m4a container can be both lossy and lossless

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eandmsz
My fingers hurt
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Joined: May 31st, 2013, 18:23
First Name: Andras
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m4a container can be both lossy and lossless

Hi,

I found a minor bug with the file symbols. The m4a extensions show up with the yellow icon, which indicates lossy format, however m4a is a container which can have both. In my case it's lossless ALAC, and the resonic player knows this actually when reads the Hz, bit depth, bitrate, etc info from the file.

I guess there is no easy fix for this, because if the player needs to look into every file to tell if it's lossy or lossless, then it would hurt the performace.

I suggest the following:
- Introduce a new symbol for containers which can have both lossy and lossless audio. This symbol would match both lossy and lossless filtering criterias and could have half blue/half yellow icon, or gray, or whatever :)

- If you are currently working on the library support, then I guess you are doing some kind of database, where you put all the data for the indexed files. You might consider to have a lossy/lossless field in the database, so we can filter correctly and show the correct symbol for these problematic files, if they are indexed already. (I don't know if the folder browser will actually use the library database or not, but even if it doesn't, we can benefit from this field in the libarary browsing mode)

I hope I was clear... :)

Tom
Liqube Audio
Liqube Audio
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Re: m4a container can be both lossy and lossless

Hey.

This is a bit of a tricky thing when it comes to performance. I decided to just show the lossy icon for all .m4a files (not so for .alac extensions), however when you play the files you'll notice that the progress shade color is actually blue for ALAC, which indicates a lossless file, and orange for M4A files.

The 2-color icon I really want to avoid for simplicity's sake. I just recently added additional icon types. See http://resonic.at/labs/31 or http://resonic.at/img/labs/31.

I'll give this more thought.

The database is being built already, but yes, a separate field for lossy/lossless (I call it content kind) does make sense. Especially for special cases where determining the actual kind takes some time.
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sasvoigts

Re: m4a container can be both lossy and lossless

player needs to look into every file to tell if it's lossy or lossless, then it would hurt the performace.

Tom
Liqube Audio
Liqube Audio
Posts: 969
Joined: December 12th, 2012, 19:12
First Name: Tom
Primary DAW: Live
Location: Inside a face mask
Contact:

Re: m4a container can be both lossy and lossless

sasvoigts wrote:player needs to look into every file to tell if it's lossy or lossless, then it would hurt the performace.
Exactly, so it does that only for certain files.
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