Lossless Audio Codec Comparison 2007

[Tab.]

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. But since I'm a nice guy, I'll paste the results below.





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 mirrored results. Also, have a nice graph. 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 comps are up yet. The rest of the site is gold, though. Enjoy the 4chan gallery :]

[LantisEscudo]

Interesting. I am curious, though, how differing types of audio might change the results (classical music vs. rock vs. speech vs. a movie soundtrack), etc.. This comparison was done with only one track by a group I'd class as rock, so I'm wondering whether the content effected the results.

[Tab.]

Well, of course the result will vary by the type of music. But this album is one of the few actual, CD-quality albums I own, so I was a bit limited :|

[LantisEscudo]

Okay, I'm just curious as to how much. I'll have to try my own comparisons; I've got a pretty eclectic collection of CDs.

Oh, and thanks for introducing me to such an interesting musical group. I've already ordered their album based on the preview tracks they have available.

[Tab.]

Oh, and thanks for introducing me to such an interesting musical group. I've already ordered their album based on the preview tracks they have available.

Yeah, I love their sound. It's so melodic and epic. My favorite songs, in this order, are:
Kill the Lights
The Dream
Under the Stairs
The first is new and it's available on their Myspace. I've got both CDs. Maybe I'll add Violet to the comparison.

[LantisEscudo]

Kill the Lights is excellent, as is Blue.

Do you have a list of command lines and settings you used? I'm not familiar with the settings on a number of these codecs.

[shumira_chan]

I'm not sure his is very useful. I did a quick and dirty test with a song I ripped from a CD and got the following:

50991404b t.wav
45291956b t.zip
45291834b t.gz
42346043b t.bz2
30129324b t.flac

This is actually what I expected, I was very surprised to see that zip outperformed audio-oriented compression codecs (such as flac) in your test. Also, each compressor has a myriad of options, some very specific to compressing audio data. In my experience there isn't much point to these tests, ultimately one has to use the compression which best suits the data at hand. Of course, there're other important issues: many players can play audio oriented codecs (e.g. flac), but few, if any, will decode generic compression (e.g. zip).