Lossless Audio Codec Comparison '07

[RadicalEd]

I've just completed and compiled a formal comparison of the major players in the lossless audio arena, including, but not limited to, FLAC, MPEG-4 ALS, and iTunes ALAC. Results, along with pretty chart, here (http://www.brutus-music.com/Mike/ALossless.html), but also pasted below for your convenience.

http://www.brutus-music.com/Mike/Images/acc.png

http://www.brutus-music.com/Mike/Images/cw.png

La takes the cake, achieving 65.33% compression -- the closest to half off you're going to get. It should also be noted that MPEG-4 ALS is heavily based on LPAC, thus, it makes perfect sense for them to achieve identical results. FLAC, ALS, and ALAC are all pretty much on even footing, and right around the midpoint as far as the results go. I'm still surprised at how terrible bzip2 did. I guess it's just not suited for this kind of data the way it is for text and source code.

If I've left any out, let me know.

Oh, and watch the links in the Codec Comparisons section of the site -- they're not all functioning yet and none of my other comparisons are up yet.

Lossy audio, and lossless/lossy video coming soon.

[honai]

What about compression/decompression speed? Multi-threading capabilities? In other words, which codec provides the best compression/time ratio?

Say, for example, FLAC compresses 2% worse than La but at twice the speed (or half as much CPU usage during decompression) - shouldn't that be weighted in the results?

[smok3]

Multi-threading capabilities?
actually is any of this really multithreaded?
RadicalEd: good stuff, iam always surprised how well monkey's audio does. wow @ ZIP :)

[honai]

AFAIK at least WMA is multi-threaded.

[RadicalEd]

What about compression/decompression speed? Multi-threading capabilities? In other words, which codec provides the best compression/time ratio?Right, people on other forums have pointed that out, and it's a good idea, but A. speed really isn't all that important to me, plus I went out of my way to use the slowest settings on each encoder, so it wouldn't be quite fair, B. I don't have a real method of clocking it other than looking at my watch and trying to judge, an C. I don't feel like doing it over :|actually is any of this really multithreaded?Kind of a moot point -- I'm running the compression software in VMWare which is set to only emulate 1 CPU, although I do have a dual-core system.

[LANjackal]

A. speed really isn't all that important to meSame here. That's why I use MAC Extra-High for my lossless archiving. Also, you can easily set thread priority for MAC from within the frontend, which no other common lossless format allows, AFAIK.

[prOnorama]

Pretty nice comparison, there are codecs in here I haven't even heard of.

What I'm missing is which versions of each codec you used.

Edit: and of course the level of compression used (for instance FLAC 1.1.4 level 5 or 8)

[Dark Shikari]

It also strongly depends on what kind of music you're compressing, I'd think.

And how in the world did you get a "1 day" compression time on 7zip? Even on a slow Pentium 4 you can get at least 1MB/s using LZMA on Ultra.

[Mangix]

7-Zip has a command line with more options...

[RadicalEd]

It also strongly depends on what kind of music you're compressing, I'd think.No doubt, Classical will compress differently from Rock which will compress differently from Electronic. I'm looking into adding more albums from different genres soon.

[Dark Shikari]

7-Zip has a command line with more options...
It does, and there's still no option that will give you that kind of compression time UNLESS you do all of the following:

1. Use HC matchfinder (very suboptimal, only useful to save memory).
2. Max number of matchfinder iterations.

If you use the BT4 matchfinder, the optimal one, more matchfinder iterations beyond a few hundred will not affect speed as it will reach an optimal level and won't do any more matchfinder runs anyways.

[FlimsyFeet]

So Zip compression performed as well as WavPack and better than FLAC.

Did you use WinZip with any special options, or simply the right-click/Send To -> Compressed (zipped) Folder option within Windows XP?