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Could something like IceT help with the situation in the future?:

IceShare is library that distributes Ogg streams on a pseudo-P2P network. It is heavily based on BitTorrent, but works on the Ogg page level, and unlike PeerCast it works with files as well as continuous streams.

It's designed to allow musicians, video producers, radio and television stations, or anyone looking to inexpensivly distribute audio/video on the web. It's intended to be initiated from websites, with links to icet:// URLs. It is not designed for P2P searching, such as Gnutella, Kazaa, and Mule provide, however websites may be setup to easily search content on one or more IceTracker servers.

Could something like IceT help with the situation in the future?:

IceShare is library that distributes Ogg streams on a pseudo-P2P network. It is heavily based on BitTorrent, but works on the Ogg page level, and unlike PeerCast it works with files as well as continuous streams.

It's designed to allow musicians, video producers, radio and television stations, or anyone looking to inexpensivly distribute audio/video on the web. It's intended to be initiated from websites, with links to icet:// URLs. It is not designed for P2P searching, such as Gnutella, Kazaa, and Mule provide, however websites may be setup to easily search content on one or more IceTracker servers.

Could something like IceT help with the situation in the future?:

IceShare is library that distributes Ogg streams on a pseudo-P2P network. It is heavily based on BitTorrent, but works on the Ogg page level, and unlike PeerCast it works with files as well as continuous streams.

It's designed to allow musicians, video producers, radio and television stations, or anyone looking to inexpensivly distribute audio/video on the web. It's intended to be initiated from websites, with links to icet:// URLs. It is not designed for P2P searching, such as Gnutella, Kazaa, and Mule provide, however websites may be setup to easily search content on one or more IceTracker servers.

Could something like IceT help with the situation in the future?:

IceShare is library that distributes Ogg streams on a pseudo-P2P network. It is heavily based on BitTorrent, but works on the Ogg page level, and unlike PeerCast it works with files as well as continuous streams.

It's designed to allow musicians, video producers, radio and television stations, or anyone looking to inexpensivly distribute audio/video on the web. It's intended to be initiated from websites, with links to icet:// URLs. It is not designed for P2P searching, such as Gnutella, Kazaa, and Mule provide, however websites may be setup to easily search content on one or more IceTracker servers.

Could something like IceT help with the situation in the future?:

IceShare is library that distributes Ogg streams on a pseudo-P2P network. It is heavily based on BitTorrent, but works on the Ogg page level, and unlike PeerCast it works with files as well as continuous streams.

It's designed to allow musicians, video producers, radio and television stations, or anyone looking to inexpensivly distribute audio/video on the web. It's intended to be initiated from websites, with links to icet:// URLs. It is not designed for P2P searching, such as Gnutella, Kazaa, and Mule provide, however websites may be setup to easily search content on one or more IceTracker servers.

Could something like IceT help with the situation in the future?:

IceShare is library that distributes Ogg streams on a pseudo-P2P network. It is heavily based on BitTorrent, but works on the Ogg page level, and unlike PeerCast it works with files as well as continuous streams.

It's designed to allow musicians, video producers, radio and television stations, or anyone looking to inexpensivly distribute audio/video on the web. It's intended to be initiated from websites, with links to icet:// URLs. It is not designed for P2P searching, such as Gnutella, Kazaa, and Mule provide, however websites may be setup to easily search content on one or more IceTracker servers.

A group of us have been working on another project called IceShare with the hopes of providing the free software community with a real P2P multimedia solution which anyone can use and adopt in their own software. Additionally, IceShare is intended for streaming non-continuous media as well, such as CD tracks or archived videos, whereas a media player could not only use the media as it's being transfered but also seek to a not-yet-downloaded parts of the media (where the download focus changes to the new seekpoint).

There's another attempt at P2P streaming as well called Gnomoradio, currently at version 0.7. I have not tried it myself nor do I know anymore than the announcement they sent out about it.

