What is OptimFROG?


OptimFROG is a lossless audio compression program. Its main goal is to reduce at maximum the size of audio files, while permitting bit identical restoration for all input. It is similar with the ZIP compression, but it is highly specialized to compress audio data.

OptimFROG usually obtains the best lossless audio compression ratios. It has Windows, Linux, OS X, and FreeBSD versions, fully featured input plug-ins for the Windows Media Player, foobar2000, Winamp 2/3/5, dBpowerAMP, XMPlay, QCD, XMMS, and many other audio players (with bitstream error resilience, ID3v1.1 and APEv2 read tagging support, ID3v2 compatible), optimal support for all integer PCM wave formats up to 32 bits and an extensible streamable (error tolerant) compressed format. It is also fast, the default mode (preset 2) encodes CD quality audio data at 66.9x real-time and decodes at 96.9x real-time on Intel Core i7-6700HQ at 2.6 GHz, while the fastest mode (preset 0) encodes at 140.0x real-time and decodes at 138.0x real-time. Self-extracting (sfx) archives can also be created with a small overhead of just 173 kB.

The compression ratios which can obtained with OptimFROG are generally ranging from 25% (silent classical music) to 70% (loud rock music) of the original audio file size. This is less compared with around 13% obtained with high quality MP3 files (~176 kbps), but you have the great advantage of archiving and listening at perfect copies of your original music.

OptimFROG uses a new audio compression technology, the generalized stereo decorrelation concept (together with the optimal predictor), which was first introduced with OptimFROG 4.0b in December 2001. At the time of its introduction, the new technology yielded significantly better (~1.5%) compression than existing state-of-the-art lossless audio compressors.