Compression and speed of lossless audio formats
Encouraged lately by some new & improved lossless audio formats, I got curious how all these would compare in a graphical form, as a function of their (realtime) speed.
Seven albums with different music types were used. Each album was ripped to a single big wav file, then compressed and decompressed with batchfiles like this (renamed to .txt for convenience). Then the file creation times and -sizes were entered in excel worksheets, where also the graphs were generated.
The speed results come from my 900 MHz Athlon PC, harddisk in ATA-66 mode, W2000 SP3. I noticed that the highest-speed formats not only depend on the CPU, but also on the harddisk read/write speed. For example with shorten, CPU usage only reaches about 70%. To have the harddisk's performance as constant as possible, I kept it defragged before running each batchfile, and erased the generated lossless- and wav files afterwards, so the files got placed in about the same place on the harddisk.
Graphs:
In the graphs, the Y-axis shows the compressed file size as a percentage of
the uncompressed (wav) file size.
The X-axis shows the speed, for example 10 means a 5 minute track was processed
in 30 seconds.
Use the links on top of the page to switch quickly between the graphs.
| graph | album | comments |
|---|---|---|
| Titanic | James Horner: Titanic - Music from the motion picture (1997) | Orchestral music, only one song (Celine Dion). |
| Gema | Gema Cuatro: Grandes boleros a capella (1994) | A capella quartet. |
| Fleetwood | Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1977) | Soft rock. |
| Aphex | Aphex Twin: Richard D. James album (1996) | Electronica. |
| Trance | Trance 2001, The 4th edition, CD1 | Trance compilation mix. |
| Platina | De platina editie (2000) | Compilation of ballads, pop & rock songs. |
| Steve | Steve Vai: Passion & warfare (1990) | Guitar rock. |
| All albums | Average result of all 7 albums. | Each album weighs equally (irrespective of playtime). |
| All (2004) | All 7 albums, but with some old compressor versions. | |
| All (2003) | All 7 albums, but with some even older compressor versions. |
Compressors tested:
| homepage | ext | version released |
winamp plugin |
foobar plugin | used compressor presets (default) comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monkey's Audio | .ape | 4.01b2 feb 2006 |
3.99 | 2.1 | fast (c1000), normal (c2000), high (c3000), extra high (c4000), insane. |
| Free
Lossless Audio Codec |
.flac | 1.1.2 feb 2005 |
1.1.2 | inclu'd | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. |
| Lossless Audio | .la | 0.4 apr 2003 |
0.4 | 0.4 | (default), high. |
| OptimFROG | .ofr | 4.520b1 apr 2006 |
1.07 | 1.21b | fast, normal, high, extra, best, highnew, extranew. |
| WavPack | .wv | 4.31 dec 2005 |
2.3 | inclu'd | fast, fx2, fx4,
fx6, (default), x2, x4, high, hx2. For clarity, the decompression graphs only show the letters f, d and h. |
| RK Audio | .rka | 1.07 oct 2000 |
1.0.5 | no | 1 (fast), 2 (normal), 3 (max). |
| Windows
Media Audio (lossless) |
.wma | 9.0 jan 2003 |
inclu'd | 9.0 | default. dBpowerAMP Music Converter was used. |
| Shorten@shnutils Shorten@etree |
.shn | 3.6.0 may 2004 |
2.0.2 | 0.3.14 | default. ICL6 binary by john33 was used (en/decodes 15/5% faster than Cygwin binary). |
| WinRAR | .rar | 3.51 oct 2005 |
no | inclu'd | normal. |
| ALAC (Apple Lossless) |
.m4a | - apr 2004 |
no | 1.0 | default. iTunes 4.5 was used. |
| The
True Audio compressor |
.tta | 3.3 may 2005 |
3.1 | 2.4.2 | default. |
| MPEG-4
ALS (Audio Lossless) |
.als | RM17 apr 2006 |
1.00 | no | 1(-a-o5), 2(-a-o10), 3(-o10), 4(-a-o30), 5(-a-b-o50), 6(-a-b-o50-g1), 7(-a-b-o50-t2) Also used -r5 for Winamp seeking. These are preset suggestions only. |
| Lossless
Predictive Audio Compression |
.pac | 1.41 feb 2002 |
1.00 | @case | 2 (simple), 3
(medium), 4 (high), 5 (extra high). Development frozen, replaced by MPEG-4 ALS |
Some other links:
Lossless
Encoding forum at Hydrogenaudio, and the original
thread that made me start this page.
Lossless
comparison wiki at Hydrogenaudio, it considers many properties, not just
speed and compression.
Speek's encoder frontends
for most of the above formats, and his Comparison
of lossless audio compressors.
Updates:
4 June 2003: OptimFrog 4.506 with new 'highnew' mode
(compression with other modes did not change since 4.504b).
21 June 2003: Updated hyperlinks.
17 January 2004: Added tta.
1 May 2004: Updated ape, ofr, shn, rar, tta, hyperlinks, removed winamp seeking
comments, new Apple Lossless, removed BONK.
9 May 2004: Updated WavPack.
19 May 2004: Some more WavPack levels.
3 July 2006: Updated ape, flac, ofr, wv, rar, tta, hyperlinks.
7 July 2006: New MPEG-4 ALS, removed LPAC.
11 July 2006: Some more ALS levels.
Hans