Media players which support Ogg Theora alpha-2 (Xine and mplayer) already support streaming Ogg video. If you have one of these players compiled with Theora support, try opening it with a url from here.

From the Release Plan:

--
2.1 Release
Feature: burst-on-connect
Description: This functionality adds the ability to set internal icecast buffering parameters which affect listeners who first connect to a stream. Currently, listeners experience seeming high buffering times due to the fact that icecast does not send data out faster than data coming in from the source client. By adding burst-on-connect, listeners will be able to get a burst of data from icecast on first connect which may eliminate this buffering time in many instances. This option will be configurable.
--

Not quite sure if they have added this to CVS for testing yet or not, but it sounds like it will address at least part of you problem, the buffering at the initial connection.

As far as handling what happens if a stream falls behind, well, that's a bit stickier and I'm not sure how even commerical tools handle it. Ultimately, I nifty way of handling it would be to dynamically reprocess the stream to speed up the rate that the stream is played while keeping the pitch correct until the stream catches up again.

Of course that would have to be configurable as that could be detrimental to some types of recordings.

Regardless, enough tangental ramblings...

There is a spec for streaming Vorbis over RTP (which I belive is usually on top of IP directly). I don't know of any implementations of this, though...

That's not entirely true. Yes, MP3, AAC, and WMA are the big buzz words, but a quick look at the hardware FAQ shows that there are quite a few major players, including Rio and iRiver, that now support Vorbis.

I know there's a lot of poo-pooing of Vorbis advocates, and sometimes with good reason, but I for one wouldn't mind having the benefits of both an open sourced, cross-platform codec for my own personal collection as well as something nifty like AAC to listen to DRMed music from an online music store.

Troy

Perhaps 1,000 people have significantly large enough Vorbis music collections to warrant an Ogg compatible player.

The openess of free software

with the polish of proprietary excellence.

1) Ogg/Vorbis is supported by (obscure mp3 player). Why should I get that (*drool*) new, affordable iPod?

2) Ogg/Vorbis can work in a DRM-based business model! Here is how: Step 1: Get five candles and a live goat.

Exactly. That is why there are many players that support OGG Vorbis now. Neuros, Rio, IRiver and a buch of others. I personally do not want to be locked into a proprietary format like wma or Apple's AAC. And I would never buy an iPod that limitis what I can do with music I buy. I personally don't understand the Apple Fan Boy mentality. On one hand they cheer Open Source and screem how Apple is now BSD on the inside. Though they over look all of the proprietary Apple formats that are attempts to lock comsumers into Apple. Quicktime, Apple's AAC, their restrictive iPod and iTunes, and just about every product they put out. I personally am sick of companies trying to control what I can do with a product I purchase to further their profits. I will stick to buying a CD and legally ripping it to OGG and playing it on a portable player like the Neuros that supports it. Read this quickly, because soon Apple Fan Boys will be along and wet their pants and mod this as a troll.

For more information on Ogg, here's the Ogg Vorbis General FAQ

Also here is a page that describes the quality of Ogg Vorbis encoding with comparison samples to listen to. Sound quality is subjective so listen for yourself.

There are several good players on the market now. Please see Vorbis Hardware. My personal favorite being the Rio Karma which sports phone out, RCA out (much better than 1/8" out for hokup to external amps, ethernet with DHCP client for automaticaly grabbing an address for networking, 5 band parametric EQ (by far the most advanced eq in a portable player). Pretty nice product. 20 gigs are out now with 40 gigs coming shortly.

Xiph.org Stream directory

"Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet." --Bruce Schneier, CRYPTO-GRAM, May 15, 2001. This applies to streams too.

Is there support for OGG files?
Can I use it between my home PC and my work PC both of which run Linux?
Can I copy a new track to the iPod at home and then download from it to my work PC?
Will it play those files that I want to copy FROM IT to my other PC?

For some reason it sounds like it doesn not. And if that is the case, then this player is not worth a dime to me. I read some post here that are trying to say that if you want to copy YOUR music from YOUR iPod, then you are somehow a theif! What utter crap-ola. Oh, and if Apple thinks I am going to pay $100 for a portable player and then $50 for batteries, they are nuts. 50% the cost of the original product for a battery?

