This page comparing various lossless audio compression algorithms and programs hasn’t changed much since January 2003. I am no longer maintaining it and I suggest that the best place to maintain an up-to-date account of this subject is in the Wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_data_compression#Lossless_compression
Some short updates
- http://www.lossless-audio.com Windows, Linux, plug-ins etc.
- Windows Media Player 9 supports lossless audio compression. See: Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/quality.aspx . I also understand that Apple’s Itunes software has a lossless algorithm.
- http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossless.htm Martin Lange compares various algorithms.
- http://www.true-audio.com Free (as in free and open source) algorithm with impressive documentation, various implementations, including a Cool-Edit plug-in. Comparison of various algorithms at: http://www.true-audio.com/codec.comparison .
- Francois Charlton wrote to me with some thoughtful theoretical material which I reproduce here: fc-lossless.html .
If you want the test samples . . .
Update 2010-04-16:
I apologise for the test files not being available for some time. I have not been able to find my December 2000 CDRs of these files. This was the basis of what I used to have in a separate directory, which I described in this way:
I have a set of audio samples which I think give a good range of material to try compression algorithms on. I can send this to you on two CD-Rs if you like, or if you have broadband Internet and are happy to download a bunch of stuff (674 Megabytes) you can get Zipped (ordinary Zip format) compressed versions of the 11 music tracks I used for these tests. Please see ../../0-big/ and give the username lossless and the password audio. There is also a bunch of compression programs there and the batch files etc. I used for testing. The files on these CD-Rs, and in the above-mentioned directory, are from December 2000.
I have found most of the test files - 00 HI to 10SI - and these are avialable: Please see ../../0-big/ and give the username lossless and the password audio. The test files are stereo 44.1kHz 16 bit .WAV files, compressed with PKZIP - so they can be decompressed by WinZip and many other programs. The Unix/Linux "unzip" program can also decompress them.