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> lossless audio isn't necessary As an audio engineer, I must point out what is wrong with this statement. Sure, the average listener cannot discern between F
by AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
> lossless audio isn't necessary
As an audio engineer, I must point out what is wrong with this statement.
Sure, the average listener cannot discern between FLAC and a well-encoded lossy audio file. However, with the Web Audio API making big advancements, the need for in-browser FLAC support is becoming quite apparent.
People are building all sorts of web apps for creating, manipulating, and processing audio. For this use case, working with lossy audio is out of the question. Supporting FLAC means the ability to follow signal flow best practices [0] without requiring the user to work with much larger PCM files.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_signal_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_signal_flow
- mmastrac 10y agoI think this is the most reasonable argument for supporting FLAC natively. We have support for lossless images in the browser already - TIFF isn't the image analogue, but rather PNG.
- ansgri 10y agoExcept that PNG is by far not sufficient in professional image manipulation: it's compression scheme is good and 8uc{3,4} is lossless, but beyond 8bpc you're out of luck. I'd love to have a wide-supported float32 format with reasonable lossless (and maybe lossy) compression options. Conversely, FLAC supports different resolutions and sampling rates, so it does do the job for the sound processing.