A much better player IMO is the Neuros. It is 20GB, very sleek looking, and it supports OGG and MP3, all for only $199.

For more players that support the Open Source OGG format, take a look here Vorbis Hardware

I know all the Apple zealots will mod me a troll, though that is not my intent. Just because Apple puts out some product does not make it great. When you compare the features of the iPod with other players, the iPod just falls short IMO. I am sorry, but I DO NOT want DRM and I DO NOT want a company I purchase a product from (Apple) to assume I am a theif and prevent me from copying audio I LEGALLY own.

Therefore, CDs are still the only sane choice, if you want to be sure that you can still play the music on whatever equipment you happen to own a few years from now, much less 20 years from now.

Buying data in proprietary formats, is just plain dumb and short-sighted, especially when the older format is standardized. This is a technological step backwards. I won't be using any of these low-value services, unless the formats get cracked (like what happened with DVDs, when DeCSS made DVDs transition from risky investment, to safe investment).

My dollars continue to vote for Red Book compact disks. Anyone who wants to usurp that vote and direct those dollars to themselves, should go see Xiph about a codec and file format, and don't even think about adding a DRM wrapper.

Unmaintained? Pshaw! The latest beta (with ogg integrated with all of the other formats already supported by the Neuros) was released less than a month ago. You may want to catch up on your reading:

The source code for the application that handles uploads and downloads to and from the Neuros is written in Python and is due to be released to the public tomorrow. As far as I know, this software is Windows only.

However, there is much better software out there for handling this (even if you are on a windows PC). I recommend the opensource solution available on SourceForge. It's called Neuros Database Manipulator, is written in Java, and it should work in any OS that can run Java applications. It's slick, fast, and stable. Most people give up on the software that ships with the Neuros and start using this immediately.

If you want a solution written exclusively for Linux, check out the Positron software. You can read about this from the project sponsors, thos guys at Xiph.

If you have any specific questions about whether it will work on your specific OS build, I'd read and post to the Neuros forums. They have a great community support system, and the company is very much invested in answering questions as well. So, it's not unusual to get responses from the community, Neuros tech support, and even the Neuros CEO. Check it out.

So, there are a bunch of options available for ya, even if you aren't on an x86 computer.

Damn Moronic Editors

Sounds about right to me.

Although, I suspect that many of the 300 read slashdot and are vocal in their support of their beloved format.

Personally, I feel that Vorbis is an interesting audio codec; of mediocre quality at low bit rates, but decent quality at high bit rates, that was crippled by tying it to the awful container format OGG (If you want to see how bad of a container OGG really is, read the protocol specs, and see what you have to do to seek in a file. )

I've probably upset someone by stating my dislike of Ogg, so in order to avoid another mailbox full of badly spelled insulting messages, I'll post this anonymously.

There are a few others, but mostly only available in Asia.

Xiph maintains a wiki that has a list of Vorbis (and occasionally FLAC)-supporting hardware.

This list isn't authoritative, however, as companies do have a habit of implementing our stuff in things without telling us first.

Nathan Sharfi
Webmaster

Xiph maintains a wiki that has a list of Vorbis (and occasionally FLAC)-supporting hardware.

This list isn't authoritative, however, as companies do have a habit of implementing our stuff in things without telling us first.

Nathan Sharfi
Webmaster

There are links to reviews from the Xiph Wiki also.

here. Check the thread/archives, there's more.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't FLAC fall inside the Ogg container? I know that most people think of Vorbis as just "Ogg," but it's just one of the parts of Ogg, another of which, if this page says what I think it does, is FLAC.

Regardless, it doesn't hurt to be accurate. It's great that it plays Ogg Vorbis and Ogg FLAC files, and has lots of other cool features; however, I'll not give up my iPod till you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Dan Aris

That just redirects to xiph.org

Incorporate {Scalable Vector Graphics} into {w3c standards compliant open source web rendering engine} and add {Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language} with support for mp3 and/or {Audio compression and streaming that isn't patent encumbered}.

