It would be a hugely usefulif the Audiophile version of BIAB could be shipped with the realtracks formatted as ‘Lossless WMA’ rather than WAV and be expanded to WAV at run time in the same way as the non-audiophile (standard WMA) version is.

This would ‘only’ deliver about a 50% compression ratio over WAV but, for the audiophile version, this equates to well over 300 gigabytes of saved storage (and this figure is growing with each release). I am aware that there would be a slight performance penalty for the decompression to WAV at run-time but this would, I believe, be much more than offset by the ability to store the realtracks on a superfast SSD. (Most affordable SSDs top out at 512GB at present and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future).

Would PG have to pay some kind of extra royalty to Microsoft for the use of lossless WMA? If so is this significant? (I would be happy to pay a little more for a 50% disk storage saving).

Many thanks, Aubrey


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