Josh,
Those speed improvements are great. Quick test on an 365MB wav of Neil
Young's eponymous 1st album on a PIII 650E (Coppermine) under FreeBSD 4.2:
User Sys MB
shorten23 0:46s 4.0 208.3
shorten31 1:24s 5.3 208.6
flac CVS 4:21s 7.5 199.2
It's getting near to be a useful replacement for shorten. Only 3x slower.
Any idea why it uses so much more sys time? I would've thought they'd
all be about the same. I can see why shn31 uses more than shn23, because
it goes and appends that seek table after the encoding.
In my limited testing I note that it usually gets a few percent better
than Monkey Audio, but that MA occasionally gets a few percent better than
flac. I've been chatting with the MA author to get him to release a
version of his command line compressor MAC.exe to put support for pipes
in. He says that it will be able to decode to a pipe. However, it won't
encode from a pipe, because it has to know how much data it is going to be
compressing first and then it needs to seek around to update header info.
This is a big win for the obviously more elegant design of flac.
Keep up the good work Josh. I just with I knew some x86 assembly so I
could help out with the optimisation.
Cheers.
Mark Powell - UNIX System Administrator - The University of Salford
Academic Information Services, Clifford Whitworth Building,
Salford University, Manchester, M5 4WT, UK.
Tel: +44 161 295 5936 Fax: +44 161 295 5888 www.pgp.com for PGP key
