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What does La do?
La performs lossless compression on mono+stereo 16-bit wav files.
Being 'lossless' means that no data/quality is lost in the compression -
when uncompressed, the data will be identical to the original.
How well does it perform?
The compression ratios of La depend on the type of music file being
compressed, but the compression size will generally range between
20% - 70% of the original.
This ratio is of course modest in comparison with lossy formats such as
.mp3, however La does (at time of writing) compress around 1.5% better on
average than any other lossless compression programs.
Speedwise, La runs around 2.5x real time in default mode on my Pentium
III-1000. This is quite slow relative to comparable compressors, however corresondingly
the compression rate is slightly higher than the others. It is also significantly
faster than older versions, and given that most new computers these days are in the
3 ghz range I don't think the speed should be an issue for most people. However,
if you are running something slower than 500 mhz, it is unlikely that you will be
able to playback the music realtime in Winamp.
Features
- Windows and Linux versions.
- High compression performance (comparisons show it to be the best available).
- Winamp, foobar2000
and Xmms plugins.
- CRC checking.
- Windows Frontend with multiple encoder support and FreeDB support.
- Third-party GUI thanks to Wim Speekenbrink (see http://home.wanadoo.nl/~w.speek/la.htm).
- ID3 v1.1 tagging support.
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Changes between 0.4 and 0.4b
- Core compression engine separated into .dll.
- Source for plugins + console program released together with API to encourage indepedent development.
- Small bug-fixes.
Changes between 0.3c and 0.4
- New faster default mode, which compresses almost as well but is almost 2x faster.
- Old default mode is now 'high' mode and compresses a little better at about the same speed.
- New multi-encoder Windows frontend with FreeDB support.
- New plugin for the foobar2000 player.
- Now has better console-in and console-out support.
- New windows installer.
- Added html documentation.
Changes between 0.3 and 0.3c
- Big bug fix to entropy coder - was causing pure noise examples to not decompress
properly!
- Small bug fixes to decompressor and plugins.
- When decoding both console input and output now work.
- Winamp plugin should read ID3 v1.1 tags.
- Linux version together with xmms plugin released!
Changes between 0.2 and 0.3
- Compression has been improved around 0.3% (i.e. compressed files average around
0.6% smaller). Speed is approximately the same as the previous version.
- The file format is of course different due to the above compression changes,
however La 0.3 will still play files from La 0.2.
- A couple of bugs in the winamp plugin have been fixed, the major one was that
it previously assumed all files where 44khz and thus played (for example) 22khz
files at double speed.
- Handles .wav files with more complicated headers better.
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I appreciate greatly the help provided from the following people :-
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