I would suggest that Haiku chooses wavpack as default audio compression codec. It’s lossless, fast and has a BSD compatible license. I record directly to wavpack using rockbox on my old conwon x5 player so performance is not a problem. FLAC is much slower to record and therefore not as versatile and has a gpl license.
not exactly, http://flac.sourceforge.net/license.html
there’s nothing wrong with wavpack, but I’d err away from making it a default lossless codec, flac has it beat in that option. I only really know about wavpack from hunting CLI specific questions about flac and other tech/nerd issues online, flac is getting talked about, and used by the recorded music industry, now. wavpack isn’t.
Unfortunately flac is way to slow for live encoding compared to wavpack. There’s a very good reason to why Rockbox chose to record directly to Wavpack instead of Flac. Flac just isn’t versatile enough.
Wavpack is getting more popular by the minute and it suits Haiku much better than flac.
Well I don’t know if the choice of a default audio codec would be decided at the OS level. I think it is something that should be left to audio encoding apps. Wavpack does sound interesting and I would at least like to see it ported to Haiku if it hasn’t already. Of course the current encoding support in the Haiku Media Kit isn’t so great, last I checked. But we will get there eventually.
- Ryan Leavengood, Haiku developer
Well what I meant that the era of lossy audio encoding is ending, and will in the future be used only for streaming. Wavpack with it’s hybrid mode removes the size disadvantages of lossy formats. Lossless encoded audio is also future safe, cause you can always convert from an lossless format to an other lossless format(like flac/ape to wavpack) without loosing any quality. Thats impossible with lossy formats like mp3 or ogg, because you’ll loose quality for every conversion. In 20-30 years the mp3 files that you own are going to be obsolete and you will probably not be able to play them. I only use lossless encoding for audio (wavpack) and pictures (png) now and I have already started encoding analog VHS tapes with lossless video compression (Lagarith and Huffyuv) for archiving them on optical media.
The future is lossless.
well, much like Ryan points out; support? sure, why not. default? umm, I dunno. I will say this much, as someone who works in the digital music biz, and has done for five years now, nobody is talking about wavpack. flac, apple lossless, even WMA lossless, are talked about, but not wavpack. That’s not to say wavpack is junk, but it’s not what people (labels, encoder farms, artists) are talking about when they talk about lossless. If I go into work on Monday, and everybody is talking about this hot new format, then perhaps making it the default is an option, but as it stands, for better or worse, the three I mentioned earlier are what’s got mindshare, in my business anyway. Two of them, are probably not much of a realistic option for Haiku.
With your logic the why should people use Haiku then? Windows, OS X and Linux are the most popular Operative system and what every one are using. Flac, Apple lossless and Wma lossless can’t replace Wav pack’s functionality and are therefore limited in their use. Wavpack is more popular than you know, just go to Hydrogenaudio Forums and see. The good thing about lossless audio is that if a format becomes obsolete you can convert it to an other lossless format with out loosing any information. I have some old ape (monkeys audio) files that I’m converting to wavpack now because that will probably be the dominating format in the future thanks to rockbox.