Compressing Dance Recordings With FLAC

January 18th, 2014
music, tech
When the Free Raisins run our own sound I record our playing to listen back to later. I keep these recordings, but seven tracks at 1GB each starts to add up. I could compress them as mp3s, but I might want the full-quality versions some day. I looked into lossless audio compression, and FLAC seems to be the most widely supported open codec. While I've seen people find compression ratios of about 50% for FLAC, I was expecting better than this because while I generally record a whole 3hr performance only some of that has much signal. Compressing at level 8 I ended up with files 67% smaller than whan I started:

(The files at the far left, squished down to 14.3% of their original size, consist entirely of silence. This is because when using my vsl1818 with Audacity I can only record tracks 1 through N. If for some reason we've set things up so no one is plugged into track 4, I still end up with a recording of that track, 3hr of silence. Ignore these in computing the average and flac only managed to make things 66% smaller.)

I could have combined multiple tracks from the same dance into one multi-track flac for better compression, but this seemed like too much hassle and too much chance of making files that would be hard to work with later.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

Look! A therapy technique people don't already know!

via Thing of Things May 14, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

Impact, agency, and taste

understand + work backwards from the root goal • don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement • make success inevitable • find your angle • think real hard • reflect on your thinking

via benkuhn.net April 19, 2025

more     (via openring)