Freesound Forums

What about adding WavPack to the supported audio formats? More and more applications seem to support it. Reaper and Wavosaur for example.

I'm using this format at home for backup storage. The nice thing is that it even supports 32bit floating point formats (which FLAC doesn't).

http://www.wavpack.com

to be honest supporting Flac is a pain: many beginners don't know how to use flac, and thus we get a lot of questions about it.

supporting an even less known format (should we also support monkey's audio and shorten?) will create a big avalanche of new questions.

- Bram

Ok. Was just an idea.

Btw: Monkey's Audio is bullshit Just watch the CPU usage on playback start of a file ...

Bram
to be honest supporting Flac is a pain: many beginners don't know how to use flac, and thus we get a lot of questions about it.

supporting an even less known format (should we also support monkey's audio and shorten?) will create a big avalanche of new questions.

- Bram

Wavpack is directly supported by:

A) cool edit (now - adobe audition)
B) steinberg wavelab (often alite version is/was added to sound hardware)
C) rockbox firmware (see rockbox.org for details) patched players with recording capability (many of them have internal mic or possibility to connect one), like iriver h1xx, sansa etc.; they can act as pretty nice and cheap field recorders.
D) other software mentioned above.

On rockbox players - wavpack seems to be very fast, and therefore they implemented it as a recording alternative to uncompressed wav.

I can't imagine my work without wavpack. I use it to backup my sound projects, in order to have direct access to such compressed archive. Also - sending uncompressed, large/long wav files - is painful, especially on lower connections.

Besides wavpack has a very nice lossy compression (about 200kbps), which is very friendly to field recordings that contain noise patterns (wavpack does not produces distortions like mp3, but adds a little bit of noisy artifacts; that was the reason, why I resigned from using musepack for certain kind of recordings).

Bram - I think this are very fair arguments regarding wavpack implementation. By implementing new options - it is your task, to make people aware, why they are worth to be used. They become popular if you have a good promo, and as so big website - you have an influence on the market.

toiletrolltube
I've never heard of wavpack, but I think Bram is right - enough with all these different formats - too much hassle. I use Cooledit which doesn't support Flac, decompressing to wave is no problem. And why would you prefer lossy compression over lossless?

I think wavepack is an attractive option, but I also understand why other tasks might have a higher priority.

But, if we implement wavpack, we should support all these!
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison#Comparison_Table

What is the advantage of supporting more than one type of lossless compression of freesound? I can see the advantage of supporting aif/wav because many people have their material in this form, but when considering all the lossless options, flac is definitely the best known!

The biggest problem is that users are in general not very knowledgeable about these special formats. Flac files already gather a lot of "what is this??" questions from downloaders...

This is of course very inexact, but...

Average number of downloads per file type:

ogg: 247.2680
wav: 214.2621
mp3: 204.6010
aif: 183.2341
flac: 111.3534

Percentage of files @ freesound:

wav: 69.9%
aif: 11.3%
mp3: 11.1%
flac: 6.6%
ogg: 0.8%

- bram

I totally agree with Bram.

Supporting more file types might make things more convenient for a small percentage of uploaders, but much more inconvenient for the majority of downloaders. Remember files are only uploaded once, but are downloaded many thousands of times. I am very unlikely to download any file in a format not directly recognised by Audacity for instance, even to give it a more critical listen than can be got from the preview. I think anybody posting in a less common format will be thoroughly disappointed with the small number of downloads it gets. I have better things to do than find and download file format converts just so I can audition the odd sound file here and there.

Sorry Dstruct, don't mean to sound negative, but overall there is much less time and inconvenience involved for everybody if you do the conversions to fit in with your system (which I'm not criticising) than the vast majority of downloaders would have to do to fit in with theirs.

Wibby

This is a *very* old thread (the first post dates back to 2008, in case you haven't noticed) but I want to point out that the comment about flac being unable to store 24bit samples is wrong.

I remember we held a similar discussion ages ago, personally I'm a fan of flac. I still use it in my personal archive but gave up uploading to fresound in this format both, because of the number of users that complained and... because my inet connection is now faster

D

dobroide
I want to point out that the comment about flac being unable to store 24bit samples is wrong

It's unable to store 32bit floating point samples.

