MikeB on 20 March 2008
@ NJ5
As you said, the Cell is good for decompressing data so it should be extremely easy to fit that into the engine without performance loss.
Highly compressed audio using audio codecs are never lossless.
A wikipedia quote:
"Audio compression is a form of data compression designed to reduce the size of audio files. Audio compression algorithms are implemented in computer software as audio codecs. Generic data compression algorithms perform poorly with audio data, seldom reducing file sizes much below 87% of the original, and are not designed for use in real time. Consequently, specific audio "lossless" and "lossy" algorithms have been created. Lossy algorithms provide far greater compression ratios and are used in mainstream consumer audio devices.
As with image compression, both lossy and lossless compression algorithms are used in audio compression, lossy being the most common for everyday use. In both lossy and lossless compression, information redundancy is reduced, using methods such as coding, pattern recognition and linear prediction to reduce the amount of information used to describe the data."
Example of lossless image compression: GIF (256 colors, 24-bit RGB pallete) or PNG (24 bit). Example of lossy image compression: JPEG (quality degrades with smaller file size)
