Lossless audio support

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stuart
stuart's picture
Joined: June 24, 2009

I've raised the idea of lossless audio file (flac, wavpack, even lossless WMA) support on the Mulch list before. For archival purposes and to save disk space I store mulch wavs in flac, and it's a hassle having to flac -d them whenever I want to play an old Mulch file.

The counter argument then (which I think is still valid) was that support for lossless audio would mean extra processing for Mulch during playback, which would have a significant performance cost. This is a sensible point. However, I don't see why, when loading an amh file, Mulch couldn't

a) decompress LoopPlayer audio into the appropriate format Mulch uses in memory; and
b) decompress FilePlayer audio into a temporary folder.

Obviously there would be a performance penalty when loading the .amh, but none during actual playback.

Additionally, it would be useful to have an extra option with the Save a Copy with Sound Files functionality whereby you could choose to save to a single zip or other appropriate archive format containing the compressed files and .amh.

I often email Mulch files to another Mulcher for collaboration and this would be very useful, rather than having to compress and zip the files manually each time.

And of course it would be useful to be able to load such a zip file into Mulch directly.

I don't think this is a terribly urgent problem, but for managing tracks archivally over the longer term I think these options would be extremely useful.

Thanks

Stuart

JM Charcot
JM Charcot's picture
Joined: June 24, 2009

I'd love to have the flac support in mulch.!

Kind regards,

JM.

jonah
jonah's picture
Joined: September 13, 2010

How about apple lossless m4a in OS X?

Ross B.
Ross B.'s picture
Joined: April 11, 2009

I agree with all of the above (although I probably wouldn't bother with the pre-decompressing for streaming). The only challenge is that this will require a complete re-write of the AM file streaming system and that's not where I'm putting my energy right now. In the future perhaps.