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New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

hydrogenaud.io

11–20 of 201 posts

Re: New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

#11
post #2

Tip for those who are looking at the compression ratios thinking "so what?": look at the run-times. It's a minimum of 3x faster than its contemporaries.

According to the author, right? Those results aren't backed up by Porcus's comments in that thread.

Maybe not x3-5, but Porcus confirms that it is still very fast:

> Though it is fast indeed! The decoding speeds are outright impressive given how FLAC is the fastest thing we ever saw ...

Re: New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

#12
Cool toy and a nice piece for the CV perhaps, but it is difficult to take it seriously if you refuse to offer source code or a implementable specification.

I would give you the benefit of the doubt that it might just be code shyness or perfectionism about something in its early stages, but it looks like the last codec you developed (“HALIC”) is still only available as Windows binaries after a year.

I struggle to see an upside to withholding source code in a world awash with performant open source media codecs.

Re: New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

#13
post #9
post #2

Tip for those who are looking at the compression ratios thinking "so what?": look at the run-times. It's a minimum of 3x faster than its contemporaries.

>It's a minimum of 3x faster than its contemporaries. Ok, but what would make that useful?

> Ok, but what would make that useful?

Lower run-time means less electricity and less tying up of the CPU, making it available for other things. As a real-life example: i frequently use my Raspberry Pi 4 to convert videos from one format to another. This past week i got a Pi 5 and moved the conversion to that machine: it takes maybe 1/4th as much time. The principle with a faster converter, as opposed to faster hardware, is the same: the computer isn't tied up for as long, and not draining as much power.

Re: New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

#14
post #8

For what looks at first glance to be a potentially impactful development, this post and the "encode.su" one linked from it are extremely sparse on details. Where is the source code? A detailed description of what the codec actually does? References to relevant publications? All I see are two mystery Windows binaries, hosted on a forum I've never heard about. The fact that "encode.su" uses the world's most notorious d…

Hydrogenaudio is well known in this area and many new prototype codecs are announced there first. Also, the lack of source control and Windows-only binaries are very much congruent to the style of development there. See it as your confrontation with a new world, because small it is not!

And later, you will learn to understand the depth of the contribution that the ffmpeg project provides :)

Re: New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

#15
post #8

For what looks at first glance to be a potentially impactful development, this post and the "encode.su" one linked from it are extremely sparse on details. Where is the source code? A detailed description of what the codec actually does? References to relevant publications? All I see are two mystery Windows binaries, hosted on a forum I've never heard about. The fact that "encode.su" uses the world's most notorious d…

Also, what does the High Availability in the name of the codec refer to?

I've searched the web and found not a single mention of "high availability" in the context of audio codecs. In fact, the top-ranked result was this very post, which doesn't explain what the term is intended to mean.

Re: New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

#16
post #2

Tip for those who are looking at the compression ratios thinking "so what?": look at the run-times. It's a minimum of 3x faster than its contemporaries.

IMHO that's still a "so what?". I see audio compression as having two primary purposes: realtime and archival, and speed is only vaguely relevant for the former.

In realtime applications, any processor within the last decade is far more than powerful enough to encode and decode in realtime. The first set of tracks in the results is 2862s long and even the slowest WAVPACK manages to encode it in >113x realtime and close to 250x realtime for decode.

For archival, high compression is important, but this codec doesn't compress better than WAVPACK either.

Re: New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

#17
post #8

For what looks at first glance to be a potentially impactful development, this post and the "encode.su" one linked from it are extremely sparse on details. Where is the source code? A detailed description of what the codec actually does? References to relevant publications? All I see are two mystery Windows binaries, hosted on a forum I've never heard about. The fact that "encode.su" uses the world's most notorious d…

The fact that "encode.su" uses the world's most notorious domain extension doesn't inspire confidence, to put it mildly.

The leaders in data compression and information theory are all from the former Soviet Union, so that's no cause for concern.

I think Andrey Markov started it all.

Re: New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

#18
post #14
post #8

For what looks at first glance to be a potentially impactful development, this post and the "encode.su" one linked from it are extremely sparse on details. Where is the source code? A detailed description of what the codec actually does? References to relevant publications? All I see are two mystery Windows binaries, hosted on a forum I've never heard about. The fact that "encode.su" uses the world's most notorious d…

Hydrogenaudio is well known in this area and many new prototype codecs are announced there first. Also, the lack of source control and Windows-only binaries are very much congruent to the style of development there. See it as your confrontation with a new world, because small it is not! And later, you will learn to understand the depth of the contribution that the ffmpeg project provides :)

So people just download .exe files that they see in those forum posts and run them on their machines?

New world indeed...

Re: New Ultra Fast Lossless Audio Codec (HALAC)

#20
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's a minimum of 3x faster than its contemporaries. Ok, but what would make that useful?

> Ok, but what would make that useful? Lower run-time means less electricity and less tying up of the CPU, making it available for other things. As a real-life example: i frequently use my Raspberry Pi 4 to convert videos from one format to another. This past week i got a Pi 5 and moved the conversion to that machine: it takes maybe 1/4th as much time. The principle with a faster converter, as opposed to faster hardw…

Yes, but there's a threshold for effective improvements. If the more compatible and more efficient format only uses 16 seconds to encode 1 hour of audio, it's hard to imagine this making a big difference in any real use case, offline or real-time.
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