Lossless Audio, as you certainly would not have guessed from its name, is a lossless audio codec. Whoa!

It was developed in early 2000s by Michael Bevin with the goal of being an audio superpacker, obtaining best possible compression with little concern for encoding time (and decoding time, as it seems to be a symmetrical compressor) and memory requirements.

It did not meet much success, probably due to being limited to stereo 16-bit streams, closed source, and also due to competition from open codecs that had no such limitations. While these compressed less, one can be reminded of a quote from WaveZip's author "an extra 10% compression ratio just isn't worth a 20x wait".

The Windows package contains a command line (de)compressor and a GUI frontend, besides plugins for Foobar2000 and Winamp. The Linux package contains a command line (de)compressor and a XMMS plugin.

Development ceased decades ago, indicating this codec has been abandoned. But the web page is still available. There, you can find the theory underpinning its operation.

Compression performance in my limited test: 47,6% (high mode)


Date: 2004-02-08
Version: 0.4b
Interface: Graphical and command line
Platform: Win32
Download: la04b.exe - 584kB

Date: 2003-05-18
Version: 0.4
Interface: Command line
Platform: Linux
Download: la04.tar.bz2 - 1.189kB