Lossless Audio Compression: A Case Study

Audio compression is used everywhere – largely due to the rise of the internet, computers, and embedded systems. Since original, uncompressed digital recordings are very large in size, efficient ways are needed to compress large audio signals into small, high-quality, convenient formats. While lossy audio formats, like MP3, are widely popular in many everyday applications, lossless formats are also important to retain the original audio signals. It is feasible to perform lossless compression due to decreasing memory cost and increasing internet bandwidth. This paper investigates improvements to the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), one of the best lossless audio formats, by conducting tests on nineteen quality benchmarks. We have also studied lossless compression techniques from other domains and applied dictionary-based encoding for audio compression. The results show that dictionary-based compression is not useful, while modifying the blocking size in FLAC shows minor improvements in compression efficiency. Cristobal Rivero [email protected] Prabhat Mishra [email protected]