Contents
Introduction

3

1 Test setup
1.1 Scripting and graphing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.2 Codecs and parameters used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.3 WMA, RealAudio and ALAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

4
4
5
6

2 CD-audio test
8
2.1 CD’s used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
8
2.2 Results all CD’s together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9
2.3 Interesting quirks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.3.1 Mono encoded as stereo (Dan Browns Angels and Demons) 12
2.4 Convergence of the results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3 High-resolution audio
17
3.1 Nine Inch Nails’ The Slip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.2 Howard Shore’s soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.3 Wasted bits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4 Multichannel audio
24
4.1 Howard Shore’s soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
A Motivation for choosing these CDs

27

Bibliography

312Introduction
While testing the efficiency of lossy codecs can be quite cumbersome (as results
differ for each person), comparing lossless codecs is much easier. As the last
well documented and comprehensive test available on the internet has been a
few years ago, I thought it would be a good idea to update.
Beside comparing with CD-audio (which is often done to assess codec performance) and spitting out a grand total, this comparison also looks at extremes
that occurred during the test and takes a look at ’high-resolution audio’ andmultichannel/surround audio.
While the comparison was made to update the comparison-page on the FLAC
website, it aims to be fair and unbiased. Because of this, you’ll probably won’t
find anything that looks like conclusions: test results are displayed and analysed,
but there is no judgement or choice made. As different people have different
demands, there is probably not a single codec that can is ’the best’ at all really.
It is important to understand that nothing in this document is set in stone,
codecs are still being tweaked and big surprises are still very well possible, seefor example the still recent move of Apple to make ALAC open-source. Besides
that, the test material is, while being quite diverse, currently limited to 29
CDs for the CD-audio test, 2 sources for the high-resolution audio test and 1
source for the multichannel test. Because of this, the results should be usedwith care. Furthermore, this comparison is ”only about numbers”, comparing
speed to compression. Other important stuff, like software/hardware supportand development activity are not mentioned at all. For more information onthese features, I would like to recommend the HydrogenAudio comparison oflossless codecs [5] and the codec comparison on FLAC’s homepage [4].

3Chapter 1

Test setup
Because of time and labour constraints, not all available codecs are checked forall material. The most notable exception are WMA Lossless and Real Audio
Lossless, as command line encoders for these formats seem to be only available
for Windows and these did not work over wine. WMA Lossless is included in
the first overall CD-test, but these values were added manually. The in-depth
comparisons don’t feature WMA Lossless.
All codecs were tested either directly or via wine on a linux machine. The choice
for linux (kubuntu 12.10 in this case) was mainly because it offers comprehensive
timing tools, which make it easy to check how much CPU time a process has
used. In this way, tests could be run fully automatic which makes it possible totest a wide range of codecs, settings and music.
The machine used is a HP Elitebook 8530w, equipped with an Intel Core2Duo
T9600 and 4GB of RAM. The CPU frequency for both cores is fixed with cpufreq
at 2.13GHz to be sure thermal management won’t throttle the machine andthrash the results. Timing was done with ’time’, both real time and cpu time
where measured but only cpu time has been used in the following analyses.
Before the test starts, the WAVE files are copied to a ramdisk (ramfs) to bypass
the hard drive entirely.

1.1

Scripting and graphing

The scripting was done in PHP (because I’m familiar with it, not because it’sa good choice for this use) and was basically executing encoding and decoding
commands within the time-command and sanitizing this data before it went
into the cvs-file. It made sure every encoder would have a fresh copy of the files(in case one encoder would mangle them) in the ramdisk and measured the sizeof the WAV-files and compressed files to extract a compression ratio.
These cvs-data was ordered by hand and fed into a graph generator, also written in PHP. This resulted in four graphs: two with the familiar ’encoding or
decoding speed’ versus compression and two which displayed more or less the4inverse of the speed versus the compression. The latter two graphs were added
because the linear scale used doesn’t display the really slow codecs well. Using
logarithmic scales was possible as well, but considering those are hard to readfor most people this wasn’t done. Furthermore, the inverse of encoding speed
happens to be CPU-usage, which is a value that is probably easy to relate formost readers.

