Audio Compression Format Without Quality Loss

Hey all,

i was asked to make a remix for someone, it’s for a small public EP to be released. I just did send him a CD via snail mail, while giving him a mp3 via email the same time. Now he tells he wants a vocal part in the end to be quieter. I dont’ want send another CD though.

I remember someone told me about an music compression format like MP3 or OGG, one that does not compress as good as them, but does it without any qualitiy loss. So it would fit great into my current situation, so i could send him the track vial mail.

Do you know such a format?

Thanks,
Loolarge

http://www.wavpack.com

thats what you want.

the great thing is : you can first of all compress wavs lossless.

BUT. whats even better :

you can compress a WAV to mp3 and then make an additional correction file.

which means, you change the mix again and again and send mp3s to your friend until he is satisfied, and when he is, you simply send the correction file for the last mp3 you sent him and he can recreate the wav file using the mp3 and the correction file.

download wavpack and the windowsfrontend (because wavpack itself is a commandline-based tool).

I love this program and I cant wait for wavpack support in renoise, because this would make me switch from wav to wv (wavpack) completely, since there is also an plugin avaiable for cooledit.

To MP3?? I thought it was wavpack’s own lossy format silimar to MP3… ? (maybe that’s what you meant :unsure: )

Looza, thankx alot! :yeah:

edit:
@Johan: it can encode a wav-file to mp3 and at the same time generate an additional data-file that contains the frequencies that are left out due the compression. With the help of this Data-file, the original/lossless wav-file can be restored again from the mp3, later. That’s what the manual tells. Hey, thats really great, actually!

another edit:
As this is an open source project with source code available, i think implenting into renoise could probably be possible :D

Loolarge :drummer:

Hi,

I needed such a tool also … I was browsing around at vorbis.com one day, the page with all the info about OGG (Vorbis), and while following some links, I ran across another project of those guys called FLAC

It is a lossless audio format. So you will NOT lose any audio information. Offcourse the filesize won’t be as small like with OGG or MP3, and it depends on the dynamics of the song/file…

But when I’ve tested it with a song I made in renoise, which was about 6 mins I believe, the original WAV file was ± 58 Mb, after using FLAC i reached a filesize of 25 Mb !

The only downside is that you will need a decent and powerfull computersetup tho encode/decode it on the fly. On my Athlon XP rig no problem, but one of my other machines, a AMD K6-2 400, it played with dropouts etc…

The link at last : FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec

Hope this was some usefull info ;)
DJG