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what's your "favorite" codec?

CommanderBubba - Mar 22, 2004

		CommanderBubba		Mar 22, 2004
			what's your "favorite" codec? So, audio encoding is a big deal these days, what with everybody trying to get stuff to sound nice but have small file sizes. And to think, just a few short years ago, everyone was using analogue audio casettes, and the majority of people didn't bother to use a Dolby System tape recorder or "position II" cassttes to get rid of all the hissing and interference. Nobody complained (that I ever can remember) about their mix tapes for the car not sounding "perfect"... But now, Audiophiles are on the rise! Taking it to the street.... (Of course, those dumb-asses that download 8000 songs of KaZaa in 112 kbps don't apply here, they're just weird and stupid, IMHO) So, what's your "favorite" audio codec? The one you find most interesting? Me, the audio codec I think is most interesting is AC3 Dolby Digital. Why? Well, if you read the whitepaper on it, you'll begin to realize what people with a couple of PhD's (one in music and the other in engineering) do for a living... According to "legend" (and the whitepaper) they originally had to design a codec to hold the 6 digital audio tracks (center, front left, front right, surround left, surround right, and the theatre's "rumble" track that made the place shake when the Tyrannosaur in Jurassic Park was walking around...) that would fit on a strip of digital audio tape that went in-between the projector holes on the edge of the 72mm filmstrip and could be read by an audio processor in the projector system. The result: a lot of kung-fu programming and sneakiness (in terms of saving bandwidth and hiding audio "artifacts") that gives you 6 channels at about 448 kbps and is the industry gold standard. Apparently, they also broadcast the sound for HDTV in AC3 too, but I've never seen HDTV in action.

		Alexvrb		Mar 22, 2004
			what's your "favorite" codec? If you include such things as universal compatibility, regular MP3 with a good encoder like LAME is always great. I particularly favor this for use with videos if I am using the .avi container. So I guess my favorite is regular ancient MP3, though not at 112 kbps, except maybe in a video with j-stereo. 192+ kbits true stereo is preferable for music. If you want to know what the "best", most advanced codec is today, I'd have to say Ogg Vorbis. It achieves pretty excellent quality at moderate bitrates. However, you have to use their stupid filter to play them back, standalone players don't support it (yet?), and there's no reliable ACM codec so you have to encode seperately and mux if you're using with a video. There's one more codec... that has gotten my attention recently, though it isn't even out yet. Upcoming implementations of multichannel MP3 promise to blow away AC3. It allows you to have more channels at comparatively low bitrates, while still being compatible with older players (though they'll only decode it as stereo, quality will be the same). Unfortunetely, they'll most certainly want to make money off it - so while it is interesting, I don't know that it will see widespread use, unless we see free implementations of it. Edit: I forgot to mention my favorite for lossless codecs. Monkey's Audio is free, decently fast, has excellent compression compared to other free solutions, and the source is available. Playback can be a bit of an issue if you actually use it to compress music you play, but really I would only consider using it to cut down on space for archiving music (smaller than generic archives like .rar or .ace, MUCH smaller than raw). So if you want to have a perfect archive of your music CDs, you can't go wrong with Monkey's.

		it290		Mar 22, 2004
			what's your "favorite" codec? I like Shorten for lossless compression.

		Alexvrb		Mar 22, 2004
			what's your "favorite" codec? From what I've seen in tests, it is faster but has less compression. Monkey's and FLAC both seem to strike a pretty good balance with some of their modes, better compression and still not too slow. If you want pure size, apparently La 0.4 is the best, but slow as balls. Like you'll be lucky if you can decode it in realtime

		kahuna		Mar 24, 2004
			what's your "favorite" codec? FLAC looks promising to me.