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New "mp3PRO" From Fraunhofer, But What About LAME?
xenoweeno writes: "This Week In Consumer Electronic reports that Thomson and the Fraunhofer Institute are working on a new mp3 format they've dubbed "mp3PRO." Thanks to competition from e.g. Windows Media Audio, they're looking to get 128kbps quality down to 64kbps. Great, but what does this mean for projects like L.A.M.E., which has just recently freed itself from Fraunhofer ["regular"] mp3 code/patents? Back into the fray?"
A lot of Open Source project actually show what software can *really* be too, but anyway, he's right. MP3 is quite old, and ready to replace.
WMA has better quality and higher compression-rate.
(-% TwistedMind %-)
LAME's code no longer includes any of the ISO code, so is free of copyright claims in this area. However, the MP3 processes are patented in many countries, and have to be used in order for an MP3 encoder to work. Fraunhofer haven't slapped the LAME coders with a suit yet. Vorbis should be patent-free. Yet Fraunhofer issued a warning a few days ago to the effect that the Vorbis coders were probably infringing some patent somewhere. This is, of course, a meaningless and unsupported threat. But, then, if you paid for the final development work on the most popular compressed media format in the world, wouldn't you go looking for a little compensation?
Thanks. You also did remind me of analog audio compression formats like Dolby A/B/C/SR, which I forgot to consider. The B type in particular, does not have the sliding frequency bands like the others so under my narrow definition it wouldn't be compression (which it is). :)
I mostly didn't like his attitude.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Good point, but this claim was for a hardware acceleration of the encoding process. Unfortunately, it was proprietary, much like Creative's other stuff.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
If you know what you're doing, you encode at 256kbps or above...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Thy anti-closed attitude here is just sad especially since the claims of open-source have always been about creating "new" and this is "new." Why not take a look at reality once in a while instead of living in a self-created open-source heaven and battling the gates of closed-source hell led by the forces of Bill Gates. You are not fighting a holy war as much as you'd like to be revolutionaries...its just self-made.
Enjoy the new format and the hopeful improvements it has. Develop alongside or against it as in the end, any development is good.
The term 'instrument' in relation to module music formats (like s3m) is somewhat misleading as they're not really instruments. An instrument in this case is any sampled sound: speech, ambient sounds, crowd sounds, distorted guitars, vocals or whatever. The goal of sound compression should be to identify patterns in wave music, isolate them into instruments and play them back by modyfying the pitch, volume, etc, to recreate the original recording as close as possible. Worst case scenario is you end up with 1 instrument, the entire track, hopefully mp3 compressed, so you're guaranteed at least as good a compression as regular mp3.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Will this new MP3 Format be playable on current technology MP3 Players? I'm not talking about the software players...those are always upgradable, but I'm asking about the stand alone portable players out there. Rio, Nomad, those are the ones I'm concerned about.
I just bought a SoundsGood Audio Player add on module for my Handspring Visor and basically has it just become a paperweight?
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Ah, but Thomson has been claiming that Ogg Vorbis is probably also in violation:
http://slashdot.org/yro/00/12/11/2347252.shtml
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Wasn't ment as a troll, I guess I just have a very different view of music I guess then you.
As far as the 'Why would anyone ever need more than 640k of ram?' quote I don't think its directly comparable.
In the case of memory, more memory ment that the programs could get more complex with higher memory requirements. My question was, assuming each CD holds about an hour of music (on average), carrying around 500 hours of music won't change the fact that there is still only 24 hours in a day (only so much you can actually listen to at once). Its like saying "I hate DVDs because they still only put one movie on a disk! I want to be able to carry around the complete run of 'Cheers' (chosen at random) in the memory of my computer so I can watch the episodes at random as my background wallpaper."
If you're using it as a big music juke-box I can understand the need for more storage/better compression (I guess), but I don't see what so hard about saying, 'I feel like X Y and Z today' and picking CDs (mp3 or otherwise) to take with you for that day.
I think this may be just a difference in viewpoint and we'll have to agree to disagree.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
last time i used the winamp plugin for winamp, the playing, changing the volume, anything. would use 100% cpu.
also compression was about 500X slower then LAME.
but i didn't compress tracks enough to see a "major glitch". i ment performance, as in speed. i didn't enconter any bugs.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Source alternatives (png, ogg vorbis, etc) they are always in reaction to an existing technology brought forth by a company who could afford the R&D costs on something more original.
