FLAC and other audio stuff

Monkey’s Audio beats FLAC, sometimes marginally, on compression while maintaining relatively close encoding time. Other lossless codecs might compress better, but have much higher times. At least, this is what I learned by looking at the FLAC comparison to other lossless codecs at the FLAC site.

NeroPlugins.cd-rw.org has lots of audio plug-ins for Nero, including a FLAC plug-in. Now I can burn straight from Nero, and I don’t have to worry about the quality of its MP3 decoder. (Hopefully the decoder provided at that page is making straightforward calls to FLAC’s code, and was compiled with a decent compiler. … Suddenly I’m not feeling so confident.) The people at the Hydrogen Audio forums seem to think that APE 2.0 tags are better than ID3v2, or at least that’s my impression after doing some reading.

Another thread on Hydrogen Audio where people talk about archiving with FLAC to CD-R they mention (a) storing PAR information with the files, and (b) storing cue sheets. (Or is that CUE sheets?) The idea with PAR sounds kind of neat, assuming it won’t be that much overhead. However, the CUE sheet idea made me look in to it.

If you want to make an accurate copy of an audio CD, even those ones with nasty hidden tracks in the pregap or whatever, you need a cue sheet for that CD apparently. I thought I could make such a cue sheet with CDRDAO, but it looks like it has to actually step through the whole CD — augh! It doesn’t seem to do it too speedily either. Then I found out that CDRDAO doesn’t actually make a cue sheet, but its own format (TOC). Indeed I can’t find a program to make a cue sheet by reading a CD in Linux. Moreover, it seems most of the people that do this actually archive their entire audio CD into one big WAV/FLAC file. Though apparently foobar2000 and WinAMP with the WinAMP mp3cue plug-in or something similar might be able to play from this format, it seems kind of unacceptable to me. (Aside: a similar plug-in for XMMS may exist, from a glance at some Google results.) This WinAMP plug-in (for example) looks like it makes a separate playlist, and I bet the UI on that isn’t as nice as the built-in playlist. I kind of like having tracks in separate files anyway. It might be possible that cdparanoia is going to rip the whole CD, pregaps and all, and I could still rebuild the CD if I had the cue sheet. Until I find a better way to make the cue sheet, though, no cue sheet for me. I hope I don’t regret that choice in the future.

I really went to Hydrogen Audio for some discussion on optimum FLAC flags, since Abcde is using a whole bunch of flags I’m not familiar with. I didn’t find any of this discussion. However, I did find information on the --super-secret-totally-impractical-compression-level flag for FLAC. So maybe the night wasn’t a total waste.

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Random page with lots of links to specifications for various CD and related stuff.