On 27/10/06, Tom Fine wrote:
A couple of points on this:
1. even if a format is truly lossless vis-a-vis audio quality (which
is perfectly achievable through standard data-compression techniques),
I would argue that it adds some risk and complexity to your digital
archive. The reason is that compressed data, by its very nature, is
more vulnerable to corruption and complete loss if a smaller area of a
storage medium is damaged.
I agree with this. I can't see that the risk is worth it for a space
saving of up to 50%, now that storage media are so big.
In a plain WAV or AIFF file, if one bit is corrupt, it will just give a
small click (which can be repaired), and has no effect on any other
samples. In a compressed file, any fault can affect a whole sequence of
samples, or even make the file unreadable from that point to the end.
And audio files are big, so there is more chance of one file developing
a fault somewhere than in the traditional compressed text or GIF files.
Regards