The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! is the third solo studio album by Saul Williams . It was released in 2007. It peaked at number 41 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart, as well as number 89 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. The album is entirely produced by Trent Reznor . The title of the album is a reference to David Bowie 's 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars .
23-479: The album was available for purchase or free download at NiggyTardust.com. The website allowed users to pay $ 5 to support the artist and be given the choice of downloading a 192 kbit/s MP3 version, 320 kbit/s MP3 version or lossless FLAC version. Digital distribution of the album is provided by Musicane . Reznor publicised the album on the Nine Inch Nails website and mailing list, saying that "Saul's not
46-509: A CD. If a CD is read and ripped perfectly to FLAC files, the CUE file allows later burning of an audio CD that is identical in audio data to the original CD, including track order and pregap , but excluding additional data such as lyrics and CD+G graphics. But depending on the burning program used, CD-Text may be recovered from the metadata stored in the CUE sheet and burned back to a new copy on blank CD-R media. The reference implementation of FLAC
69-400: A waveform. The result is formed by adding the residual and the calculated waveform. As FLAC compresses losslessly , the decoded waveform is identical to the waveform before encoding. For two-channel stereo, the encoder may choose to joint-encode the audio. The channels are transformed into a side channel, which is the difference between the two input channels, and a mid channel, the sum of
92-518: Is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio , developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation , and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of
115-606: Is currently no multicore support in libFLAC, but utilities such as GNU parallel and various graphical frontends can be used to spin up multiple instances of the encoder. FLAC playback support in portable audio devices and dedicated audio systems is limited compared to formats such as MP3 or uncompressed PCM . FLAC support is included by default in Windows 10 , Android , BlackBerry 10 and Jolla devices. In 2014, several aftermarket mobile electronics companies introduced multimedia solutions that include support for FLAC. These include
138-557: Is implemented as the libFLAC core encoder & decoder library, with the main distributable program flac being the reference implementation of the libFLAC API. This codec API is also available in C++ as libFLAC++. The reference implementation of FLAC compiles on many platforms, including most Unix (such as Solaris , BSD ) and Unix-like (including Linux ), Windows , BeOS , and OS/2 operating systems. There are build-systems for autoconf / automake , MSVC , Watcom C , and Xcode . There
161-520: Is optimized for decoding speed at the expense of encoding speed. A benchmark has shown that, while there is little variation in decoding speed as compression level increases, beyond the default compression level 5, the encoding process takes up considerably more time with little space saved compared to level 5. Alongside the format, the FLAC project also contains a free and open-source reference implementation of FLAC called libFLAC. libFLAC contains facilities to encode and decode FLAC data and to manipulate
184-795: The Pono music player and streaming service used the FLAC format. Bandcamp insists on a lossless format for uploading, and has FLAC as a download option. The Wikimedia Foundation sponsored a free and open-source online ECMAScript FLAC tool for browsers supporting the required HTML5 features. Support introduced in Windows 10. Windows Media Player (2022) also supports FLAC in an Ogg container for live streams (e.g. Icecast internet radio ). Support introduced in Android 3.1. Android natively supports regular FLAC (.flac), but not Ogg FLAC (.oga). However, support for both regular FLAC and Ogg FLAC were later added to
207-521: The Xiph.Org Foundation and the FLAC project announced the incorporation of FLAC under the Xiph.org banner. Xiph.org is home to other free compression formats such as Vorbis , Theora , Speex and Opus . Version 1.3.0 was released on 26 May 2013, at which point development was moved to the Xiph.org git repository. In 2019, FLAC was proposed as an IETF standard. FLAC is a lossless encoding of linear pulse-code modulation data. A FLAC file consists of
230-431: The magic number fLaC , metadata , and encoded audio. The encoded audio is divided into frames, each of which consists of a header, a data block, and a CRC16 checksum. Each frame is encoded independent of each other. A frame header begins with a sync word , used to identify the beginning of a valid frame. The rest of the header contains the number of samples, position of the frame, channel assignment, and optionally
253-436: The sample rate and bit depth . The data block contains the audio information. Metadata in FLAC precedes the audio. Properties like the sample rate and the number of channels are always contained in the metadata. It may also contain other information, the album cover for example. FLAC uses Vorbis comments for textual metadata like track title and artist name. The FLAC encoding algorithm consists of multiple stages. In
