
SELA – Simple Lossless Audio - fla
https://github.com/sahaRatul/sela
======
rcthompson
To all those complaining about the lack of details or the lack of need for yet
another format, please note that this looks more like a personal toy project
for its creator (and others) to learn about audio compression rather than
something being proposed for general use. Please don't needlessly punish
people for open-sourcing their code.

~~~
krick
That's nice, but I don't see anybody "needlessly punishing people for open-
sourcing their code". Enough people found this project interesting enough for
it to appear on the frontpage of HN. Other people are obviously confused and
curious why this is the case. It's not like there's one and only "toy audio-
codec project" on github, you know.

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doublerebel
The README is very light on content. Any discussion of lossless audio should
include a FLAC comparison. FLAC is already sadly undersupported (ahem, Apple).
Could the submitter shed some light on what makes SELA different from its
predecessors?

Personally I wish we could see Lossy FLAC support from all distributors and
players, it's the smartest encoding I've seen. But also totally ignored in
format discussions.

~~~
przemoc
About what "Lossy FLAC" you're talking about? Do you mean perhaps [1]?

If FLAC would ever gain a lossy mode, it would be a disaster, because it would
be instantly (ab)used and it would be misleading to a lot of users. "FLAC is
not Lossy" [2] and it will hopefully remain that way forever.

(Of course it doesn't prevent people from encoding audio into FLAC from lossy
formats, but it's a completely different matter.)

    
    
      [1] http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=55522
      [2] https://xiph.org/flac/features.html

~~~
TD-Linux
In addition, Xiph also has two lossy codecs, Vorbis and Opus, which are
actually designed for lossy encoding. Opus is also currently the best
available codec for music compression, among both free and nonfree
competitors: [http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm](http://listening-
test.coresv.net/results.htm)

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edem
Would you kindly explain why do we need YAMF (Yet Another Media Format) when
we already have FLAC?

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cmdrfred
Why do we need another blog platform when we have Xanga? Why do we need
another search engine when we have Altavista?

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anigbrowl
It's a reasonable question - the proponent of a new technology should be able
to articulate the benefit it brings. FLAC does have the merits of being
lossless, open, royalty-free, stable, widespread, and extensible.

Of course I wouldn't discourage anyone from developing their own codec as a
learning exercise, but essentially the format war is over, FLAC won, and it's
hard to think of use cases for any plausible alternatives. On the other hand,
there's still plenty of room to make one's mark in the video space.

~~~
cmdrfred
I feel a personal project of this complexity is worthy of peer review. That's
why I up voted it. I don't think its fair to evaluate it outside of its own
context at this stage. This is an open source project, not a start up.

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mannewalis
What's the compression ratio?