1.2

Codecs and parameters used

Every known lossless codec that could be easily used on Wine or Linux has beentested. Considering the parameters, the ones recommended by the developer (orthe command-line help of the encoders) were used, with some exceptions. For
example, not all available compression modes of OptimFROG were used, because there are a lot and the codec is pretty slow. Also, after some preliminary
tests, it was chosen to drop ALS’s -7 mode and OptimFROGs maximumcompression. ALS -7 was simply too slow with little or even negative gain (see figure1.1) and OptimFROGs –maximumcompression is not advised for daily use, only
for benchmark purposes. While this is a benchmark, daily use is the focus of
this report.
As you can see in figure 1.1, the encoding of ALS -7 and OptimFROG maximumcompression both took 2.5 times the playing length of the files, which forsuch a comprehensive test is far to long: together they used half of the running
time of the test, while they offer no real benefit. On this CD, ALS -7 is actuallyeven worse than ALS without parameters, but this usually wasn’t the case. Thisis strange, as the comparison I did in may 2009 (with an earlier version of ALS)
did show fairly large gains, but with this version it seems those gains were lost.

Figure 1.1: Encoding speed as ’calculated CPU-usage’ versus compression for’Fanfare Ciocarlia - Baro Biao: World Wide Wedding’5Codec
FLAC
TAK
LA
TTA
WavPack
Monkeys Audio
OptimFROG
ALAC
Shorten
MP4ALSParameters used
-0, -1, -2, -3, -4, -5, -6, -7, -8-p0, -p0e, -p0m, -p1, -p1e, -p1m, -p2, -p2e, -p2m, -p3, -p3e,-p3m, -p4, -p4e, -p4m[-], -high, -high -noseek[-]-f, [-], -h -x, -hh -x-c1000, -c2000, -c3000, -c4000, -c5000–mode fast, –mode normal, –mode high, –mode best, –mode
bestnew[-][-][-]
Table 1.1: Parameters used for each codec

1.3

WMA, RealAudio and ALAC

For WMA Lossless, Realaudio Lossless and ALAC there was no command line
encoder (or at least, not one that would run on Linux or Wine), so for thesesome measurements on a Windows computer where made. Because this was
all done by hand, only the first 4 CDs of the list have been tested, otherwise
the amount of work added would have been disproportionate. After testing,the 4th CD (the audiobook of Dan Brown) was rejected because RealAudio’s
low-complexity setting struggled with the mono content, and it would not havebeen representative to show this.
P.S.: It seems there is a command line encoder for ALAC called refalac nowadays, but I didn’t know of it when I did the comparison. I’ll use that one forthe next revision of this document.
WMA Lossless has encoding and decoding support through DirectShow, so thesewere encoded and decoded with dBpoweramp. RealAudio only has encoding
tools available and iTunes has only encoding support. The decoding of RealAudio and ALAC via iTunes was tested using ffmpeg on the Linux computer. The
results of the Windows machine were ’scaled’ to the level of the Linux-box byrunning FLAC -6 on the same files and retrieving an ’speed factor’ from that.
The uncompensated outcome for encoding at the Windows-machine is shownin figure 1.2a, the decoding performance of FLAC and WMA Lossless plus thecompensated RealAudio Lossless and ALAC, which were both decoded with
FFmpeg.
As the results of the Windows-computer are unreliable (real time was measured,not CPU time) and because only 3 CD were used to calculate this ’scaling
factor’, these results should be used with care: they are not as reliable andprecise as the other results. However, they do provide insight in the global
performance of these codecs. In particular, it can be seen that both WMA
Lossless and ALAC do not perform very well, as FLAC -6 is not consideredstrong compression nor fast encoding but still outperforms them.
For RealAudio it should be noted that decoding them is nearly impossible: Real6

(a) Encoding performance(b) Decoding performance

Figure 1.2: Codec performance for the three CDs tested on Windows
Codec
WMA Lossless
RA Lossless - low
RA Lossless - medium
RA Lossless - high
ALAC @ iTunes 10

Compression
1.024
1.008
0.993
0.991
1.015

Encoding speed
0.755
0.420
0.181
0.160
1.036

Decoding speed
0.452
0.735
0.654
0.670
0.450

Table 1.2: Scaling values with respect to FLAC -6
has tried to ban any 3th party decoder, and the ffmpeg decoder can’t decodethem without errors. Several decoded files had (small) missing parts or hiccups.
Therefore, the decoding speed measurement is probably not really reliable.
The scaling factor retrieved from the tests and used to extrapolate the results
to the overall test graph are shown in table 1.2.

