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dbry / WavPack

WavPack encode/decode library, command-line programs, and several plugins
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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question about --enable-legacy #166

Closed sezero closed 11 months ago

sezero commented 11 months ago

Hi David: Legacy wavpack files (generated by wavpack < 4.0 yes) are disabled by default and needs --enable-legacy configury switch to enable during library build: Is there a compelling reason for that? Is it unstable / unreliable? And/or, are such legacy wavpack files rare to care about? Asking it because I am undecided about enabling it in SDL_mixer's own vendored libwavpack builds.

dbry commented 11 months ago

Hi Ozkan. Version 4.0 of WavPack is now around 20 years old, so any files from before that are exceedingly rare (I have not heard about one for years). And I recommend that anyone still in possession of such files should losslessly transcode them to a modern version because there are many technical issues with them. First, they begin with a WAV RIFF header, so some software misidentifies them and plays loud noise. Also, they are formatted as one contiguous stream, so they are very slow to seek and a single bit error can turn an entire file to unrecoverable noise.

In short, my recommendation would definitely be to not include legacy support in any SDL builds. Even FFmpeg, which attempts to decode anything, has correctly decided not to include WavPack legacy support.

Thanks!

sezero commented 11 months ago

OK, thanks!