Dstruct

dobroide
I want to point out that the comment about flac being unable to store 24bit samples is wrong

It's unable to store 32bit floating point samples.

A lot of online databases can't store 32 bit floating point. or at least would prefer not to. its a larger file than regular 32bit.

kantouth
A lot of online databases can't store 32 bit floating point.

Freesound can.

Actually, I've been thinking: what we COULD allow is that people upload wavpack and flac files, but we store them uncompressed and show/offer them to the user as WAV files. We have the space...

That way uploaders can use flac/wavpack/ape/whatever to save uploading time, but we don't annoy people by using a format they don;t understand.

What do you guys think about that?

- bram

Sounds fine.

That way uploaders can use flac/wavpack/ape/whatever to save uploading time, but we don't annoy people by using a format they don;t understand.
What do you guys think about that?
- bram

A very good idea. Helps some people, upsets nobody.

wavpack is different from other lossles formats (like flac, ape and others), because it is supported by some major and widely known "audio editors" directly (via free input plugin), without need of recompression. people who create music from samples (like me) - are using audio editors. I have about 130GB (in about 35 000 files) of sonic material from my ongoing and finalized albums, sound experiments and so on. all wavpack. it's also easier to burn on DVDs (less space) and to use with pendrives. in wave it would be, I don't know, 400GB?

I don't insist.
I just suggest.
What I'm saying - comes from experience, not vague theory.
(-;

I remember a time, when people were delighted with the APE, because of it's great compression and speed. so what happened then? lack of software (major editors) and hardware (ape became supported by rockbox very late) support made the opposite. flac became more popular because of hardware support (non-rockbox players) abd web-shopping. wavpack won with it because it was supported by the software and hardware (unfortunately mostly rockbox only). what makes the audio format good? capability to use it.

on the other hand, you are right, that there are common users. but if you have so much space, you could add an option for uncompressed wav/aif files only - "download always as wavpack" (cookie stored setting?) and link to info page with plugins for various software and explanation (-;

p.s.: I saw, that some sound pack are missing (error page appears, either missing file or bad gateway) - when did you made last link auto check-up?

"download as wevpack" would mean we need to store 1.5x the amount we store right now and the usage it will get will be nearly zero (so, we only lose, not win).

The only thing we MIGHT do is offer the low quality mp3 version as downloads for people who just want a sound on their mobile phone. It might actually save us a lot of bandwidth that one

We always try to be nicer to uploaders than downloaders, so I do see that the option of uploading wavpac/flac/... formats should be added. I like that idea! I've added a ticket in our development space.

- bram

1.5x, I know, I know (-;

And perhaps you are even more right Bram. I overlooked the fact, that for multitrack use - I must make all project files 44.1kHz anyway (while the uploads have various samplerate).

Adding the wavpack option for uploaders is nice. One re-conversion routine less. Reedit-Save-Upload with no need to unpack and recompress back for further use.

*

Small mp3s for mobiles - hmm... I don't know. For lossless it's fine, but some standard should be considered to make the compromise between compression and quality. But would be used for lossy too? On one hand, mp3 (despite its popularity) - does not likes to be recoverted to mp3 again, on the other hand - if the uploaded files are in lower quality - would there be a scripting tool, that determines which files reconvert (let say 200kbps+) and which not? Besides it could cause some chaos after download (prefix or sufix should solve it).

The idea itself is good, because preview is not (plus - in firefox has some glitches during start), and to chceck the potential of file - usually I must download it anyway (it applies rather to noisy and field recordings). Online preview could use mobile files in better quality. If the online previews are generated dynamically, then you would save some CPU usage probably.

Should this be reconsidered now?

With Ambisonics, and High Order Ambisonics (HOA), becoming more common now, WavPack is very useful.

Yes I just ran into some problems with OGG Vorbis multichannel files and would rather use a not compressed format to begin with. So yes, wavepack would be great to offer Ambisonics B-Format uncompressed files on freesound that can be under the filesize limit of 1 GB! FLAC unfortunately only supports 8 channels...