OptimFrog

[Lou Seefer]

Greetings,

Is anyone out there working on Quinnware supporting OptimFrog (both dual stream and lossless)? I find QCD player to be an absolutely awesome piece of software, and I feel pretty similar about ofr. It'd be fabulous if there was recognition someday between the two.

Cheers,

Lou Seefer

[Tokelil]

If anyone other than me dont know this format take a look here:
http://losslessaudiocompression.com/

Anyone have any ideas how this compares to other lossless formats?

[Tokelil]

From that page:
This is the list of the new features which will be included in future versions of OptimFROG. For a part of them work is in progress, for others work is just about to start. If you find a useful feature not implemented in OptimFROG, feel free to e-mail me and tell me about it and I will most probably add it to this list:

OptimFROG Lossless and DualStream decoder SDK
QCD input plug-in
CoolEdit (2000 and Pro) fully functional (read/write) plug-in
multichannel support
recovery information at creation and repair for corrupted files
uLaw, ALaw, and IEEE float data types support
automatic speed calculation for all encoding and decoding modes

So it seems like a QCD plugin is in the works. And as long as no decoder SDK is available I guess the plugin has to come from their hands.

[Lou Seefer]

Anyone have any ideas how this compares to other lossless formats?

At highest compression the lossless encoder is usually better than Monkey's Audio and LA...which means it's the tightest compressor known to man. The dual stream (which produces a lossy file and a correction) is very, very good. It gives better quality at about 300 kps than mp3 at 320. Transparent to my ears.

Regards,

Lou Seefer

[brian]

I've been trying out this codec with XMPlay, for which there is already a plugin. The sound is certainly excellent, but I'm left with my usual puzzlement as to how devotees of lossless formats find the hard drive space needed for their music collections. My 20Gb drive would be much too small for my collection if I converted it to OptimFrog; I'd need at least 40Gb, and probably a new motherboard as well. Perhaps I'll get them one day!

[Lou_Seefer]

I've been trying out this codec with XMPlay, for which there is already a plugin. The sound is certainly excellent, but I'm left with my usual puzzlement as to how devotees of lossless formats find the hard drive space needed for their music collections. My 20Gb drive would be much too small for my collection if I converted it to OptimFrog; I'd need at least 40Gb, and probably a new motherboard as well. Perhaps I'll get them one day!

Well, It's not the best format if you're going to be *cough* trading or sending this stuff over a network. I mainly use it because I hate buying CDs twice. When I buy a new one, I clone it with exact audio copy (freeware), compress a copy with Optimfrog, and back it up on a CD-R, so I can recreate the original when it gets all scratched up.

If space and/or bandwidth is a worry, Ogg Vorbis and AAC are good lossy encoders.