Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

Balrogg: Demonically compacting (up to 15%) lossless Vorbis/Opus recompressor

read original get Samsung T7 Portable SSD → more articles
Why This Matters

Balrogg is a GPLv3 tool that losslessly recompresses already-compressed Ogg Vorbis and Opus audio, claiming 8-12% savings on .ogg and 3-8% on .opus. That matters for archives, music libraries and CDN storage costs where lossy audio was previously considered incompressible. The catch is that files must be decoded back with the tool, and the .blr format isn't stable until v2.0.

Key Takeaways
Worth a Look

Samsung T7 Portable SSD — If you're archiving a big lossless music library, a fast external SSD gives your compressed .blr archives a safe, portable home. The Samsung T7 is compact, USB-C, and quick enough to make batch encoding and decoding painless.

See Samsung T7 Portable SSD on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.

balrogg

balrogg losslessly recompresses Ogg Vorbis and Opus files. Archives are typically 8-12% smaller than .ogg files and 3-8% smaller than .opus files.

Releases are not backwards or forwards compatible until v2.0 is reached.

balrogg is licensed under GNU GPL version 3. See COPYING. Report issues to Kamila Szewczyk [email protected]. The project is hosted at https://github.com/iczelia/balrogg.

Quick start

balrogg e music.ogg music.blr balrogg d music.blr music.ogg balrogg -b e * .ogg * .opus balrogg --progress -9 e music.ogg music.blr

e compresses and d expands. balrogg detects the codec. With -b , every remaining path is processed using the available cores and memory. Encoding appends .blr ; decoding removes it. Larger inputs run first.

-p or --progress displays a progress bar on stderr for encoding and decoding, with each Vorbis tuning trial identified separately. Use --progress-lines for logs. Batch progress uses separate lines labeled with the input filename.

Installation

Use your package manager or download a binary from GitHub Releases. To build a release tarball, run

... continue reading