7

Chapter 2

CD-audio test
The most important use of lossless codecs nowadays is containing CD-audio.
Because of this, most of this report focusses on CD-audio. First, the performanceof all codecs on the whole corpus will be examined. Next, some CDs will be
examined separately to comment on particular quirks and weak points of certain
codecs.

2.1

CD’s used

The CD’s used in this test are listed below, with a very general indication of
the kind of music it is, should represent or what special significance it has, incase the performer is unfamiliar to you. These CD’s should encompass a wide
range of music and therefore give balanced results, with the weak spots of eachcodec exposed equally.
• 30 Seconds to Mars - This Is War (rock)• Confido Domino Minsk - Sacred choral music from White Russia (choral,
religious)• Daft Punk - Alive 2007 (electronic, live)• Dan Brown - Angels and Demons (audiobook)• Enya - Amarantine (new age)
• Fanfare Ciocarlia - Baro Biao: World Wide Wedding (world music, brass)• Gilberto Santa Rosa - Esencia (salsa)• Giuseppe Verdi - Messa da Requiem (Berliner Philharmoniker feat. conductor Claudio Abbado) (classical, romantic)• Howard Shore - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (soundtrack, orchestral)• Iron Maiden - Brave New World (metal)8• John Coltrane - Live at the half note, vol. 1 (jazz)• Joss Stone - Mind, Body & Soul (soul)• J.S. Bach - Magnificat (orchestral, baroque)• Koninklijke Militaire Kapel - [no name] (military brass, vinyl rip)
• Kraftwerk - Autobahn (electronic)• Lana del Rey - Born to Die (pop)• Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III (hip hop)
• Martin O’Donnell & Michael Salvatori - Halo: Reach O.S.T. (ambient-ish,soundtrack)• Michael Bublé - meets madison square garden (pop, live)• Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells (not classifiable)• Rosenberg Trio - Djangologists (jazz)• Rush - Grace under Pressure (1997 remaster) (rock)• System of a Down - Mezmerize (metal)• Szakcsi - Virágom, virágom (world music)• Tiësto - In Search of Sunrise 7: Asia (dance)• Various - Jeff Waynes Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (radio
drama-ish, rock, orchestral)• Various - Latin Village, CD 1: Salsa (compilation of salsa)• Xzibit - At the Speed of Life (hip hop)
• Yann Tiersen - Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (minimalism, soundtrack)
Quite some effort was put into choosing and balancing this list, with a lot of
help from [3]. In particular, Tom Beck, developer of the TAK codec, pointed outthat mastering can make a real difference in codec performance, and therefore
the test should encompass as much different ’mastering techniques as possible’.
For more information on the CDs and why they were used for this test, see
Appendix A.

2.2

Results all CD’s together

The results following are from all the CDs mentioned above averaged. Thiswas done by averaging the CD-results, not those of the individual tracks. The
WMA Lossless, Real Audio Alternative and iTunes ALAC results were added
later, with the method explained in section 1.3 and therefore are not as precise
as the others.

9(a) Displayed the usual way(b) Displayed as realtime CPU-usage

Figure 2.1: Encoding codec performance of all CD’s averaged

10

(a) Displayed the usual way(b) Displayed as realtime CPU-usage

Figure 2.2: Decoding codec performance of all CD’s averaged

11

2.3

Interesting quirks

While testing different CD’s to obtain a balanced total, the results of the individual CD’s were plotted as well to look for certain peculiarities, both to report
and to assess the validity of the test. If the results of most CD’s look similar andany strange behaviour is explainable, one could say the test is more or less valid
because it converges. Apart from ALAC, FLAC setting -0 and -3 and Shorten
fluctuating a lot (the latter two because of lacking stereo decorrelation), there
was only one case in which non-standard behaviour was observed, which will be
discussed next.