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#1732858636502276-589: The NEX series from Pioneer Electronics and the VX404 and NX404 from Clarion. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has adopted the FLAC format for the distribution of high-quality audio over its Euroradio network. The Windows operating system has supported native FLAC integration since the introduction of Windows 10. The Android operating system has supported native FLAC playback since version 3.1. macOS High Sierra and iOS 11 add native FLAC playback support. Among others
299-470: The album 4.5 stars out of 5, saying: "This is Williams' finest moment, and interestingly, one of Reznor's, too." Quentin B. Huff of PopMatters placed it at number 12 on the "101 Hip-Hop Albums of 2007" list. All tracks are written by Saul Williams and Trent Reznor , except where noted Credits adapted from liner notes. Musicians Technical personnel Free Lossless Audio Codec FLAC ( / f l æ k / ; Free Lossless Audio Codec )
322-450: The album. It was announced at nin.com that, as of January 2, 2008, two months since its release, 154,449 people had downloaded NiggyTardust. Of that number, 28,322 people chose to pay the asked price of US$ 5 (US$ 141,610 Total). In comparison, Saul's self-titled album has sold 30,000 copies since its release in 2004. A physical release of the album was released on July 8, 2008. It contained five bonus tracks. Thom Jurek of AllMusic gave
345-486: The block size. Regardless of the amount of compression, the original data can always be reconstructed perfectly. For the user's convenience, the reference implementation defines 9 compression levels, which are presets of the more technical parameters to the encoding algorithm. The levels are labeled from 0 to 8, with higher numbers resulting in a higher compression ratio, at the cost of compression speed. The meaning of each compression level varies by implementation. FLAC
368-407: The difference between the approximation and the input, called residual, is encoded using Rice coding . In many cases, a description of the approximation and the encoded residual takes up less space than using pulse-code modulation . The decoding process is the reverse of encoding. The compressed residual is first decoded. The description of the mathematical approximation is then used to calculate
391-413: The first stage, the input audio is split into blocks. If the audio contains multiple channels , each channel is encoded separately as a subblock. The encoder then tries to find a good mathematical approximation of the block, either by fitting a simple polynomial , or through general linear predictive coding . A description of the approximation, which is only a few bytes in length, is then written. Finally,
414-451: The household name that Radiohead is" and urging fans to support him. This was a reference to Radiohead's In Rainbows , which was released in October on the band's own website with customers choosing how much they want to pay for the album. The free option has since been removed, with a message on the website claiming their intention had always been to remove it after 100,000 free downloads of
437-580: The metadata of FLAC files. libFLAC++, an object-oriented wrapper around libFLAC for C++ , and the command-line programs flac and metaflac , are also part of the reference implementation. The FLAC format, along with libFLAC, are not known to be covered by any patents , and anyone is free to write their own implementations of FLAC. FLAC is specifically designed for efficient packing of audio data, unlike general-purpose lossless algorithms such as DEFLATE , which are used in ZIP and gzip . While ZIP may reduce
460-443: The original audio data. FLAC is an open format with royalty-free licensing and a reference implementation which is free software . FLAC supports metadata tagging, album cover art, and fast seeking. Development was started in 2000 by Josh Coalson. The bitstream format was frozen with the release of version 0.9 of the reference implementation on 31 March 2001. Version 1.0 was released on 20 July 2001. On 29 January 2003,
483-481: The original media are lost, damaged, or worn out, a FLAC copy of the audio tracks ensures that an exact duplicate of the original data can be recovered at any time. An exact restoration from a lossy copy (e.g., MP3 ) of the same data is impossible. FLAC's being lossless means it is highly suitable for transcoding e.g. to MP3, without the normally associated transcoding quality loss between one lossy format and another. A CUE file can optionally be created when ripping
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#1732858636502506-469: The size of a CD-quality audio file by 10–20%, FLAC is able to reduce the size of audio data by 40–50% by taking advantage of the characteristics of audio. The technical strengths of FLAC compared to other lossless formats lie in its ability to be streamed and decoded quickly, independent of compression level. Since FLAC is a lossless scheme, it is suitable as an archive format for owners of CDs and other media who wish to preserve their audio collections. If
529-417: The two input channels. In place of a mid channel, the left channel or the right channel may be encoded instead, which is sometimes more space-efficient. Even though the reference encoder uses a single block size for the whole stream, FLAC allows the block size in samples to vary per block. The amount of compression is determined by various parameters, including the order of the linear prediction model and
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