[OT]Software patents end? ??:) light at the end of tunnel

Andy Green andy at openmoko.com
Fri Nov 28 12:15:27 CET 2008


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Somebody in the thread at some point said:

|> FLAC *is* compressed, but it's lossless compression, meaning that there
|> is no change to the sound when you encode it to FLAC, Whereas when you
|> encode to MP3 or ogg, you're losing audio information.
|
| I'd like to point out also that the CD source is already lossy in that
| it is a digital representation of analog signals. Recording companies,
| however, compensate for this and work to make the sound output from a CD
| player as ideal as possible,

About FLAC it's actually really interesting.

They do a lossy compression action like most other codecs, but they then
decode it and compute an additional "error channel", the difference
between what the lossy decoder gives and the original it still has
access to at encode time.  The error channel is compressed in the gzip
type sense and added into the FLAC file along with the lossy encode.

The end user FLAC decoder does the lossy decompression and then adds on
the error channel to give a lossless result in the end.

(Sorry Arne... but it's kind of on-topic you know with the Android image
getting recooked for this).

- -Andy
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