There is an integer only version of ogg available.

Hope that helps.

• Neuros Digital Audio Computer
• Rio Karma 20 (Picture)
• PhatNoise's PhatBox, Kenwood's Music Keg (Powered by PhatNoise) These are in-car players that are installed into the trunk of your car and hooked up to your car stereo. Both players run ARM-Linux and support playback of FLAC files. Beta firmware to support Ogg Vorbis is available at http://phatbox.sixpak.org/phatbox/ogg.phtml.
• KISS Technology's DP-450 and DP-500 DVD Players
• MPST Digital Jukebox
• Freemax FW-960
• iRiver iHP-120, iHP-100, iGP-100, possibly others
• Umax/Yamada have a few standalone DVD players that support Vorbis.
• Neuston provides a standalone DVD player (model DVX-1201) that supports Vorbis.
• Samsung The MCD-CM600 is now available in Korea. It is a CD portable that can play Vorbis, MP3, and WMA. Page with photo of MCD-CM600. Closeup of MCD-CM600.

• Neuros Digital Audio Computer
• Rio Karma 20 (Picture)
• PhatNoise's PhatBox, Kenwood's Music Keg (Powered by PhatNoise) These are in-car players that are installed into the trunk of your car and hooked up to your car stereo. Both players run ARM-Linux and support playback of FLAC files. Beta firmware to support Ogg Vorbis is available at http://phatbox.sixpak.org/phatbox/ogg.phtml.
• KISS Technology's DP-450 and DP-500 DVD Players
• MPST Digital Jukebox
• Freemax FW-960
• iRiver iHP-120, iHP-100, iGP-100, possibly others
• Umax/Yamada have a few standalone DVD players that support Vorbis.
• Neuston provides a standalone DVD player (model DVX-1201) that supports Vorbis.
• Samsung The MCD-CM600 is now available in Korea. It is a CD portable that can play Vorbis, MP3, and WMA. Page with photo of MCD-CM600. Closeup of MCD-CM600.

They put down open source when releasing their Office suite but include Ogg Vorbis in Halo: Combat Evolved their flagship X-Box now PC game.
It seems that the sales and marketing people find it inferior but the developers don't.

I realize most people (with the Slashdot crowd exception) don't know much about Ogg Vorbis and don't have any problem with MP3. But the battle's just begining.

Microsoft wants to push its DRM with the WMA format, iTunes and iPod use other methods of DRM through the devices and software with the MP3 format. But both WMA and MP3 suffer from a major problem in that neither compression codec is free or open.

MP3 players/burners (hardware or software) must collect some money with which to pay royalties for use of (de)compression codecs. WMA is the same way if anyone besides Microsoft provides the software to (de)compress the format. Enter Ogg.

Ogg Vorbis was developed in the open source community and is free of royalties and most restrictions (no more than any other open source software). Some tests have shown that Ogg Vorbis does a better job of retaining sound quality at high compression ratios. And finally, the best reason to switch: There are Ogg Vorbis player for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X that don't suffer from any restrictions. (In linux, XMMS no longer plays MP3s due to licensing restrictions.)

For the curious, a couple places to start looking for players and more information about Ogg Vorbis are:

• Ogg homepage at Xiph.org
• www.whamb.com - Ogg Vorbis player for Mac OS X
• www.zinf.org - decent Ogg/Mp3 player for Windows/Linux

very practical and a great way to pollute your system with proprietary crap. In other words it's great for open source advocates and evil for free software advocates (myself included).

If the 1% of proprietary crap on your system makes it usable, with the option being a 100% proprietary environment, I'm all for the little bit of proprietary crap. If proprietary stuff brings more users, more and better Free Software will be developed.

In other words you are in the open source camp (see OSI) -- pragmatical and practical imperatives, in the oposition to purely ideological and political ones of free software movement (see FSF). This is exactly what I was talking about.

