[Jeff Guidry]

I was considering that the major sellers of digital music files have not started offering lossless downloads. I would love to be able to purchase full albums losslessly from iTunes or any other service, but it does not appear that such offerings are on the horizon.

It occurred to me that part of the reason might be that lossless files are still rather large, and the companies selling digital music might not want to store so much information losslessly, or they want to control bandwidth costs by sending out smaller files.

Question: is it theoretically possible to have losslessly compressed files significantly smaller than currently exists (I believe the typical lossless codec can make a file generally between 40-60% smaller than the original)? Are there any breakthroughs on the way?

 

[Arainach]

That's on par with current compression technologies. To go any farther, you have to go to some VERY CPU-intensive compressions, such as 7zip, which just aren't worth the tradeoff.

 

[plonter]

in fact, "juno downloads" let you the option to download in wav,and you can also choose to download in flac(that's kinda new feature i think).
but it cost a whole lot more than lossy.

 

[Jeff Guidry]

Well, that Juno Downloads looks like it's a specialty site for dance music...I'm talking about more general sites like iTunes and Amazon, etc. I know that some band websites, etc. offer lossless downloads.

ADDED: Gosh, 2.47 USD for a .wav track? That's pretty spendy...but it looks like you get a fairly good discount for buying all the tracks on an album...

 

[plonter]

yes..i downloaded a few tracks from there, it's not cheap but it's worth it
if you really want the songs. all the tracks i downloaded from there you cant find in my country and they usally coming out on vinyls and singles,and ordering from abroad will cost me prtty much the same.

but you should try to search juno for other downloads except dance,i know that i once searched the site for rush and sigur ros and found a bunch of meterial. try it.

 

[EnOYiN]

There are compression methods which are way better than the standard ones which are being used right now. However, it's way too CPU intensive to decode them right now though. (like has been said before) The internet already is fast enough for lossless downloads and space is also cheap enough.

Just a fun link: KGB Archiver homepage

That's a program which does some really good compression. Do expect it to take a while even on a multi-core processor. Note that you can't compress already compressed files very well because of the Shannon limit.

 

[Jeff Guidry]

The KGB archiver FAQ says: "you cannot compress graphics or music very well" with the program because the data is too differential. This I believe is the problem with .zip as a music compressor. It does not appear that the KGB archiver is the magic bullet I was looking for for music...

 

[apatN]

Lossless files are already compressed quite a bit and it's not that they are huge. One album is like what, 300MB?

 

[krmathis]

I am sure there are ways to improve compression of audio files beyond what the codecs do today. But I doubt there are very much to gain, and it will hit encoding time (CPU power) quite hard. And probably also decoding time.

Most compressors taking the lead when it comes to compression rates are specialized for text, and don't do to well for audio data. Like PAQ8P, WinRK, PAsQDa, NanoZip, Durilca, KGB, ...
Maximum Compression (lossless data compression software)

 

[Currawong]

FLAC has variable compression settings, but as already has been stated, the higher ones take ages and are extremely intensive to decode.

 

[EnOYiN]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Guidry /img/forum/go_quote.gif The KGB archiver FAQ says: "you cannot compress graphics or music very well" with the program because the data is too differential. This I believe is the problem with .zip as a music compressor. It does not appear that the KGB archiver is the magic bullet I was looking for for music...

That's why I posted it as a fun link. You can compress things like MS Office really well. The answer to your question is faster internet and more hard drive space I'm afraid. Both of them are getting better pretty quickly.

 

[craiglester]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Currawong /img/forum/go_quote.gif FLAC has variable compression settings, but as already has been stated, the higher ones take ages and are extremely intensive to decode.

Actually... FLAC's with higher compression take longer to ENcode, almost all of the hard work is done by the encoder, not the Decoder. FLAC compression level 8 takes WAY longer to encode than level 4.

FLAC - faq

 

[m0ofassa]

theres also levels above 8 IIRC up to 10 and some super duper compressed one from a bootleg flac.exe from hydrogen audio that needs a high buffer on most machines to playback gapless. I personally dont have any problem encoding or decoding flac (encode of an album takes about 4 minutes and i'll get a buffer every 8 hours or so if I do something cpu intensive), but yeah.
As for the question, if we're talking high compression like 10% the size of flac, within reasonability then no, not currently. You'd be lucky to get much runtime from a portable setup using that sort of file, or decode them well on a home rig.
However, you can get very small files with inaudible loss (according to hydrogenaudio) such as the oggenc provided there (also bootleg) where they say its inaudibly lossy at about 160kbps

 

[krmathis]

^ Try the following flac option for high compression:

Code:

[left]flac --lax -P 4096 -b 4608 -m -l 32 -e -p -q 0 -r 0,16[/left]

Its almost identical to the old, and no longer working, "flac --super-secret-totally-impractical-compression-level"

 

[rimrocks]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Guidry /img/forum/go_quote.gif Question: is it theoretically possible to have losslessly compressed files significantly smaller than currently exists (I believe the typical lossless codec can make a file generally between 40-60% smaller than the original)? Are there any breakthroughs on the way?

Wouldn't be holding your breath. Twenty years ago lossless got about 2:1, and that ratio has hardly changed since then.
Fundamentally the question is, 'How different from noise is music?'. You can't compress noise. So as music becomes more tonal, it becomes more easily compressed. Therefore different types or genres of music will have different compression ratios. But overall a 50% reduction seems to be about all we're going to get.