2.3.1

Mono encoded as stereo (Dan Browns Angels andDemons)The biggest difference with the all-round test is the audio book. The tested
material contains a lot of silence, is pure mono (encoded as stereo of course) andfeatures only one voice. The encoding and decoding performance is displayedin figure 2.3 on the following page.
The most obvious features are the behaviour of FLAC and the bad performanceof WavPack and LA. FLAC’s behaviour is because at modes -0 and -3 (which
are the two peaks visible) there is no stereo decorrelation tried. All other modes
have some form of stereo decorrelation, which obviously helps as this is puremono: it halves the size of the files here. WavPacks bad performance is aknown ’bug’. Newer encoders have an option –optimize-mono, but it has to be
set manually as it might break compatibility with older decoders.
When looking for best compression, OptimFROG lead here with a very small
lead. Its –bestnew mode has the lowest compression (17.727%) while Monkey’s
Audio -c4000 (extra high) compresses only little less (17.733%). It is strange,
but Monkey’s Audio insane mode (which is slower than the extra high mode)gets only 18.0%. TAK and FLAC both perform very well considering their
speed. A last remark is that LZMA2 (7-zip’s compression mode) does very wellconsidering it is not an audio codec, it scores 30% compression and outperforms
both FLAC -0, -3 and Shorten here.
To find out which part of the performance of the codecs was due to the file
being mono and which was due to the file containing lots of silence and only
one voice, I decided to rerun the test with the files mixed to mono. This mono
mixing was done with SoX using ”remix 1” as a filter. So no mixing, I just took
the first (left) channel to form the mono-channel.
The results are displayed in figure 2.4 on page 14. The results for this test
are more like the overall result, with the performance of LA and WavPackback on par and shorten (which seems to have no stereo decorrelation at all)benefits the most. The strange behaviour of Monkey’s Audio stays, however.
The most striking difference between the stereo original and the mono mix isthat FLAC and the lower TAK and WavPack levels have halved their encoding
time: apparently, stereo decorrelation takes a lot of time. In FLAC, stereo
correlation is more or less ’brute-force’, so that fits the picture very well.

12(a) Encoding performance(b) Decoding performance

Figure 2.3: Codec performance for the audiobook Angels & Demons as written
by Dan Brown and read by Richard Poe

13(a) Encoding performance(b) Decoding performance

Figure 2.4: Codec performance for the audiobook mixed to mono

14

2.4

Convergence of the results

One of the most important questions regarding any results of this test would bewhether the results are truly ’average’ and whether they represent all different
kinds of CD-audio out there. As pointed out in section 2.3, this is not the case:some codecs perform better than usual at certain CD’s. However, most results
seem fairly similar while being obtained from very different material.
From comparing results and trying to draw conclusions on the convergence of theresults, one can observe differences regarding the reliability of certain codecs.
For example, when one takes a look at figure 2.3 on page 13, certain codecs(FLAC -3 and Monkeys Audio -insane) generate larger files while being slower:choosing a higher ’mode’ will not always result in better results.
In figure 2.5 on the next page the encoding and decoding performance of all
codecs are graphed for five very different kinds of music: a capella choral,
metal, hip hop, soul and jazz. While the average compression achieved andspeed differs, codecs all perform similar for different kinds of music: LA and
OptimFROG take turns in achieving the best compression while both being
pretty slow, FLAC is always the fastest decoding, Shorten performs at FLAC
-0 but slower, Monkey’s Audio ranges from OptimFROGs –best to WavPacks
default setting (but being slower then the latter), TAK is almost always thebest performer when trading off compression to encoding speed etc.
The ’typical’ position of each codec works for very different kinds of music andis never much better or worse when compared to the average of all CD’s, except
perhaps FLAC -0 through FLAC -3 and Shorten.

15

(a) Encoding choral music(b) Decoding choral music(c) Encoding hip hop(d) Decoding hip hop(e) Encoding metal(f) Decoding metal(g) Encoding soul(h) Decoding soul(i) Encoding jazz(j) Decoding jazz

Figure 2.5: Codec performance for various music genres

16

Chapter 3

High-resolution audio
While the use for ’high resolution’ (i.e. a high sample rate or high bit depth) is
open to discussion, lossless codecs are used to pack this kind of material, so it
should be tested as well. Two codecs do not participate in this test: both LA
and Shorten do not handle these sample rates/bit depths at all.

