[linux-audio-user] Apple Lossless codec

[Eric Dantan Rzewnicki]

On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 03:29:08AM -0700, Malcolm Baldridge wrote:
> > I would very much like to be able to record and read ogg/vorbis and 
> > ogg/flac files in ecasound[0]. I'm not an experienced coder, but I can 
> > read C/C++ (at least a little ... ) and I am an experienced sysadmin, so
> While reading Ogg/FLAC is sensible, "recording to" FLAC is not sensible
> since it will induce potential bottlenecks and delays which may cause your
> recording latency to the exceed a reasonable level.  It's not trivial to
> compress audio data losslessly, and I highly doubt any commercial audio
> product records to a compressed format NATIVELY and on the fly, as opposed
> to an operation that occurs after the real-time nature of recording is
> completed.  FLAC might squeeze 2:1, but the CPU cost is disproportionate to
> the I/O costs of storing the audio uncompressed.

Of course, certainly, point well taken. I wasn't clear in my initial 
statements. ecasound can be used in both real- and non-real-time. It's 
also scriptable. In scripts where the CPU is needed in realtime I would
do the flac encoding in a separate step, as I do in some cases for 
ogg-vorbis encoding now. In some cases my scripts aren't using the CPU
that much and it would be more convenient to skip the extra step and go
directly to flac.

I guess I should have said that I would like to be able to compose
ecasound scripts that take flac files as input and result in flac files
as output. I'm mainly interested in saving storage space.

> As far as reading/writing Ogg/FLAC files for processing, etc, that's another
> matter entirely.  ecasound (whatever that is) should be able to read/write
> those during non-real-time operations.

ecasound is a very versatile and extremely useful tool for multitrack
recording, editing, effects processing, playback, mixing and format
conversions. It can be used from the commandline or in an interactive
console mode. The same commands used in the interactive mode are
available via ECI, the Ecasound Control Interface. ECI has been
implemented in C, C++, perl, python, ruby, php and emacs-lisp. I use the
python version.

http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecasound/welcome.html

> Even the Lord Elrond is attuned to Quality in the Darkest Hours,

If the Lord Elrond had ecasound he could even use it to tune his lyre.

> =MB=
> -- 
> A focus on Quality.

ecasound is quality.


-Eric Rz.