Comment by prvc
2 years ago
Yes, but this must be weighed against increased storage costs, not to mention the computational cost of transcoding (and others to do with the proliferation of formats). Within the parameters of this application and taking into account the relative costs of compute and storage (in money or energy), it is not clear to me that there would be any advantage to switching.
The compression rate in audio compression is really limited. In most cases it is difficult to decrease below 50 percent.
Therefore, it is not a logical choice to increase the process rate in order to provide a few percent more compression between audio codecs. As a result, high processing times are high energy.
>Therefore, it is not a logical choice to increase the process rate in order to provide a few percent more compression between audio codecs.
Why not? And for what applications? Example: for a media streaming service, where each file is transferred many times, the bandwidth costs dominate, so it is worthwhile to spend a great deal of time on encoding to maximize efficiency. In the case of an archive, where a large amount of information is stored, accessed infrequently, storage space becomes the constraint, once again. In general, 1 marginal second of CPU time is usually cheaper than 10Mib of marginal storage (or whatever the figure works out to be). Finally, why not just write a fast FLAC encoder?
The only reason Flac is the most popular sound code is that both compression and code -solving is faster than others. The same applies to many formats such as JPEG, MP4, MP3, Rar, Zstandart. What is fast is always advantageous and is a reason for preference. Even if they are not free. As you mentioned, of course, it does not apply to every situation.
Flac is already existing. There are also a lot of workers on it. I always want to try independent and different things.
> ... it is not clear to me that there would be any advantage to switching.
Indeed, getting an accurate answer would require looking at the whole constellation for a given use case.