WavPack 5.8 Lossless Audio Compression Tools Now Enable Multi-Threading By Default

The open-source WavPack lossless audio compression format is out with a new release today for this BSD-licensed software around this audio code container.

WavPack 5.8 is the new release and comes almost one year following the prior release. For those doing a lot of work with WavPack, the WavPack 5.8 release is quite exciting in that it now enables multi-threading support by default for its CLI programs. If a multi-core CPU is detected, the multi-threading support will be enabled.

It was last year in WavPack 5.7 that multi-threaded encode and decode was introduced. The performance gains have paid off and it's proven worthwhile so it now is promoted to being enabled by default unless the new "--no-threads" argument is used.

WavPack 5.8 also delivers on:

"Much of the development for this release stemmed from the discovery of situations where the quantization noise introduced with the hybrid mode was higher than expected, in particular with very low bitrates (e.g., < 3 bps) and high sample rates. This was traced to feedback in the decorrelation loop and has been addressed. Also, audio samples were discovered where the DNS (dynamic noise shaping) algorithm produced sub-optimal shaping, and this has been addressed with an all-new DNS algorithm. Finally, some issues were fixed that caused the "extra" mode performance to degrade with multithreading and also with the hybrid mode."

Downloads and more details on the WavPack 5.8 feature release via GitHub. I'll be working on some new/updated WavPack CPU benchmarks soon.