Topic: New Sound Devices Firmware ***Coming Soon***

[it-goes-to-eleven]

FLAC is lossless. And it works perfectly in 24-bit mode. You get out of it what you put into it bit for bit.

Actually, it sometimes doesn't.

If you flac a 1GB file (for example) with a header that specifies the length as 100 bytes, flac stores just the 100 bytes and discards everything else.  That doesn't apply so much to this realtime case but I think the issue is important to reguarly repeat (especially when flac is being described as working 'perfectly').

[live2496]

In looking into this a bit and thinking about it....

These files have binary zeroes in the riff header and data chunk. These files will not play in some media players and officially they contain errors because the data chunk counter does not match how many bytes are in the data chunk.

However, I agree that FLAC should be modified to detect and to handle this condition. Some of the better audio players like Winamp and Foobar2000 don't care about this and handle files like this without incident.

I doubt that Sound Devices will be processing files offline. It doesn't make sense to stop recording, recoup as much space as you can off of a media and then continue to record. It makes more sense to encode while recording. This is the main benefit of FLAC. That said, Sound Devices should not have the aforementioned file problem because they are not processing input files. They will have an encoder instance, and process files being provided from the converter.

That is not to say that there couldn't be problems due to power failure or whatever. I think that you should be able to decode through errors after the fact and get your data back. Yes, it's just one more thing that could go wrong, but users will have to weigh the benefits vs any additional problems it might possibly cause them. 

I see it as a good move on their part.

[mhibbs]

So essentially FLAC support is just a space saver and not a time saver.  So with that thinking Bean's statement that it puts the 7xx boxes "WAY ahead of the pack" may be more of Bean's fluffing of his gear than SD being truly WAY ahead of the pack. 

I mean how many of you would even use that feature?  Its cool that they offer it but is it really a reason to "see even more folks spending the $$ on a 7x series"

I'm impressed that SD is listening to their customers but is this really a killer app for this box?  Will this make more people buy the box?

Great for festivals or multi-run trips where you don't want to pack something to dump to.  I do see it as a time saver (although it's relative...we're talking some min, not a revolution).  The firewire transfer still isn't exactly blazing fast.  If you reduce the file size by 1/2, you cut the time to dump from the 722 to the computer in half.  Decoding flac on my computer is definitely faster than 1/2 the time it takes to transfer a wav from the 722 to my computer.


mitch