FLAC and SHN?

[daol20]

I know that FLAC is Free Lossless Audio Codec and is another form of compression to .shn. But i havent heard (or seen to) much in the way of trading in FLAC format. Is there a particular reason my FLAC isnt as popular? Seeing that the specification of the stream format is in the public domainand that neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any patent.


Are the compression percentages simliar to that of SHN??

[Angela]

I think FLAC has been around for only a year. I don't really know much about audio compression. I found a few interesting pages yesterday. I also read they expect FLAC to become more popular than and eventually replace SHN.

A good start on SHN: SHN FAQ

This one is interesting:compression testing

There's yet another comparison sheet at soundforge.

[daol20]

From your third link....</font>

# As far as I know, only two of the lossless encoders out there (FLAC and WavPack) are both actively developed and truly free (source code for Shorten and Monkey's Audio is available but the licenses are more restrictive). Most others give out free binaries, but without access to the source, you are leaving your data to the whim of the maintainer for eternity; you have no way to port the program to another OS or fix it if it breaks. This can be a serious drawback unless the format has world-class clout (like MP3).
# The compression ratios and times for flac are representative only of the reference encoder. They are not indicative of the limits of all FLAC encoders or the FLAC format itself since the format is open and extensible, and anyone is free to write a better FLAC encoder. And it is almost certain that the reference encoder itself will improve.
# Since FLAC supports streaming, it is at a slight disadvantage to the formats that don't because they don't have the extra overhead of all those frame headers.

hmm, so at the moment, due to the extra overhead of sorting frames (to allow for streaming) the FLAC format doesnt compress to the same factor as shn. (Tell me if i've read that wrong).
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[Mario]

The reason FLAC hasn't caught on is that it is a stylistic, rather than substantive, improvement.

It compresses files into smaller chunks than SHN, but not dramatically smaller. It allows for different recording rates. And its open sourced. There are probably other improvements Im not recalling now.

However, none of this make an end run difference. The cut fom mp3 to shn was relatively instantaneous because of the dramatic substantive difference. From shn to flac is more of a means difference, but the end stays relatively unaffected. Thus, people are slower to change and learn something new.Edited by: Mario

[daol20]

It seems as though they both have, typically, a factor of two compression obtained for 16 bit audio.

So is it simply a matter of preferance at the moment?</font>