[wazoo2u]

Originally Posted by ssamadhi97

...why not?

It's just a file format - you can convert back and forth between all lossless formats at will without losing anything anyway.


btw one significant difference is that WavPack preserves nonstandard RIFF chunks, as opposed to FLAC which just discards them and slaps a canonical wav header on decoded files. Not that this should matter for people who are into live music trading, but for people who actually make use of those chunks it's a selling argument (think radio stations). iirc. [that's just random info. I know it's not actually relevant for the decision on whether to allow WavPack here or not]

I understand that it's just a file format, but it means that if I'm using FLAC as a portable device format, I'll be converting everything to FLAC, and then probably tossing the original Wavpack files, hardly a good idea when trying to preserve lineage.

I don't care if it's FLAC or Wavpack when I'm firing up Foobar. If Wavpack saves me 10% compression space, great, but it's not "the killer app" in the scheme of things.

I'm concerned with keeping FLAC in the forefront of potential portable music formats because at the very least, some development work has been done already. I think it would be in the best interests of most lossless collectors to have a really good portable device on the market, and so far, it seems that FLAC offers the most promising results (albeit slight) in achieving that goal. MP3 is dwarfing lossless usage. It seems like it's going to be difficult to develop even a niche market device. Why not encourage development by sticking with FLAC for a while and see if developers are encouraged to build hardware devices, and for that matter, the future development of FLAC to make it better ?

Your notes on radio station and iirc applications are duly noted, and that's great... for them. Are those features a benefit to lossless collectors, not according to you, and I would agree.

It dowsn't seem to me that FLAC has achieved mainstream popularity among collectors for more than 2 years or so, and it wouldn't hurt if it could live a longer life.

So again my question, and speaking from a standpoint of ENCOURAGING DEVELOPMENT, does it look to anyone else that introducing the popular use of Wavpack compressed files is taking "one step forward, two steps back" ?