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Comment by proyb2 | Hacker News Reader

Between Brotli and FLIF, which is good enough?

Brotli is excellent at text and does a great job at compressing overall, but FLIF is written directly to excel at lossless image compression, hence FLIF will be much better unless it's a really poor solution (which results show it's certainly not).

Likewise Brotli will not beat FLAC at compressing audio, since FLAC is specifically written to do that.

Actually, FLAC doesn't have a very good compression ratio (e.g. see [1]). It does have features that are very important for audio streams: it can be quickly resynced and AFAIK decompression proceeds at nearly-constant speed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7893171

Even so, I would be very surprised if FLAC did not outperform general purpose compressors if the test is done on a wider range of music than a single piano piece (which should be very compressable overall as audio goes).

edit: went and did a test on a couple of tracks, using brotli: bro --quality 11 --window 24 against flac -8 (best settings in both cases)

  satie - gymnopedie no 1:
  wav: 41.6mb
  brotli: 28.1mb
  flac: 14.7mb

  ram jam - black betty:
  wav: 41.8
  brotli: 35.8
  flac: 26.5

  vangelis - tao of love:
  wav: 29.4
  brotli: 23.0
  flac: 13.4

  meat load - paradise by the dashboard light:
  wav: 89.3
  brotli: 78.3
  flac: 58.5

certainly not a massive test, and there are likely general purpose compressors which does a better job than brotli, still I feel rather convinced that they will not do better than FLAC other than in extreme cases such as the piano piece you linked to.

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