;)
I think you are making a wild assumption. What I think you dont realize is you are using your 'capitalist-centric' rationale to relate these things unnecessarily. Its a chicken-egg problem. I believe that because the modern social organization is essentially the corporation it plays a dominant role in everything. While I'll agree that new tech usually appears under a Corporate moniker - it does not happen as a natural result of something this corporation provides.
Research is done by people -- these people have motivations (fame, food, sex, whatever) -- if they were _allowed_ to produce work for the public domain: they would. The technology would still be there -- there would still be innovation. We have allowed corporations (or those who can use them as tools to satisfy their own needs) to gain _alot_ of 'power'. That power is all around you - your City Hall is a corporate entity and acts like one, your employer is a corporate entity and acts like one, your civil groups, your soccer league, your grocer -- EVERYTHING is a corporate entity and acts like one.
What I would advocate is a legislative restructuring and balancing of (Capitalist) Corporate vs Civic vs Private 'power'. We have (unfortunately) allowed (Capitalist) Corporate entities to 're-organize' culture to their advantage -- I use the analogy of a virus being capable of altering conditions within its host -- this effectively precludes any action outside of this dominant social structure.
So, back to your original point: Don't believe that innovation, freedom, basic needs and all else that you require for sustenance would vanish if Corporations did - that somehow they have 'given' us these things: It is very untrue. Technology would be born and evolve quite well outside of the present (Capitalist) Corporate world - maybe more so, because alot of the unfortunate after effects would be lost -- we could spend a greater amount of our efforts on worthwhile things (technology, art, and other self-satisfying pursuits) if we could abandon the 'necessary evils' of the corporate world: Advertising, Marketing, BizHeadTalk, Consumerism, Needless Pollution, Self Rewarding Greed, Corporate Enslavement, Exploitation of the Underprivileged and other various crap - people should be able to live their lives without being _forced_ to participate in (in what I believe) to be a selfish, ill-conceived system to fuck other people. I believe it is better to share with your neighbour than to steal from him - but what option do I have outside of being a modern-life-martyr and starving?
Ok - im done preaching.
maybe offtopic: what about wavelet transformation for audio compression? anybody who knows about signal processing?
an audio codec does not only consist of a psychoacoustic model, but also a mathematical description of the data, in case of MP3 its basically the fouriertransformation.
for image compression, they now start to use the more modern wavelet transformation (really, fouriertransformation is nice, but its literally last century mathematics). would wavelets improve MP3 on the mathematical side? anybody?
So don't be so negative. It works the way -you- want too =)
(Looking at most of the posts here, this is perhaps the most mistunderstood aspect?)
- tankefugl
"mrhg-tap-tap-ping" - famous typewriter, 1853AD
http://www.famous-words.com/
In other words, you can play what you like, but you're not allowed to contribute without paying the ante.
According to Thomson's licensing terms, you're only allowed to play for free if it meets these 4 conditions:
- Software implmentation for "desktop" use
- Distributed free of charge
- Downloaded via the Internet
- For personal use of end-users
These specific details are at this page. Any other software players, they want $0.50 each with a minimum of $15k/year (hope you sell an aweful lot), or a much larger one-time payment. Terms are similar for hardware, but there's no free version. They want quite a bit more if you're encoding.I've heard a number of people say that their patents only cover the encoding process. Maybe that's the case, and they're just trying to tax decoders without a leg to stand on.... but so far I've not seen a really good arguement backed up with references to the patents. If you know of one, please post a link or email me. Thanks.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
On every Live! card, Creative claims "up to 320Kbps" encoding, as well as "9X mp3 encoding". Unfortunately, that's integrated into their "PlayCenter 2" software, which only runs on Windows, and even then it won't run properly on Windows 2000 or Windows NT 4. Should this be considered false advertising? Should Creative release the source code for this so all Live! owners with the card can encode on all operating systems? Should Creative be cited for false advertising? I believe so.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I've wondered about this myself. Some of my favorite music pieces are vocals and a single acoustic guitar or a single piano. I would think one could separately code the two sources more effectively than the sum. This would give the listener the added advantage of mixing the output themselves (they might me interested in learning the music part). I wonder how many separate tracks could be coded before it becomes more efficient to just code the aggregate.
