[vorbis] Lossless/lossy hybrid?

[Aleksandar Dovnikovic]

Monkey's Audio lossless compressor (currently win32 only, free but not
open-source except decoder) author is thinking to implement a kind of
audiophile-quality lossy compression which would filter "noise bits" that
are hard to encode lossless but which are (or should be) inaudible and thus
improve lossless compression (avg. 300-450kbps). I think that implementing
something like this in future OggSquish could be very interesting for people
who want very high-quality but are unsatisfied with lossless compression
ratios.

Here's the message from Monkey's Audio forum:
_____________________________________

Howdy everyone,

I was putzing around with MAC today and I made a lossy mode that seems
perfectly transparent at around 300-450kbps. It doesn't do any
psychoacoustic tricks... just filters off worthless "noise bits".

Anyway, I was toying with the idea of making this format work in conjunction
with a "recovery record", so that when you compressed you'd get both - an
audiophile-quality lossy copy and a lossless recovery record.

It'd be a high-quality lossy format that works hand-in-hand with lossless
compression. If you have stuff you didn't listen to much, or were running
out of space, you could just stash the recovery records away, and you'd
still have awesome sounding music.

So, what do people think of this one? Is it a good idea or is it stupid?

If people seem interested, I'll put together a version so you can do some
listening tests and let me know what you think.

Take care and thanks for any opinions.

-Matt

____________________________


---
Aleksandar @ Vorbis Xtreme | http://solair.eunet.yu/~aldov
Ogg Vorbis is the free, open source alternative to MP3

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