Other than MP3, What Compressed Audio Formats Exist? 7
cd asks: "While the MP3 format has become the dominant form for compressed music on the Internet, is it the most technically superior? What other forms of music compression are available for those who don't wish to download new music or upload their music, but for those who simply want to archive their music CDs? In this article Ken Thompson mentions PAC format. Is this the way to go? Is their encoding and playback software available for Linux?"
Re:Shorten & others (Score:1)
One key issue that's vital to us in the live recording trading community is the lossless compression. MP3 is just not good enough for the DAT-head and other audiophiles among us, since it's by very nature a lossy compression algorithm, chopping off key bands of audio information. Shorten avoids that by not cutting any audio information. True, it does not compress as much, thus making download times longer, but that's no excuse for sloppy sounding audio.
Re:Codecs (Score:1)
Shorten (Score:1)
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Other compresion formats, plus detailed MP3 info (Score:1)
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~ypsilon/80545/CoderExampl
Also, you don't have to through away data to compress bitstreams. There are many different technologies that employ clever representations that decode to the exact same PCM which was used as source. Generally, the compression ranges from 40% to 80% of the original PCM, with the average tending towards 50%. Certainly, an improvement over nothing, but not nearly as compressed as MP3s. But when quality absolutely must be maintained, this is the only way to do it. So this seems like the best way to archive your CDs if you have lots of space. This page includes benchmarks of different systems, quick descriptions of the different technologies, and lots of good links:
http://www.firstpr.com.au/audiocomp/lossless/
Finally, a general overview on mp3s, how they work, some other standards not listed above, and
more: http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~aer98/mp3links.html
Other formats (Score:2)
Shorten & others (Score:3)
I also came across the comp.speech FAQ [faqs.org] which has a specific section regarding audio compression standards.
Codecs (Score:3)
Here is a link [tu-berlin.de] to download a Lossless Predictive Audio Compression encoder for Linux (and the page [tu-berlin.de] I found it on).
PAC is very likely to be avalible for some other Unix, so it would (with a little work) probably work on Linux.