For you to say though that this feature would induce people to pay for the version means there must be some sort of copy protection to prevent the user from just coping it to another file and preserving the multi-track info. Of course this is going to make it less appealing, even to people who bought the song in the first place, by making it difficult to play the same song at home, in the car, and on a portable.
Most of the people on this site wave the banner of Freedom and Openness when in reality all they want is a free lunch.
Sorry, this sort of ad hominem bullshit just doesn't cut it here. Sure, some of the community are freeloaders, but very few of the Open Source people I deal with are. Those whom I know well don't hesitate to pay shareware fees, buy a few copies of RedHat, and otherwise compensate that digital street musician for his/her fine work. The "some do it, so all are bad" argument is worthless crap, no matter who presents it. Even M$ ain't totally bad, if examined fairly and without bias.
In my experience, the same people who support open source software are the ones who support the whole pirate warez scene.
Then I suggest you stop hanging with those clods and get some better experience, or else provide some verifiable support for that claim. I DO NOT believe the FACTS support it. My experience, for one data point, is entirely the opposite. To take the extreme position, does Stallman approve of warez? I think you'll find he does not.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Let's not be silly and just say that a compressed format uses a compression algorithm, okay? And there is a difference between lossy and lossless compression.
By the way, I'm an engineer so I've read some literature.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Is LAME catching up to mp3pro or is mp3pro catching up to Ogg and Advanced Audio Coding?
Simple solution:
1. Use Wine.
2. Create better codecs.
3. Port to native Windows/BeOS/MacOS/Amiga
a. This easier than it might seem
b. 1.5x the work of the original for
5x the value
c. Gives competitors who like to do as
little as possible something to worry
about.
4. Keep the competition busy.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
There is a beta of a Mac version of Windows Media Player, too.
If you haven't seen it, there's a demo/beta version available on Microsoft's site. The quality (for the amount of data used) is simply amazing.
View Here
Of course, if you're running a non-Windows machine, don't bother.
As for GIF and RSA, they both stem from the same reason, as far as I can tell; Netscape. I wonder if we can pin this on Marc?
Here's my reasoning. Netscape was the first wildly popular web browser. Sure, Mosaic was first, but Netscape really brought it to the masses when they spruced up HTML into something that normal people (IE, non-geeks) want to look at. Netscape had the power to do something other than use GIF, but didn't.
Why use GIF in the first place? Compu$erve was the most popular ISP at the time, not that it was really an ISP. Still, it was the way most people connected to the greater networked world, unless they were at a uni. Compuserve used GIFs... Oh my.
Anyway, with a whole bunch of GIFs running around the world, it becomes a reasonable format to work with. Plus, it's compressed, which can be pretty handy. You can also flag a color as transparent (anyone know if that's what that was originally used for? Or if it's part of the original spec?) so that's extra handy. Later, the animation supported by GIF (which some other programs like the DOS .MOD music player "modplay" used) was added.
RSA seems to have come about due to Netscape though, directly. There is a fascinating document which serves as an Introduction to SSL which explains the basics. It doesn't tell you the story of Netscape inventing it (probably because it would be boring) but it does mention in passing that they're responsible for SSL.
Anyway, NCSA Mosaic used GIF, Netscape didn't decide to use something else, and Netscape decided to use RSA for key exchange inside of HTTPS. To be fair to NCSA, the web in that form was never really intended to be the final web. We should have never taken the web past a toy, and developed something better, and used that instead. Everyone, including those who are responsible for its success, tends to agree on this. Too late now, though.
Of course, I'm one of those people, since I lived in a scruz geek house and had a web page. I should have known better and preached against it. Then I could do interviews and talk about how "I know it would be the world wide wait" or something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I believe the underlying codec is AAC, as Universal prefer it to MP3.
99% of people dont notice the difference ..
;)
1% does have a sensitiv enough ear to hear it...
I'm f*cking glad, I'm one of the boring 99%
I dont really notice any difference at 128kbit
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
I appreciate what your saying, but the flip side of making file sizes smaller is that you get better quality for the same bit rate. If they can make 64kbps mp3s sound like 128kbps (which I doubt!), the surely 128kbps will sound better!
