Hi Carl:

I agree with your main point, but I think MP3 has been reverse engineered by the LAME team, so at
least some of it is effectively open-source now.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Pultz" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 8:22 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Is it time to rethink FLAC ?


> The thing about FLAC versus some other formats is that it is 'open-source.' What's under its hood
> isn't a secret, unlike the Apple and Windows formats or MP3, so baring some Great Simplification,
> a future culture that can deal with digital media will (hopefully) have all the info they need to
> reconstruct the data. That's not an argument for using it, but it does make the decision
> practical. Someday, Microsoft and Apple will be dust, and who knows what will control their ip?
>
> Another subtlety to this subject is that all of these file formats are alternate ways of
> describing the same thing. With lossless formats, it isn’t really correct to think in terms of a
> generation. A FLAC version of a WAV file is the same information, expressed in a different way.
>
>