Xarchiver 0.5.0.beta1

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:14:48 +0200

Hi, After two years of development I'm finally able to release the first beta of the new release 0.5.0. Due to the number of features introduced there are also some nasty bugs to be fixed. What to test: 1) GUI behaviour when working on the archives, red/green light, sensitiveness of the buttons etc etc. 2) Operations on tar and tar compressed archives. 3) Cut/copy/paste on all the archives (there are bugs with tar compressed archives). Please report all the bugs at .... If you don't want to subscribe there please send me the detailed bug description along with the backtrace to my email address. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated. Giuseppe Torelli

FLAC: our favourite multiplatform (Linux, Windows, MAC OS X) Free Lossless Audio Codec!

Galigio — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:37:14 +0100

It is true! MP3 format is the most common format we normally use in our everyday applications but MP3 is a lossy compression algorithm and it is not comparable with the quality of uncompressed audio formats as Monkey’s Audio, ALAC, WMA. Nowadays, FLAC is well and constantly supported by many music player producer. We compared FLAC and MP3 formats using the “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major - Allegro” by Bach and the results were very interesting. For common listeners (as us) the audio quality was, more or less, the same but when we asked to a couple of friends (authentic music “hooligans”) to describe the difference between the two music files (FLAC and MP3) they spent more than 15 minutes of their (and our) time talking about “tones”, “pizzicato” and something else that I really do not remember at the moment! After the listening, when we compared the file extensions, we discovered that the FLAC file was five times bigger than the MP3 (25.6MB vs 5.1MB)… To conclude, we really think that FLAC represents a fantastic (and the best) lossless format for home stereo systems. On the other side, if you are not a music purist, MP3 could be the best choice for listening music on portable audio devices.