As for making the system "usable" I have really no idea how having pure free software system (in The Church of Emacs sense) renders it somhow "unusable." I don't need Windows drivers, since I don't buy crappy hardware without support in my kernel. I don't need win32 codecs for MPlayer, since I don't pirate movies. I don't need patent-violating MP3 players since I don't pirate music, which means I can have all of my CDs ripped to superior in every way Xiph Ogg Vorbis format.

I also don't care about more users -- only about more developers and with my Debian those are completely orthogonal (I don't use commercial GNU distroes, with which I admit that the user base is indeed important).

But if you're serious about digital recording you're doing 24 bit. And I'm tired of hearing about how it doesn't matter, because it does. You may not be able to hear high frequencies directly, but I strongly believe you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging, in the timbre of woodwinds, and in the overall resonance of a piano. *subtle* but important, IMO, and it *is* My O that matters here.

I agreed with basically all you said up to this point. It is important to record in 24 bits indeed but it doesn't have anything to do with inaudible high frequencies (24 bits is all about quantization, not sampling) and even if it did, they are still inaudible in the same way as ultraviolet is invisible. Of course a painter could use ultraviolet paint because in his opinion "[y]ou may not be able to see high frequencies directly, but [he] strongly believe[s] you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging..." etc.

Even if you really did "perceive" the sound in some magical way without the involvement of your ears (in the same way as deaf people would percieve them -- hint: they don't) they would still be removed by the lowpass filter used in every player to remove the high frequency noise caused by the rectangular edges in digital signal representation.

You are postulating existence of the same phenomena as Professor Collins (an amateur psychoacoustician) in this discussion from over a year ago. Please notice the answer by Monty of Xiphophorus fame (author of Ogg Project (including the famous Vorbis CODEC), CCDA Paranoia and Icecast) who systematically invalidates every single argument of Professor Collins point by point.

Now, back to the 24-bit quantization (once again, having nothing to do with sampling frequency), it is important, because you want to be able to e.g. compress or expand the recorded track without loosing the resolution of 16-bit samples. For example you can easily add 20dB do a very quiet portion of sound, still using the full 16-bit resolution of samples on a final CD (24-bit samples have 256 times higher resolution than 16-bit) but that's about it. It is like processing graphics using 48-bit RGB (or 64-bit RGBA) because you can play with gamma and contrast without the need to sacrifice the final quality.

High sampling frequency can only make sense if you want to downsample it later to play the sound few octaves lower than the original. It is used in techno but is pointless in real music because it sounds awful (low C of any given instrument sounds differently than downsampled high C).

As about the cost of DAC on the minidisc recorders (or CD players for that matter) it is actually surprisingly cheap if you use a 1-bit DAC and the only analog component needed is the lowpass filter but I totally agree with you about the intentional suboptimal quality of consumer equipment. It is exactly like slowing the graphics card in drivers, so you could sell more expensive "pro" version of the very same hardware.

By the way, the -96bB of quiet is expensive indeed, but one have to keep in mind that it is 150000 times quieter than the lowest order bit of 16-bit samples and still 600 times quieter than the lowest bit of 24-bit samples so it is very expensive and equally pointless even when you use 24-bit quantization. You'd need 33-34 bits for -96bB to make any difference but I highly doubt the interference on your wires would introduce the noise lower than that and of course such a recording would only make sense if you are planning to add few tens dB before the finall CD mastering.

Now, I hate the techno/pop/rock crap as much as the next guy and I'm really

But if you're serious about digital recording you're doing 24 bit. And I'm tired of hearing about how it doesn't matter, because it does. You may not be able to hear high frequencies directly, but I strongly believe you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging, in the timbre of woodwinds, and in the overall resonance of a piano. *subtle* but important, IMO, and it *is* My O that matters here.