That's what companies /believe/, but, in fact, if you actually read the infamous EULA (End User License Agreement) that comes with most commercial software, you'll find that agreeing to it exempts the software house from most liability (and as an aside, that's why UCITA is bad for companies, it puts such licenses on a firm footing, although even pre-UCITA it was difficult to argue around them).
I took a middle-manager at the company I work through an MS EULA one day to actually point out how little legal recourse the company had (at the time, NT was being pushed, hard, onto engineer's desktops, exactly where we didn't want it.) (And yes, we were both very bored at the time.) He was quite amazed.
Upon further analysis (and slow percolation up the chain of command), it was found that with linux or BSD (we went BSD-wards)and a decent "platinum" installation, support, and infrastructure maintenance subcontractor (there's the people you point to when things go wrong), in terms of legality, we were on much firmer ground with Open Source software. And, since we use a lot of in-house custom code, running it on NT for 4 times the price of,say, a RH boxed set for everyone in the company (And that is of course unnecessary) was just silly (although perfectly possible - NT has no shortage of dev tools, you just pay for most of them.)
Although the total cost is not, as some people would have you believe, free, it is much better value for your money than going an MS route, particularly if someone sues you for leaking chip designs that were under NDA (worked out where I work yet?), and it is somewhat better value than Solaris (at least for some purposes - we do use a rather large solaris ultrasparc lump for some hairy simulations)
It's because a lot of research usually goes into developing those algorithms, and that research needs to be paid for.
To use Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format as an example (because they make the same claim as MP3PRO): One of Microsoft's claims on WMA is that you get better quality at half the size. This is actually more true than most people (especially around here) are willing to believe. I thought it was marketing BS until last week, when I decided to run an informal experiment.
Using MusicMatch Jukebox I ripped one song ("Finding Me" by Vertical Horizon, because it starts off immediately with sufficiently dynamic sound) into raw WAV, 128 and 64 kbps MP3 and 128 and 64 kbps WMA. Then I listened to sections of the song, comparing the same section in the five formats. I'm a vocal musician, and have a sensitive ear to sound quality, particularly in music (I know it's not as rigorous as that waveform analysis of MP3 encoders that was published here recently, but in the end it's how the music sounds to the human ear that really counts).
I was impressed with the fidelity of the 128 kbps WMA. In fact (and I was quite surprised at this one) the WMA was truer to the original than the same bitrate MP3. The MP3 was actually slightly dampened in the high ranges compared to the original. What was really surprising were the 64 kbps files. The MP3 at that bitrate basically sucked, because the sample rate was only 22 kHz (resulting in weak low ranges and muted upper tones), while the 64 kbps file sounded quite good, because it was still at a 44 kHz sample rate. Of course, there was a slight degradation (to my hearing) in the sound quality between the 128 and 64 kbps files (mainly a slightly "metallic" sound in some spots), but I suspect that most people wouldn't really notice it.
So, MS's claim of 1/2 the size, better quality is not strictly true in combination; it's more like same size == better quality, half the size == considerably-more-acceptable-than-MP3 quality at that size.
If MP3PRO uses an even better compression/interpolation algorithm than MS Research came up with for WMA, then not only will 128 kbps MP3s sound better, but 64 kbps MP3s will probably start becoming the norm for use in pocket MP3 players.
--Ford Prefect
Read again.
The guy says that it is possible to increase the file size without a better quality, that means _decreasing_ the compression ratio.
In fact, that's something that is not very clear, Fraunhoffer people say that 128kbps is enough, but what about 196kbps? is it noticeably better?
Apart from that, the particular codec might be designed to achieve 128kbs quality and nothing more than that, but that is another story.
Anyway, I think that if we are going to change formats, a free standard is the way to go.
Reminds me of Intel renaming the P6 Pentium Pro.
Makes sense from their end, no? Gotta keep leveraging the name..
-Justin
"open" does not mean "free" (either as in "free beer" or "free speech"), it just mean that the specification is available to anyone, and the algorithm can be licensed by anyone.
