Feature Request: Support for FLAC

Question

I couldn't find any information on supported audio formats. Looking at other libraries, AIFF, WAV (which varieties of WAV?) are supported. I tried adding FLAC samples, but no luck. Are there any plans to add FLAC support?

Answer 1

Thanks for your request! I'm hoping to support this in the future.

Comments

Hi, I was just wondering if you've looked into the (performance) feasibility of actually using FLAC in the sampler at all. This is not me suggesting it is or isn't feasible, I really have no idea how much of a performance hit the (de)compression would cause, or whether for instance huge monoliths would work at all. The space-saving potential is very interesting, though.

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SFZ / ARIA supports FLAC, though I'm not sure if it decodes from disk to memory or if it's direct-from-disk. Anyway, FLAC is very fast to decode and the reference decoder is BSD licensed, so there should be no technical or legal obstacles.

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It seems sforzando is pretty fast using FLAC in piano libraries (like VSUpright1 or Salamander Grand I encoded myself from WAV while they weren’t yet available as FLAC), don’t remember hearing any hangups.
FLAC would be a great addition! @DecentSamples how do you feel about that on this year?

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FLAC is amazing. It's even superior to ALAC (Apple Lossless) in that FLAC compresses silent portions to virtually zero data usage. It also now supports up to 32-bit audio (previously up to 24-bit). An excellent bulk transcoder is dBpoweramp Batch Converter. Unfortunately it costs money, but it's excellent. You can batch convert a folder and subfolders and select multiple cores of your CPU for fast multi-file conversion. Just sharing the knowledge. :)