I agreed with basically all you said up to this point. It is important to record in 24 bits indeed but it doesn't have anything to do with inaudible high frequencies (24 bits is all about quantization, not sampling) and even if it did, they are still inaudible in the same way as ultraviolet is invisible. Of course a painter could use ultraviolet paint because in his opinion "[y]ou may not be able to see high frequencies directly, but [he] strongly believe[s] you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging..." etc.

Even if you really did "perceive" the sound in some magical way without the involvement of your ears (in the same way as deaf people would percieve them -- hint: they don't) they would still be removed by the lowpass filter used in every player to remove the high frequency noise caused by the rectangular edges in digital signal representation.

You are postulating existence of the same phenomena as Professor Collins (an amateur psychoacoustician) in this discussion from over a year ago. Please notice the answer by Monty of Xiphophorus fame (author of Ogg Project (including the famous Vorbis CODEC), CCDA Paranoia and Icecast) who systematically invalidates every single argument of Professor Collins point by point.

Now, back to the 24-bit quantization (once again, having nothing to do with sampling frequency), it is important, because you want to be able to e.g. compress or expand the recorded track without loosing the resolution of 16-bit samples. For example you can easily add 20dB do a very quiet portion of sound, still using the full 16-bit resolution of samples on a final CD (24-bit samples have 256 times higher resolution than 16-bit) but that's about it. It is like processing graphics using 48-bit RGB (or 64-bit RGBA) because you can play with gamma and contrast without the need to sacrifice the final quality.

High sampling frequency can only make sense if you want to downsample it later to play the sound few octaves lower than the original. It is used in techno but is pointless in real music because it sounds awful (low C of any given instrument sounds differently than downsampled high C).

As about the cost of DAC on the minidisc recorders (or CD players for that matter) it is actually surprisingly cheap if you use a 1-bit DAC and the only analog component needed is the lowpass filter but I totally agree with you about the intentional suboptimal quality of consumer equipment. It is exactly like slowing the graphics card in drivers, so you could sell more expensive "pro" version of the very same hardware.

By the way, the -96bB of quiet is expensive indeed, but one have to keep in mind that it is 150000 times quieter than the lowest order bit of 16-bit samples and still 600 times quieter than the lowest bit of 24-bit samples so it is very expensive and equally pointless even when you use 24-bit quantization. You'd need 33-34 bits for -96bB to make any difference but I highly doubt the interference on your wires would introduce the noise lower than that and of course such a recording would only make sense if you are planning to add few tens dB before the finall CD mastering.

Now, I hate the techno/pop/rock crap as much as the next guy and I'm really

But if you're serious about digital recording you're doing 24 bit. And I'm tired of hearing about how it doesn't matter, because it does. You may not be able to hear high frequencies directly, but I strongly believe you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging, in the timbre of woodwinds, and in the overall resonance of a piano. *subtle* but important, IMO, and it *is* My O that matters here.

I agreed with basically all you said up to this point. It is important to record in 24 bits indeed but it doesn't have anything to do with inaudible high frequencies (24 bits is all about quantization, not sampling) and even if it did, they are still inaudible in the same way as ultraviolet is invisible. Of course a painter could use ultraviolet paint because in his opinion "[y]ou may not be able to see high frequencies directly, but [he] strongly believe[s] you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging..." etc.

Even if you really did "perceive" the sound in some magical way without the involvement of your ears (in the same way as deaf people would percieve them -- hint: they don't) they would still be removed by the lowpass filter used in every player to remove the high frequency noise caused by the rectangular edges in digital signal representation.

You are postulating existence of the same phenomena as Professor Collins (an amateur psychoacoustician) in this discussion from over a year ago. Please notice the answer by Monty of Xiphophorus fame (author of Ogg Project (including the famous Vorbis CODEC), CCDA Paranoia and Icecast) who systematically invalidates every single argument of Professor Collins point by point.

