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Topic: WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best (Read 78864 times) previous topic - next topic
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WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

I did a comparison between Flac, Wavpack, and Monkey's Audio. I'm a longtime MAC user, but I've been considering replacing it with something else.

Monkey's Audio still has the smallest file sizes, and the fastest compression. On a test sample, the FLAC file was around 53 MB, the Wavpack was 51, and the Monkey's Audio was 47. Additionally, the monkey's audio on a whole encoded at a faster rate.

Yes, I know that FLAC and Wavpack have features that MAC doesn't, most noticably lossy and better seeking. However, I use lossless only for archival purposes-- I rarely actually listen to the files, and so, I have to say that monkey's audio is still the best

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #1
Quote
that monkey's audio is still the best


Me too 
It was the first codec i tried that worked with embedded cue-files in foobar2000.
Decoding speed is good enough even at Extra-High.
I really can't think of any good reason to use one of the others if hw-support is of little concern.

edit: the seeking issues you mentioned where in the old versions < 4.x for Modes > High

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #2
I'm not so sure about the fastest. Flake is a flac encoder that's three times faster and produces slightly better compression as well.

I went from ape to flac a while ago, i decided flac's decoding speed, support, features and robustness were worth the few extra megabytes.
Veni Vidi Vorbis.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #3
And wait until you try out TAK (Yalac)

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #4
Totally agree with shade. i'm so excited by this new codec. Can't wait to get my hands on it.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #5
OptimFROG should be able to compress better than Monkey's Audio

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #6
Yes, I know that FLAC and Wavpack have features that MAC doesn't, most noticably lossy and better seeking. However, I use lossless only for archival purposes-- I rarely actually listen to the files, and so, I have to say that monkey's audio is still the best


I too use MAC lossless for archiving only, and so came to the same conclusion as yourself. Your premise is strongly seconded from this side of the world .

Granted, however, if I actually did use lossless for playback I'd opt for FLAC.
EAC>1)fb2k>LAME3.99 -V 0 --vbr-new>WMP12 2)MAC-Extra High

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #7
Yes, I know that FLAC and Wavpack have features that MAC doesn't, most noticably lossy and better seeking. However, I use lossless only for archival purposes-- I rarely actually listen to the files, and so, I have to say that monkey's audio is still the best


I too use MAC lossless for archiving only, and so came to the same conclusion as yourself. Your premise is strongly seconded from this side of the world .

Granted, however, if I actually did use lossless for playback I'd opt for FLAC.

If one only uses lossless for archiving, why is compression speed an issue?  OptimFrog most likely offers the best compression.  MAC is indeed a good codec, if I were archiving I'd still probably use FLAC or WavPack though.  I like the licensing on the source code.  Ensure's they'll still be around in the future.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #8
When I did lossless archiving I was very happy with Monkey.
Good speed when encoding and decoding even in extra high mode, and a compression ratio better than FLAC or wavPack, and which I don't expect to be significantly outclassed even with highly compression-effective super-slow codecs.
lame3995o -Q1.7 --lowpass 17


WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #10
Monkey's Audio still has the smallest file sizes, and the fastest compression.

Indeed, Monkey's Audio is still excellent in this area. But it also has poorer performance on decoding speed (which makes hardware support harder), a bit like OptimFROG (even slower). Error handling (decoding after media corruption, bad transfert...) is also a weak point for this format; and since 3.99 and with -c4000/5000 profiles only files are usually suffering from a long starting time making gapless playback impossible.
Some other formats are performing better in different area than ratio & encoding speed.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #11
Here's some informative links on Lossless codecs, ya better beleive it.

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...less_comparison

http://uclc.info/LossLess.pdf
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossless.htm
http://synthetic-soul.co.uk/comparison/lossless/

Well, these results show up the quality of Monkey very well.
Only LA is really interesting when compression ratio has a very strong weight. But compression ratio is not a lot better than Monkey's but encoding and decoding speed is significantly lower.
Moreover while Monkey extra high means very good compression and good speed when speed is more of concern high and normal mode make Monkey pretty fast whereas compression ratio doesn't suffer a lot.

EDITED:
I should add that the application context is most of concern of course. A codec like Monkey is interesting only for archiving and/or for listening to on a pc. When going for other listeninig environments I think there is no alternative to FLAC or wavPack (which are good solutions anyway - cause among all the good lossless codecs there's no big difference in compression ratio).
lame3995o -Q1.7 --lowpass 17

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #12
Quote
Error handling (decoding after media corruption, bad transfert...) is also a weak point for this format;


guruboolez, is that in theory or in practice ? Any links to real problem reports regarding this ?