3.1

Nine Inch Nails’ The Slip

The Slip was made available free of charge from the website of NIN, releasing
both 44kHz/16-bit FLAC-files as well as 96kHz/24-bit files.
The results are shown in figure 3.1 and 3.2. Nothing spectacular: all codecs
perform similar when compared to the CD-audio, only FLAC seems to perform
worse, being much slower then usual in both encoding and decoding and compressing a little less. Monkey’s Audio -insane (or -c5000) preset misbehaves
here, just like with the Dan Brown audiobook test and the next test in thischapter, it is slower and compresses less then -c4000.

17

(a) Sample with 44/16(b) Sample with 96/24

Figure 3.1: Encoding performance18

(a) Sample with 44/16(b) Sample with 96/24

Figure 3.2: Decoding performance

19

3.2

Howard Shore’s soundtrack for The Lord of
the Rings: The Return of the KingThe complete recordings of the soundtrack for The Return of the King features
an DVD-A along with the 4 audio CDs. This disc was used in the following
test. While I first tried another DVD-A from the same trilogy, this disc hadsome features that made it unsuitable for this comparison, see section 3.3 on
the matter. The results are shown in figure 3.3 and 3.4.
The results are very similar to those obtained with NIN’s The Slip in section
3.1, but FLAC performs a little better. Interesting to note it that the differences
between different codecs and compression modes are even smaller.

(a) Sample with 44/16(b) Sample with 48/24

Figure 3.3: Encoding performance20(a) Sample with 44/16(b) Sample with 48/24

Figure 3.4: Decoding performance

21

3.3

Wasted bits

When testing the complete recordings of The Lord of the Rings (The Two
Towers) soundtrack, some rather strange results were obtained, shown in figure
3.5 and 3.6. After looking at the analyse-files generated by the official FLAC
decoder, it became clear that something called ’wasted bits’ was responsible forthis behaviour.

(a) Sample with 44/16(b) Sample with 48/24 (2 wasted bits)

Figure 3.5: Encoding performance
The first thing that stands out when looking at these results is that the results
seem to form two groups: one group (consisting of FLAC, WavPack, TAK and
OptimFROG) that does pretty well on these samples and one group (Monkeys
Audio, ALAC, TTA and MP4ALS) that fall short. This is because the lattergroup of codecs do not search for so called wasted bits. This 2 wasted bits mean
that, while the files are packed in a 24-bit file, the data actually is 22-bit only
and the two least significant bits are always zero. ALS can perform better, but
a switch (-l) has to be used on encoding.

22

(a) Sample with 44/16(b) Sample with 48/24 (2 wasted bits)

Figure 3.6: Decoding performance
Of course one could wonder why this exists, material which is ’only’ 22-bit while
it is advertised as being 24-bit. In this case, the material was packed on the
DVD-A with a lossless codec which is called MLP (Meridian Lossless Packaging)which is a proprietary format. (Just as a side note: It’s compression was 59.3%)
MLP is among the codecs that benefits from wasted bits as well, so this way
it was possible to fit the audio on one disc, with 8GB of 8.5GB filled, without
these wasted bits the disc would have been too small. It actually is listed as an’feature’ by its creators, but is not often seen on commercial discs apparently.
So, in the rare case you come across a disc which is compressed with MLP andis packed-as-24bit-but-actually-isnt-24bit, half of the tested codecs might not
be able to handle this very well.

23

Chapter 4

Multichannel audio
While surround sound is usually paired with a movie and not often sold ’justaudio’, it might become an interesting topic in the future. Since the introductionof stereo sound, people have been talking about ’more than 2 channels’, andwhile sales of surround-sound music never really took of it has some reallyinteresting advantages over stereo.
Because it never really took of, codecs usually focus on mono and stereo sound.
For example, FLAC has a few tricks to use the similarity of stereo channels to
get some more compression, but there is no such decorrelation for multichannel
audio. Other codecs, like Monkey’s Audio, OptimFROG and shorten have nosupport for multichannel audio at all.

