Multichannel ADPCM

[Sycho]

I ripped a song off of a CD (Matt Good-Weapon, BigShinyTunes7) direct to a *.wav and then I converted it to an ADPCM *.wav and *.mp3 using BeSweet for the MP3 and Windows SoundRecorder for ADPCM, the size for the wav was roughly 55MB, ADPCM wav 15MB, and MP3 was 5MB. I opened them all up in windows media player and found the ADPCM the SAME as the WAV, and the MP3 was horrabile compared to the WAV. Well to my question, how can I make a multichannel ADPCM file? I want to do this because ADPCM is LOSSLESS coding and I don't know of any other lossless coding. Now, I love Dolby Digital but now I want to try a different format, I have always been using mutilchannel wav's but there take up a hell of a lot of space.

[symonjfox]

AFAIK Adpcm is NOT lossless. It should cut some frequencies that we can't hear.
It has also a good quality because of its high bitrate (if you create an MPEG 4 AAC at 320 kbs the quality is the same).

Lossless encoding there are Monkey's audio, FLAC and other, but you can save about 50% of space.

[specise_8472]

FYI DTS audio is actually/also ADPCM coding.
Have you tryed converting your audio into DTS CD or even DTS DVD formats? (use Surcode DTS).
PowerDVD plays DVD format perfectly and CD format plays on all DTS capable DVD players. And also on my NAD cd player as it has digital out.

For true lossless audio try MLP, which is the format used on DVD audio disks. I haven't done much playing around with this format yet to find out what programs will play it. (I think the newer version of PowerDVD supports AudioDVD. I am running the unreleased XP version with DTS 24/96 support and 8 speakers:D

cheers

[rjamorim]

Indeed, ADPCM is not lossless. But quality is usually considered better than psychoacoustic codecs (MP3, Vorbis, AAC...) because it uses only quantization - it doesn't use all kinds of processing advanced codecs do (Psychoacoustic processing, Subband coding, MDC transforming... besides quantization)

If you want to try a codec that's very similar to ADPCM (quantization only), but much better tuned, I suggest you try WavPack (http://www.wavpack.com) lossy mode. Current version doesn't support multichannel, but v4 will surely do.



BTW: DTS is not only ADPCM coding. Psychoacoustic processing is involved (although noone knows how much it is involved, since there are absolutely no specs available)