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #13
Quote
Error handling (decoding after media corruption, bad transfert...) is also a weak point for this format;


guruboolez, is that in theory or in practice ? Any links to real problem reports regarding this ?


When I used to use monkeys audio there were a lot of times files were corrupted, compared to the two corrupted flac files i've ever seen. No, I don't overclock, neither do I use beta drivers or otherwise tune the bejesus out of my machines. I never worked out whether these were encode/decode errors or hardware related as I never verified them after creation due to my own laziness.

I liked monkeys audio but it always seemed like an unfinished project to me.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #14
Quote
Error handling (decoding after media corruption, bad transfert...) is also a weak point for this format;


guruboolez, is that in theory or in practice ? Any links to real problem reports regarding this ?

In practice. There are old discussions on this board with samples showing how are reacting different decoders on corrupted streams. You can try yourself and simulate a data corruption with any hexadecimal editor.
I was myself a satisfied MAC's user, and I only obtained two corrupted files (on thousands):
- one appeared with no explanation
- the second one appeared after a partition lost and a data restauration (I was able to recover a proper file after a second restauration).

It's with DVD-R backups that the way different formats/decoders are handling corrupted stream started to become important to my eyes. Previously I didn't really care about it.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #15
>c4000/5000 profiles only files are usually suffering from a long starting time making gapless playback impossible

That is more down to the software trying to do gapless, rather than the format.

About corrupt files (I have also run tests with FLAC - changing a single byte in 30 different places, with pretty much the same results as Monkeys). The whole idea about lossless is either it is perfect or it is not, if it is not, recreate it - so the important factor of lossless is the ablity to error check the decoded data - as FLAC and Monkeys have md5 emdedded there are no issues there.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #16
I got completely different results with FLAC/WavPack than with Monkey's. Moreover, the amount of lost datas seems to depend on the encoding profile (the silent part which replaces music is longer with highest profile). I'm not completely sure about it (I experimented it, but I didn't bother to reproduce the same with several samples).
In other words, corruption may appear as less annoying with one format/profile than with one another.

For gapless: I also read once that file buffering should explain this issue. Are there players able to read these encodings without problems?

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #17
MAC doesn't seem to be available for Linux or any other OS than Windows. It's not a problem for most people but not all people use Windows (only). I for one am trying to get away from Windows dependency.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #18
Monkey's code is avaible since 2003 or 2004. Linux and MacOS ports exist for a long time. Just google for it
example: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac-port/

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #19
I see. I haven't seen that before. Well I haven't been realy looking for it since I stopped using MAC. There was no mention of Linux in monkeysaudio.com, so I assumed that it doesn't exist. It's good that it does.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #20
Well. Monkey is 5% more efficient than FLAC SVN 2006. But is it really making sense this 5% compression gain ( approx 15 mb per cd) when DVDs blank cost cents? I.e. 300-450 mb per cd - 10-15 CD flacs per DVD. And with Monkey Highest Profile you will hardly get 16th cd.
While decoding FLAC (for future mp3 rip for player ) whole album is geting less than 1 minute!!!! Monkey goes for at least a few minutes.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #21
Well. Monkey is 5% more efficient than FLAC SVN 2006. But is it really making sense this 5% compression gain ( approx 15 mb per cd) when DVDs blank cost cents? I.e. 300-450 mb per cd - 10-15 CD flacs per DVD. And with Monkey Highest Profile you will hardly get 16th cd.
While decoding FLAC (for future mp3 rip for player ) whole album is geting less than 1 minute!!!! Monkey goes for at least a few minutes.


I found it easier to fit two compressed albums on one CD-R with Monkey's... some albums just remained so big that they accumulated dust on my HD waiting for a matching small album, so I could put them in my archive. Of course I could have just burned the single album, but that would have been a waste of space  .
I've just recently changed back to Flac, because of the faster encoding times and broader support of the format, which makes it more future-safe for my archive. The fit is now easier because I no longer put recovery information on the CD itself, but rather on a dedicated CD along with the recovery data for 5 others.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #22
If you are worried about the filesize only, LA may be worth a try. Either last year or before that, I tried it and it compressed better than APE or FLAC or WV. But then, other codecs may beat it by now.

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #23
In other words, corruption may appear as less annoying with one format/profile than with one another.

"Less annoying" is hardly grounds for saying one has robustness and the other doesn't, no?

This talk about robustness and error handling in the wiki is a bunch of BS!

WOW, Monkey's Audio is still the best

Reply #24
The whole idea about lossless is either it is perfect or it is not


Nope, the idea is also about archival. And being able to recreate most of your music is better than not being able to recreate anything. That's the problem with Monkey's.