4.1

Howard Shore’s soundtrack for The Lord of
the Rings: The Return of the KingThe complete recordings of The Lord of the Rings (The Two Towers) soundtrack feature the usual 44.1kHz/16-bit stereo sound on CD, but also pack an
Audio-DVD with the same music in 48kHz/24-bit stereo sound and 48kHz/24bit surround sound. As this and the same package for the Two Towers discussed
in section 3.3 are the only 2 sources of lossless multichannel audio I have, this is
the only material used for comparison. Only the first 8 tracks are tested becauseof size constraints on the ramdisk.
The results for these tests are depicted in 4.1 and 4.2. It seems that, like thecomparison between 16-bit and 24-bit audio, the number of channels does notseem to matter much. The only strange thing is that TTA performs pretty
bad compared to its usual performance. This is strange because being able toencode multichannel-audio (up to 65536 channels) is one of its selling points on
the TTA-website. FLAC is performing better then usual, but the difference isonly small so mastering (or the way of down-mixing to stereo) could be a reason
for this, this is no reason to believe that FLAC performs better then usual on
all multichannel material.

24

(a) Sample with 48/24 stereo(b) Sample with 48/24 surroundFigure 4.1: Encoding performance25

(a) Sample with 48/24 stereo(b) Sample with 48/24 surroundFigure 4.2: Decoding performance26

Appendix A

Motivation for choosing
these CDs
The validity of this test is for a large part dependent on the audio material used.
It was chosen to pick full CDs instead of single tracks because single tracks might
exhibit a single strong ’characteristic’ which could influence the test. We wantto capture the influence of a certain genre, not that of a peculiarity of a track.
However, we might still capture the ’sound’ of a certain album (for example
the way it was mixed or mastered), but this is not reasonably avoidable, as one
would have to test an awful lot of CDs.
See table A.1 for the CDs and some data describing their contents
Each CD in this list is there for a reason. First of all, for every main genre
I could find (with some help of wikipedia [2] and the list of genres for which
Grammy-awards are awarded [1]) I tried to add 2 CDs. The genres that areprobably missing are country, blues and reggae and gospel, but these might
be added in the future. However, R&B (Rhythm and Blues) can be seen as aform of blues and gospel while country can be viewed as world-music from thesouthern part of the USA. At least one can conclude that drawing a line andgetting the list right is not easy.
The reason for trying to add about 2 CDs for every genre is not easily explained:
one could argue that certain music genres feature much more diverse kinds ofsubgenres or that certain (distinct) genres sound much alike technically, and thedivision is mainly on lyrics. While this all holds true, I would say there is noinherently better way to ’balance’ a test.
For rock, ”30 Seconds to Mars - This is War” and ”Rush - Grace under
Pressure” were added. The first is more recent and is quite heavily compressed,
while the second is (despite it being a later remaster) from the ’80s and has a
lot more dynamic range. They are musically quite different ’spots’ of the rockgenre as well. Considering rock, ”Jeff Waynes Musical Version of the War of The
Worlds” might be regarded as rock as well, but this features far more electronic
influences and is half audiobook, half music, so it fits no general category at all.

27

Album
30 Seconds to Mars - This Is War
Confido Domino Minsk - Sacred choral music fromWhite Russia
Daft Punk - Alive 2007
Dan Brown - Angels and Demons
Enya - Amarantine
Fanfare Ciocarlia - Baro Biao: World Wide Wedding
Gilberto Santa Rosa - Esencia
Giuseppe Verdi - Messa da Requiem (Berliner Philharmoniker feat. conductor Claudio Abbado)
Howard Shore - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Iron Maiden - Brave New WorldJohn Coltrane - Live at the half note, vol. 1
Joss Stone - Mind, Body & Soul
J.S. Bach - Magnificat
Koninklijke Militaire Kapel - [no name]
Kraftwerk - Autobahn
Lana del Rey - Born to Die
Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
Martin O’Donnell & Michael Salvatori - Halo: Reach
O.S.T.
Michael Bublé - meets madison square garden
Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells (2000 remaster)
Rosenberg Trio - Djangologists
Rush - Grace under Pressure (1997 remaster)
System of a Down - Mezmerize
Szakcsi - Virágom, virágom
Tiësto - In Search of Sunrise 7: Asia
Various - Jeff Waynes Musical Version of The Warof the Worlds
Various - Latin Village, CD 1: Salsa
Xzibit - At the Speed of Life
Yann Tiersen - Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