Now, back to the 24-bit quantization (once again, having nothing to do with sampling frequency), it is important, because you want to be able to e.g. compress or expand the recorded track without loosing the resolution of 16-bit samples. For example you can easily add 20dB do a very quiet portion of sound, still using the full 16-bit resolution of samples on a final CD (24-bit samples have 256 times higher resolution than 16-bit) but that's about it. It is like processing graphics using 48-bit RGB (or 64-bit RGBA) because you can play with gamma and contrast without the need to sacrifice the final quality.

High sampling frequency can only make sense if you want to downsample it later to play the sound few octaves lower than the original. It is used in techno but is pointless in real music because it sounds awful (low C of any given instrument sounds differently than downsampled high C).

As about the cost of DAC on the minidisc recorders (or CD players for that matter) it is actually surprisingly cheap if you use a 1-bit DAC and the only analog component needed is the lowpass filter but I totally agree with you about the intentional suboptimal quality of consumer equipment. It is exactly like slowing the graphics card in drivers, so you could sell more expensive "pro" version of the very same hardware.

By the way, the -96bB of quiet is expensive indeed, but one have to keep in mind that it is 150000 times quieter than the lowest order bit of 16-bit samples and still 600 times quieter than the lowest bit of 24-bit samples so it is very expensive and equally pointless even when you use 24-bit quantization. You'd need 33-34 bits for -96bB to make any difference but I highly doubt the interference on your wires would introduce the noise lower than that and of course such a recording would only make sense if you are planning to add few tens dB before the finall CD mastering.

Now, I hate the techno/pop/rock crap as much as the next guy and I'm really

But if you're serious about digital recording you're doing 24 bit. And I'm tired of hearing about how it doesn't matter, because it does. You may not be able to hear high frequencies directly, but I strongly believe you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging, in the timbre of woodwinds, and in the overall resonance of a piano. *subtle* but important, IMO, and it *is* My O that matters here.

I agreed with basically all you said up to this point. It is important to record in 24 bits indeed but it doesn't have anything to do with inaudible high frequencies (24 bits is all about quantization, not sampling) and even if it did, they are still inaudible in the same way as ultraviolet is invisible. Of course a painter could use ultraviolet paint because in his opinion "[y]ou may not be able to see high frequencies directly, but [he] strongly believe[s] you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging..." etc.

Even if you really did "perceive" the sound in some magical way without the involvement of your ears (in the same way as deaf people would percieve them -- hint: they don't) they would still be removed by the lowpass filter used in every player to remove the high frequency noise caused by the rectangular edges in digital signal representation.

You are postulating existence of the same phenomena as Professor Collins (an amateur psychoacoustician) in this discussion from over a year ago. Please notice the answer by Monty of Xiphophorus fame (author of Ogg Project (including the famous Vorbis CODEC), CCDA Paranoia and Icecast) who systematically invalidates every single argument of Professor Collins point by point.

Now, back to the 24-bit quantization (once again, having nothing to do with sampling frequency), it is important, because you want to be able to e.g. compress or expand the recorded track without loosing the resolution of 16-bit samples. For example you can easily add 20dB do a very quiet portion of sound, still using the full 16-bit resolution of samples on a final CD (24-bit samples have 256 times higher resolution than 16-bit) but that's about it. It is like processing graphics using 48-bit RGB (or 64-bit RGBA) because you can play with gamma and contrast without the need to sacrifice the final quality.

High sampling frequency can only make sense if you want to downsample it later to play the sound few octaves lower than the original. It is used in techno but is pointless in real music because it sounds awful (low C of any given instrument sounds differently than downsampled high C).

As about the cost of DAC on the minidisc recorders (or CD players for that matter) it is actually surprisingly cheap if you use a 1-bit DAC and the only analog component needed is the lowpass filter but I totally agree with you about the intentional suboptimal quality of consumer equipment. It is exactly like slowing the graphics card in drivers, so you could sell more expensive "pro" version of the very same hardware.