And what true artist stops creating music because he isn't making money? Most musicians didn't make squat before the era of recording.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
In the long run, who cares. These are all lossy compression techniques, and as bandwidth expands, downloading actual CD quality audio (perhaps viewed as a compressed form of 24bit/96kHz "DVD" audio) will be feasible. Likewise for portable players affected by storage media costs and size. I would wager that in 10 years, nobody will listen to MP-anything, except perhaps MP4-SA, which is effectively a sound synthesis and processing language rather than a compression technique.
I don't know FLAC's algorithms, but I can say that shorten has nothing to do with bzip2 in terms of compression style. As I recall, Shorten uses a predictor equation to predict the next sample from the current sample, and then uses Huffman coding on the difference between the predicted sample and the actual sample.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Everyone seems to have forgotten that years ago, Frau accidently left the source code for their original MP3 encoder on their FTP site!
;)
This is the basis for many open MP3 encoders today.
Perhaps they will be helpful enough to make the same mistake twice
I said: predict the next sample from the current sample... Brain fart. More correctly, it predicts the next sample from several recent samples.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Christ, stop and think a minute before you open your mouth. What the original poster meant to say, which is a very valid question, is does the new mp3pro "top out" at 64kbps. MP3 certainly does so, but not at 64kbps. The difference between a 256kbps MP3 and a 320kbps MP3 is almost negligable. I doubt if there are 1000 people in the world that could tell the difference. Yet the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps is extremely obvious, even to the untrained ear. So if mp3pro were to offer great advanced in sound quality up to 64kbps, but then be no different from 64kbps on, then we'd want to know about it, because it would be just like having 128kbps MP3s all over again, which aren't really that useful to some.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Well, I was referencing the files themselves. not the compression format itself. Getting music for free is great, even if the *format* isn't GNU/FSF/Debian sort of "free." In my own case, the best thing about it is downloading all sorts of crummy Britney Spears and N*SYSNC stuff for my young cousins and burning them CDs, so that I can effectively prevent the sale of crappy consumerized marketroid-driven artificial teeny-muzak. Wow, that was a mouthful... ;-)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Ooh, another lossy compression format. And here I'm waiting for digital music representation that is better than CD-Rom. (Mmmm... vinyl. I can hardly wait for DVD audio.) I doubt that this will be used for music as much as they seem to suggest. It might be good for streaming voice-only lectures, though.
Today's sig brought to you by http://www.swankypimp.com
I paid ~300 for a 40 meg hard drive in the early 90s. Nuff said.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Now people (heavens no, not me) can download twice as much Metallica for the same price!
It's depressing that Slashdot would rather plug LAME, which in the end promotes a closed standard, over Vorbis, a fully independent and open one.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
In my opinion, *GPL is a deterrent to adoption.
I wouldn't touch a GPL'd codec because i don't want to have to give away my source code. You can't sell software if you give away the source. And no, i don't want to sell 'services' - i'm a programmer, not a babysitter.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
the new codec will be adopted immediately by the digital pirate subculture, then filter down and replace mp3 in no time at all. long live free networks :)
Bandwith IS important. I know about a music studio that is putting on the infrastructure to record a bass guitarist from Canada, a lead guitar from Italy and a drumset from Spain. Think about it as distributed computing, but then distributed music channels.
I haven't heard from MP+
It's a new format developed by a German student, which is/aims to be completely patent free
I haven't tried it yet, but from what I heard it's fairly well.
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/73884/audioco der.html
And a comparison site:
http://orion.spaceports.com/~smaug/compare/
(-% TwistedMind %-)
Guess they are trying to regain all the wealth they missed out when leting people use mp3 for free. This format will probably be locked and you have to pay huge/hugeish royalties for using it. With Ogg Vorbis getting better I think it this plan will fail.
Though mp3s have gotten lots of publicity lately.
Before you get too excited, I should say that this was only done for some audio tracks that were important for a project I was working on. I haven't tried ripping a track off a CD and compressing it that way.
The problem with VBR mode is that it isnt supported within the Linux kernel.
VBR mode used to be supported in the Linux kernel, but I replaced it with the meaning of life. It got into the 2.4 release along with support for Water Faeries.
Does my bum look big in this?
Why is it that everone bashes computer speakers so much? For example mine say
Frequency Response 70Hz - 20kHz +-3db
Signal to Noise 85db
They are made by Yamaha but were not that expensive.