Genre
rock
choral, religious

Peculiarities
-

DR
6
12

electronic
audiobooknew ageworld music, brass
salsa
classical, romantic

live
-

5
16
8
12
9
12

soundtrack, orchestral
metal
jazz
soul
orchestral, baroquemilitary brass
electronic
pop
hip hopambient-ish, soundtrack
pop, live
not classifiable
jazz
rock
metal
world music
dance
radio
drama-ish,rock, orchestralsalsa
hip hopminimalism, soundtrack-10

vinyl rip
-

7
11
7
13
11
13
5
7
11

-

8
11
7
10
5
10
8
11

compilation
-

8
10
11

Table A.1: CD data28

Confido Domino Minsk’s Sacred choral music from White Russia ishalf orchestral plus choir and half a capella choir. It features, as it’s name would
suggest, mainly religious music and tests the various codecs on their handlingof only voice content.
For electronic music, 3 CDs were used: ”Daft Punk - Alive 2007”, ”Kraftwerk- Autobahn” and ”Tiësto - In Search of Sunrise 7: Asia”. The first is
because Daft Punk has been an popular electronic artist for quite some time
and this album is quite recent. Kraftwerk’s Autobahn was added to counter any
recent mastering issues and is as well well known. Tiësto was added because it
was the only dance music I have in my collection and seems to fit in this test
well: it is quite different from the other two CDs in this category. Daft Punk’s
CD is a live album.
Dan Browns book Angels and Demons as read by Richard Poe was added
to add pure speech to the test as well.
Enya - Amarantine represents New Age music in this test.
Considering world music Fanfare Ciocarlia - Baro Biao: World Wide
Wedding and Szakcsi - Virágom, virágom were added. They are both
European (Romanian and Hungarian to be precise), they are very different andseem to feature two extremes of what one would call world music. Fanfare
Ciocarlia can be typed as gypsy music as well and is mainly brass. Szakcsi isvery different and features both very serene and wild folk music, it consists ofvariations on children’s songs and features no brass instruments at all.
To add some latin (which one could call ’world music’ as well of course), two
CDs featuring salsa music were added: Gilberto Santa Rosa - Escencia anda compilation-CD. The first sounds more like traditional salsa, while the second
features more elements of current popular music.
Classical music is represented by Guiseppe Verdi’s Requiem and Bach’s
Magnificat. The first is from the romantic movement and, as is typical Verdi,
sound more like and opera than a requiem. Bach was an baroque composer.
Both cultural movements are more or less opposing considering size: baroquefeatures a small orchestra and a small choir, while romantic music features large
orchestra’s and very large choirs. In this respect, these two recordings spandifferent kinds of orchestral music. Howard Shore’s soundtrack for The
Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is orchestral as well, but only featureschoir in a few tracks and is less brass-heavy than the other two. Furthermore,this was composed in 2011-2012, so it is still relatively fresh.
To add metal to the test Iron Maiden - Brave New World and Systemof a Down - Mezmerize were added. System of a Down is quite chaotic andfast, while Iron Maiden is more steady and brutal.
John Coltrane - Live at the half note vol.1 and The Rosenberg Trio
- Djangologists were added to represent jazz. Coltrane’s CD represents live
recorded music as well.
Joss Stone - Mind, Body & Soul adds soul to the test.
The vinyl rip of the Koninklijke Militaire Kapel adds some military windmusic to the test.
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Lana del Rey’s Born to Die and Michael Bublé’s live album both add
some pop music to the test. Picking pop music was hard, as quite a lot of pop
music can be classified as rock as well (that’s why there is a lot of poprock out
there) so I took these two, while not strictly being traditional pop music.
Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III and Xzibit - At the speed of life were added
two represent hip hop. There is no particular reason to choose these, they were
the only two I had in my collection.
Martin O’ Donnell & Michael Salvatori’s soundtrack for Halo: Reachis mainly ambient music, and was added to represent it
Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells was added to add some older popular musicas well, while it is not really possible to name a genre this would fit to.
Finally, Yann Tiersen’s soundtrack for Amélie features music with different(but always a few) instruments, and is usually regarded minimalism music. It
was added to check performance on the ’less popular’ instruments featured.

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Bibliography[1] List of Grammy Award categories, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List of Grammy Award categories[2] List of music genres and styles, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music genre[3] Once more: Time for a new lossless codec comparision?, More comprehensive, more detail, (a thread of my own, to ask for advice),
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=94685[4] FLAC - comparison, http://xiph.org/flac/comparison.html[5] Losslesscomparison
HydrogenAudio
Knowledgebase,
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless comparison

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