SELA – Simple Lossless Audio | Hacker News Reader

SELA – Simple Lossless Audio

github.com

23 pointsfla17 comments

To all those complaining about the lack of details or the lack of need for yet another format, please note that this looks more like a personal toy project for its creator (and others) to learn about audio compression rather than something being proposed for general use. Please don't needlessly punish people for open-sourcing their code.

That's nice, but I don't see anybody "needlessly punishing people for open-sourcing their code". Enough people found this project interesting enough for it to appear on the frontpage of HN. Other people are obviously confused and curious why this is the case. It's not like there's one and only "toy audio-codec project" on github, you know.

The README is very light on content. Any discussion of lossless audio should include a FLAC comparison. FLAC is already sadly undersupported (ahem, Apple). Could the submitter shed some light on what makes SELA different from its predecessors?

Personally I wish we could see Lossy FLAC support from all distributors and players, it's the smartest encoding I've seen. But also totally ignored in format discussions.

Exactly. And it's not like FLAC is the only alternative: there're plenty of good lossless codecs: wavpack is great, TAK is really strong and probably could be considered even better than FLAC in the technical sense, but it's closed source so fuck it. There's really a lot of codecs with their pros and cons, and it's nice combination of features (good design, popularity, some hardware support) that make FLAC so great.

So one more "free codec" with no mention what is it and how does it compare to the existing ones is really worth nothing. I wonder why it made it to the front page at all.

About what "Lossy FLAC" you're talking about? Do you mean perhaps [1]?

If FLAC would ever gain a lossy mode, it would be a disaster, because it would be instantly (ab)used and it would be misleading to a lot of users. "FLAC is not Lossy" [2] and it will hopefully remain that way forever.

(Of course it doesn't prevent people from encoding audio into FLAC from lossy formats, but it's a completely different matter.)

  [1] http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=55522
  [2] https://xiph.org/flac/features.html

In addition, Xiph also has two lossy codecs, Vorbis and Opus, which are actually designed for lossy encoding. Opus is also currently the best available codec for music compression, among both free and nonfree competitors: http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm

If I wanted a hybrid format, WavPack [1] would have been great, if only there was more ecosystem support for it.

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=WavPack

Simple, dont use Apple products for your audio needs. Or are you refering to itunes?

FLAC could have led early on except for Apple insisting on their proprietary and nearly identical but DRM-possible ALAC format. Nobody adopted ALAC but the damage was done. Only then did Apple open the ALAC format.

Well, there's nothing wrong with ALAC which works flawlessly in Apple's world and any player worth its money.

And since all of this is lossless, it's not as if you're locking into a format.

Would you kindly explain why do we need YAMF (Yet Another Media Format) when we already have FLAC?

The README says "Part of my ongoing project about writing a lossless audio encoder" so it sounds like it's meant to be educational.

Why do we need another blog platform when we have Xanga? Why do we need another search engine when we have Altavista?

It's a reasonable question - the proponent of a new technology should be able to articulate the benefit it brings. FLAC does have the merits of being lossless, open, royalty-free, stable, widespread, and extensible.

Of course I wouldn't discourage anyone from developing their own codec as a learning exercise, but essentially the format war is over, FLAC won, and it's hard to think of use cases for any plausible alternatives. On the other hand, there's still plenty of room to make one's mark in the video space.

I feel a personal project of this complexity is worthy of peer review. That's why I up voted it. I don't think its fair to evaluate it outside of its own context at this stage. This is an open source project, not a start up.

I was not talking about blogging platforms and search engines. As another commenter said FLAC has everything we need. A lot of blogging platforms / search engines are as far from perfect as possible.

What's the compression ratio?

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