When you include the Sub they cover the entire human hearing range with an error of less than 3db, the Signal-to-Noise Ratio ensures they never hiss.. basically what am I missing that I would get with a $1000+ set of speakers (apart from any THX/Surround Sound/etc.)?
OGG VORBIS vorbis.com
-----
Kenny Sabarese
Left Ear Music
AIM: kfs27
irc.openprojects.net #windowmaker
Kenny Sabarese
www.kennysabarese.com
gawd. hopefully i never meet up with those droids. I can see them now... Playing around with kernal hacks while drinking 7-up and then all of them dressing in Sammy hilfiger and bananna republic clothes while Mr. Grandpa telling them how they are such good little boys.
Maybe I'm just used to people dressing in near black and wearing a "I hate Linux" tshirt while installing a kernal hack for an external CD-Rom on a Laptop.
You don't have infinite space? Let's see, at 128kbps, you can fit 11 hours of music on a CD. If you think that sounds like shit, go up to 256, and put 5+ hours on it. 320kbps will still give you over 4 hours. On a piece of storage that costs less than a dollar. (Less than 50 cents if you buy in sufficient bulk.) That's not "stupid-cheap"? I'd call that as close to infinite storage as anyone gets today.
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
grep -ri 'should work'
What the article subject says to me is "Fraunhofer is developing something new, which is bad because we've just managed to legally use the last thing they did without paying for it ."
Last phrase mine.
[
OS could also use the mpeg1-layer2 format, which isnt too bad and close to mp3, that im sure can be 'tweeked' to be an mp2+ (better than mp3)
This is exactly what the mpegplus project tried to do. Extend MP2 into something better. But it seems some of Fraunhofer's MP2 patents hadn't yet expired; other posts suggest that the project has been shot down.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Which is a good point- you can't simply _accept_ claims like that, it's suicidal. They will claim _anything_.
Hmm. I haven't had that problem. On my machine at work, it takes about 3% of system resources to play. And compressing a track generally takes about 40-60% of the track length in time, the same as LAME. This is on a K7-700/128M.
At my age I find coming up with a witty signature too exhausting.
I assumed with the candy reference, you were alluding to M&Ms brand candies. M&Ms are made by Mars Inc. not Hershey.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well, as far as I'm concerned this is Vapourware at its very best:
"We haven't got anything to show you at the moment, but we are the creators of MP3, so be afraid, WMA and free MP3 codecs, be very afraid... Resistance is futile. There's no point in developing your crappy codecs any further. mp3PRO might not be more than a pipe dream at the moment, but it WILL become the standard for digital audio.... someday."
talented artists like Eminem stop writing music because you communists think you are allowed to steal it for free
"I say download the audio on MP3 and show the whole world"... Even though Dr. Dre hates MP3, Eminem seems to like it. "And Dr. Dre said... nothing you idiots! Dr. Dre's dead; he's locked in my basement" where he can't pursue people who share Eminem's music on Napster and similar services.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
In my opinion, *GPL is a deterrent to adoption. I wouldn't touch a GPL'd codec because i don't want to have to give away my source code.
With a LGPL'd codec, you don't have to. IANAL, but it appears you just have to
- distribute your application in a form that can be re-linked with the library, and
- mirror the library's source code.
You don't have to release your own source code if you use an LGPL'd codec. That's what puts the "lesser" in "Lesser GPL."Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
So, Ogg Vorbis 2.0 will be announced soon?
It's NOT downwards compatible.
IMHO they just add additional information to each Mp3 frame.
Quote:
Content encoded in mp3PRO can be played back in a traditional MP3 player but without the quality enhancement. The format can also be used for streaming Web audio.
And the immediate comment by Slashdot is "But what about LAME?!". Aren't we being just a tad narrow-minded here? What the article subject says to me is "Fraunhofer is developing something new, which is bad because we've just managed to legally use the last thing they did."
Fraunhofer developed mp3. Had slashdot been around by then, it would probably have considered that to be really, really bad news because of the license. But, yet, I can listen to mp3:s today. The development of mp3 wasn't a bad thing in the long run, and there's nothing that indicates that the development mp3PRO would be bad in the long run either.
