Sonarc

From MultimediaWiki
Revision as of 19:34, 9 May 2016 by Multimedia Mike (talk | contribs) (more about the history and use cases)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Sonarc is a lossless audio compression format by Richard P. Sprague and published by the company Speech Compression. The documentation accompanying v2.1i (the latest known version of the software) indicates a copyright date of 1994. This documentation further states, "Sonarc is now being used as an installation utility in PC titles published by Interplay, Origin, and The Software Toolworks, among others."

The algorithm operates on 8- or 16-bit PCM samples in either mono or stereo configurations. It typically achieves 2:1 to 3:1 compression ratios for suitable audio, while falling back to an uncompressed mode for data which falls outside of its coding model.