[Flac] music complexity

[Mark Rudholm]

Harry Sack wrote:
> hi,
> 
> Is it true the flac encoder can compress music better when the
> complexity of the music is low?
> I'm compressing some tunes of old MS DOS games (pc speaker, sound
> blaster 16 OPL3 chip music) and I saw a *huge* compression ratio (some
> files where only 1/3th of the original file in filesize after
> compressing to flac), so I was wondering if less complex music always
> means better compression.

Yes.

This is true of any entropy coder (of which FLAC is one).

As a test, try flac encoding silence (which has no complexity)
and then try encoding noise (which is the most complexity that
the containing channel can describe).  You will find that the
first yields a very very small file and the latter yields a
file about the same size as the original file.