WavPack Lossless Audio Compression Format Adds Multi-Threaded Encode/Decode

[phoronix]

Phoronix: WavPack Lossless Audio Compression Format Adds Multi-Threaded Encode/Decode

The WavPack open-source lossless wavefile compressor is up to version 5.7 after more than one year in development. Making this new release quite notable is adding multi-threaded encode and decode support to the WavPack library and its CLI tools...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Multi-Threaded-WavPack-5.7

[tildearrow]

WavPack 5.7 also now uses MinGW builds for all their Windows binaries due to delivering better performance than the MSVC-based builds, surprisingly.

Surprisingly? MSVC is well known for being slower than GCC though.

[ssokolow]

Wow. There's a name I haven't heard in years... but then Monkey's Audio did finally go BSD in 2023. I wonder what's next. Musepack improvements? Open-sourced OptimFROG? Re-licensed Shorten?

[quaz0r]

is this of any use? is it better than flac?

[geerge]

Compatibility wise you can't beat flac but wavpack has a number of interesting use cases that flac can't handle. The main ones IMO being float format support and more than 8 channels. It also has a hybrid lossy mode.

[Adarion]

The joy of code that discovers multi-threading in 2024. ;-)
Good to see anyway. I wish more things would receive this sort of treatment, as sometimes one has a single single-threaded item in the workflow (e.g. handbrake video transcoding) and you wonder why things take long on your 8 core, but then you look at your CPU monitor and see constantly 1 core at full load, the others idle, then, for a part of a second all flash to full load, then back to 1.

[ssokolow]

I wish more things would receive this sort of treatment, as sometimes one has a single single-threaded item in the workflow (e.g. handbrake video transcoding) and you wonder why things take long on your 8 core, but then you look at your CPU monitor and see constantly 1 core at full load, the others idle, then, for a part of a second all flash to full load, then back to 1.

*nod* They're currently working on making the frontend of the Rust compiler parallel, because, while dependencies are built in parallel, and the default configuration for the LLVM backend is parallel, and the default LTO mode is parallel, and you can swap in mold for parallel linking... once you've done all that, incremental rebuilds where you don't need to rebuild the dependencies still spend a notable amount of time on the "parse, typecheck, and convert to IR so LLVM and mold can receive it" step.

On the plus side, it is Rust, so they're able to take advantage of the same Rayon parallel iterator crate that makes parallelizing so many common-case tasks in your own projects as easy as swapping out .iter() for .par_iter().

(Of course, rustc is a little more complex than that, so it's still under development because they're still sussing out regressions.)

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Wow. There's a name I haven't heard in years... but then Monkey's Audio did finally go BSD in 2023. I wonder what's next. Musepack improvements? Open-sourced OptimFROG? Re-licensed Shorten?

I have fond memories of playing with all of these and doing performance and size comparison tests back in the day. Although some of those memories have failed me. I thought OptimFROG had the hybrid mode but it was WavPack. Monkey's Audio was quite popular in an online group I was part of. This even reminded me of Liquid Audio. I wonder if I have any LQTs backed up anywhere...

[Weasel]

is this of any use? is it better than flac?

FLAC has worse compression ratios.

[Weasel]

Does this affect compression ratio in any way? I mean multi-threaded encoder?