vlac: A lossless audio codec for voice, written in Rust

Random Dev zzzzz — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:44:34 +0000

vlac: A lossless audio codec for voice, written in Rust

I built vlac, a lossless audio codec designed specifically for 16kHz mono voice audio. It uses an Order-4 LPC predictor and Zstandard with trained dictionaries.

It's written in Rust for memory safety.

How it works

Predict the next sample using the previous three.
ZigZag encode the residuals.
Split the residuals into High and Low bytes (so Zstandard can compress the zero-padded High bytes efficiently).
Compress with Zstandard.

Benchmarks

On a 10.75-second voice memo (337 KB WAV):

Original WAV: 337 KB
FLAC (ffmpeg default): 151 KB
vlac: 163 KB

vlac currently produces files 8% larger than FLAC on general voice audio. However, it is 100% bit-perfect (verified via MD5 hash on the raw PCM data) and compiles to WebAssembly. The architecture allows for domain-specific dictionary training, which FLAC cannot do.

Repo: https://github.com/pngz-dev/vlac.git

pngz - alternative to png

Random Dev zzzzz — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:27:43 +0000

I made a image format, it's called .pngz, it inherits png kind of filtering, with zstandard compression. it has also a feature to train our images on dictionary, plus a optimize button.

Check it out: https://github.com/pngz-dev/pngz.git

DEV Community: Random Dev zzzzz

vlac: A lossless audio codec for voice, written in Rust

vlac: A lossless audio codec for voice, written in Rust

How it works

Benchmarks

pngz - alternative to png