Re: [tlug] Lossless Audio Compression

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim  <jep200404@example.com> writes:

    Jim> Godwin wrote:

    >> But does  really exist?

    Jim> I don't know much about this. You know more than I.

of course it does.  For example, this (rather useless) script,
scomp[1], is a lossless compressor[sic]:

#! /bin/sh
echo "This is a SCOMP losslessly compressed file." >$2
echo "To decompress, use 'tail +2 $2 >EXPANDED'." >>$2
cat $1 >> $2
# no bugs, never fails!
exit (0)

It just has a larger set of files for which it gets negative
compression than the more common formats do.  (Hint "touch
borkborkbork; gzip -v9 borkborkbork; ls -s borkborkbork.gz".)

    Jim> Of course, classic lossless codecs such as gzip, compress,
    Jim> zip, bzip2 are reliably lossless, but since they are not
    Jim> tailored for audio, have low compression rates for audio.

I will hazard a guess that the real problem with bzip2 (and there's an
even better generic compressor out there, I forget what it's called,
which would have the same problem) is processing time, not size.  I
suppose you could get some benefit by doing a block-sorting algorithm
on bitstreams rather than byte streams, too, but there's no way that
waiting for bzip2 to finish would be acceptable for most rippers.



Footnotes: 
[1]  a Gold Star if you can figure out why SCOMP.

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