Couldn't we try to be just a bit positive about new inventions and developments instead?! Even if the inventions aren't made by three happy hackers in a University basement?
Actually, with a bit of knowledge, you would see that it is indeed possible to achieve a file size compression without an increase in sound quality. Sound fidelity could easily have a maximum value apart from the file size.
This sig may be reproduced by anyone for any reason.
Windows Media Encoder 8 (in beta) has similar claims, and I have to admit they're pretty close. MS has some demos up. Being able to stream audio at an acceptable quality on my dial-up rocks :)
Then don't accept them.
You're not obligated to use the codec, nor are you obligated to use the source code.
GPL code gives you 2 options:
1. Don't use it. If you believe that the GPL code has less value than your code, then you might be better off reimplementing it.
2. Negotiate with the copyright holder. As the copyright holder can license code under whatever terms they wish, I'm sure that they would be willing to license you the codec under terms that are more to your liking.. Of course, there may be a different (probably monetary) price attached.
GPL code is not public domain. There is a price attached. It's not a monetary price (like windows/oracle/mtv/..). But it is a price. You either pay the price, or you don't use GPL'ed code in non-free (libre) software.
Let me repeat that: GPL is not the same as public domain.
As a personal question, how is a GPL code less free than a non-free codec? What are the license fees to fraunhofer for MP3? How about liquid audio? Microsoft Audio? GPL code isn't public domain, but it is free'er than those non-free codec in several ways. Those techniques are closed, trade secret, proprietary, and patented, thus un-reimplementable. At least Vorbis lets you reimplement it with no obligation.
Yes, vorbis sounds amazing. You obviously can't tell a whole lot from converting an MP3 to ogg, but ripped from a CD, there's a noticible diff.
<shameless self promotion>
I even wrote <A HREF="http://faceprint.com/software.phtml">a script</A> to convert MP3s, and keep all the ID3 info and such.
</shameless self promotion>
Why do I say this when it's not in the LAME docs? Because LAME is open source, I needed it, and I hacked it in.
It's that simple. (I've tried to interest the coders in this but they don't 'get it': I think mastering engineers will be a lot more interested.) Let me put it this way- as long as there are mastering engineers and studio types willing to struggle with the code enough to look after _their_ interests, LAME will beat whatever Fraunhofer comes up with, because Fraunhofer is all computer geek researchers- I see them going for a 'one size fits all' consumer encoder, and this is totally unacceptable and wrong for professional use.
And encoding music into mp3 or similar lossy formats _is_ a professional task: in the field of music it is so competitive that anything a band or artist can do to give themselves an edge _will_ be done. If LAME operated by a real mastering engineer using serious reference speakers and adjusted to let the soul of the song through beats the quality level of mp3pro operated by the artist... then the guy using LAME will score more downloads, get more attention and money, sell more CDs when his music _sounds_ _better_ at the same bitrate, and the guy using mp3pro and coloring his sound with a preset compressor that isn't tailored for the individual song will _lose_.
This is such an obvious development, and it is totally favoring the 'open source' side of things, because there are not enough 'mastering engineers', even wannabes, to tailor a commercial product to them- yet the work they do can outperform what you'll get from preset compressors. It's not the easiest skill to acquire but if you can do serious mastering on CDs you have the skillset to know what to do when you have your dirty little hands deep in the internals of LAME.
I'll demonstrate using my music as an example: the top album, "Marginal Theorems", and the second most recent, "Wounded Skies", are all made into mp3s using LAME with this ATH level control and extensive mastering work on the low and high frequency cutoffs. Psy model is turned off and replaced with ATH masking only, and ATH is custom set to the needs of the track to render the reverberant field with the proper weight, where necessary. The high cutoff is a great deal more gentle than you'll usually see, so that the tendency of the encoder to grab at all the HF data it can get is mollified without seriously altering the tonal balance of the HF sounds- basically the highs are eased back in volume until they take a place in the soundstage that isn't over-forward, but retain their character. The lows are set with a combination of low cutoff and slope that allows a sort of resonant area to be moved up and down according to the needs of the track- sometimes extending well below hearing, sometimes moved up to add muscle to the midbass.
