:
> a) Skip silence (leading and ending) would give the option to skip silence
> at the beginning and end of WAV-File. Currently I have to use an external
> program (WavTrim) to do the job.
> b) Convert to mono: I encode a lot of audio books from CD. While in reality
> they are only mono (one person reading) the are transferred as stereo from
> the CD. Converting them to mono greatly increases overall compression.
> Currently I have to use SoX for conversion which is slow and painfull.
> Better would be to have an option in FLAC to skip one channel and encode the
> other channel as mono (as seen in LAME)