By the way, the -96bB of quiet is expensive indeed, but one have to keep in mind that it is 150000 times quieter than the lowest order bit of 16-bit samples and still 600 times quieter than the lowest bit of 24-bit samples so it is very expensive and equally pointless even when you use 24-bit quantization. You'd need 33-34 bits for -96bB to make any difference but I highly doubt the interference on your wires would introduce the noise lower than that and of course such a recording would only make sense if you are planning to add few tens dB before the finall CD mastering.

Now, I hate the techno/pop/rock crap as much as the next guy and I'm really

Heres a big plus, the Treo 600 can play OGG Files with Pocket Tunes.

Way to go, Handspring.

Frankly I could care less either way. I've got my eye on Thedora....

I assume you're referring to Ogg Theora, the Free video codec that's currently in alpha... I am also looking forward to this project evolving to a usable, stable level.

There's a Wiki list of (hopefully) all portable Vorbis players at http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware. That page has a link to some detailed information from iRiver about which of their players will support Vorbis.

Ogg is a container format. As far as I know, no one is seriously claiming patent protection on the idea of a container format.

Vorbis is a codec that does the same job as MP3 (only better). The Ogg guys worked very hard, with lawyers vetting the code at each stage of development, to make darn sure that no patents apply to anything in Vorbis. It would have been done a lot sooner if they hadn't had to do this.

Theora is a video codec, based on a video codec called VP3. The guys who developed VP3, On2, have patents that cover VP3, and they signed a complete and irrevokable release to allow Theora to be completely free software. I think Theora is what you were thinking of.

And the Ogg code is available under a BSD license, to speed the adoption by commercial entities. Originally they were using LGPL but enough people were worried about viral IP issues that they went to the BSD license.

<pedantic>
And it's codec or codecs, not codex. A codex is a book.
</pedantic>

Want to know more? Check out the Ogg page at xiph.org.

steveha

Lowest level possible means you don't use the block device layer, which means you don't use dd. "cdrdao copy", or "cdrdao read-cd --read-raw" is probably the lowest level you can get with Linux ATM.

I get the feeling that cdparanoia tries to do error checking

Why do you think I mentioned the -Z option to cdparanoia?

it seems disturbingly non-trivial to merely extract bits from an audio CD. That seems strange to me.

It's trivial to extract bits from an audio CD. It's decidedly nontrivial to extract the right bits from an audio CD, so the .wav or whatever is an exact-as-possible copy of what's on the CD itself. FIrst, CDDA sectors are 2352 bytes, no error correction, and seeking to a specific point is not guaranteed. That's why cdparanoia is paranoid about reading each sector several times and comparing each read result to account for jitter/errors. One element of the FAQ page on the main cdparanoia website goes into some detail about this.

Does this imply that, for example, Linux MP3 encoders are now legal in the EU, without royalty or authorization [or will be]?

My interpetation is: yes, but only if you can demonstrate a necessity to do it in order to enable some non-infringing activity. If another data format will allow the same activity to occur, then you should use that data format instead. But if, say, you have a dumb hardware device that'll only play MP3s, then yes you could encode MP3s and be done with it.

But check that with a patent lawyer first...

And when you want to rip your CD collection to mp3 (or ogg, or whatever), you're gonna want the fastest thing around, if you've got a decent collection.

Last time I checked, ripping Compact Disc Digital Audio to .ogg was I/O bound, where the speed of reading PCM audio from the CD limited the whole process. Without some sort of massively multibeam pickup technology, it won't get much faster because CD-ROM drive makers have already run up against the maximum speed at which a CD can rotate without shattering, which is why CD-ROM drives significantly faster than 48x peak haven't become popular. Careless handling of CDs in homes with kids, as well as CD crippling mechanisms, have forced CD audio extraction program authors to use compensations such as rereading sectors. But even if CD audio extraction throughput were to scale up with CPU power, another possible limiting factor is the human interaction factor of taking each CD out of the tray and putting in another one.

Yes, DVD transcoding uses a lot of CPU power, but nobody does that in the USA, right?

As I understand it, the iPod uses an ARM processor without an FPU which is the main issue with ogg playback

-fp