FLACArray

This package provides a set of tools for compressing multi-dimensional arrays where the last array dimension consists of "streams" of data. These streams are compressed with the FLAC algorithm and can be written to different file formats as well as decompressed back into numpy arrays.

FLAC compression is particularly suited to "noisy" timestreams that do not compress well with DEFLATE algorithms used by zip / gzip. This type of data is found in audio signals, scientific timestreams, etc.

In the flacarray package we use only a small subset of features found in the libFLAC library. In particular, each data stream is compressed as a single, 32 bit "channel". Stream data consisting of 32 bit integers (or 64 bit integers spanning a peak-to-peak range that fits into 32 bits) are compressed in a loss-less fashion. Floating point data is converted to 32 bit integers with a user-specified precision or quantization.

If you are specifically working with audio data and want to write flac format files, you should look at other software tools such as pyflac.