Go ahead and hear for yourself. You should hear how good the _256K_ mp3s from the same settings sounded! (I'm probably going to find a site that lets me upload those for high quality buffs or those who want a CD made- probably Ampcast.com.) Any mastering engineer could do this, but at the moment it is LAME-only because I'm not aware of any other encoder that lets you meddle with the guts of the encoding parameters that way. I asked about this for almost a year now and nobody had an answer, so I finally did it myself.
Anyone wishing to roll this into the main LAME distribution will get full cooperation from me... so far I haven't seen an interest. Which, cynically, I don't mind so much: _I_ believe in the principle of free software, but if people don't _want_ the hack by which I'm able to encode ambient information properly, fine: I'll just use it myself. I happen to think it is one hell of a secret weapon. I posted on rec.audio.pro about my modified Lexicon reverb and used 'Marginal Theorems' (128K mp3) as a demo of what I do with my Lexi and people were _floored_. They didn't neccesarily figure out how much of that I owed to free software and LAME, though ;)
muahaha, free software as secret weapon!
Ah, but Thomson has been claiming that Ogg Vorbis is probably also in violation:
Baseless accusation. Thompson basically is stating: "There's no way anyone else can develop decent audio compression techniques. They must be ripping us off."
Just because they claim doesn't make it so.
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"Rock over London... Rock on Chicago..." -Wesley Willis
Ogg Vorbis needs a better publicist :)
The company acknowledged that the primary driver behind the upgrade was competition from other codecs, including Windows Media Audio, that purport to offer equivalent or better sound quality at half the MP3 data rate.
1st off. Windows Media Audio (what a crappy name), does NOT offer 128kbit MP3 quality at 64kbit. it's not even close, and you don't need a kick ass pair of speakers from here to tell the difference. Secoundly this is FUD in response to FUD. There lieing about Microsoft's success and saying "we can do the same thing". it's all a lie.
Now what IS true is that Windows Audio Whatever does offer much better quality at lower bitrate, WAAAYYY better quality. MP3 is really geared for >128kbit, while Windows Audio is really for OggVorbis Monty does talk about how OGG should scale very well to lower bitrates, so don't really expect and new compitition.
The new format is going to be fantastic news for sites like Nullsoft's shoutcast.com , live365.com (which only has 56 and lower streams). Where lower bitrates are very common, and well.. sounds like crap.
Finally this is a good marketing move, For microsoft to say, "We have something better" doesn't mean much, for the guys who made the big #1 success to say "We can a new version, that's better". means a lot. It's like "MP3 II, the return of the codec". that and making it backwards compatible is going to mean instance acceptance.
Also FgH is going to be able to protect it's IP better this time around, maybe not even release a "dist10" (demo source) like they did last time, which spawned LAME, BladeEnc, and every other codec outthere.
Hopefully we all give this the big middle one, and use OggVorbis, unfortantly it's not done, and currently performes like crap.. at least for now. hopefully in the future this will change.
-Jon
this is my sig.
- music via low bitrate wireless (e.g., cellular)
- audio storage on appliances without mass storage (e.g., handheld device)
- tivo-like capability for small radios
- increasing the quality (there's much room for improvement) of existing 'standards' like 128kbps streams
Smarter folks than I can certainly dream up even more. I suppose I shouldn't be suprised that manyJust my $.02,
Mike
Your monitor is staring at you.
That would mean they take for example a 32 Kbps rate compatible MP3 frames and add a new stream of 32 Kbps PRO side info.
It would be impressive if they could equal the quality of 128 Kbps standard MP3 with that...
Johan.
You can't have it both ways.
I thought people believed that open source was better than commerical software.
So MP3 comes out, and open source can faithfully reproduce it by violating these (non-obvious) patents. It matches implementation but certainly doesn't improve on the efforts of Fraunhofer institute, their real work being in developing the acoustic model. If Fraunhofer can improve on that it just shows that potential for improvement was always there, but open source efforts weren't good enough to find it.
The only reason people would switch to this new encoding would be if it was substantially better. If that means that open source software falls behind - tough shit, this can be fixed eventually, it just means ignoring a different set of patents. This just shows where the real innovation comes from. I know that innovation is a dirty word now that MS have got their fangs in it, but there is such a thing as the genuine article.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
"Like MP3, mp3PRO will be open and available for licensing." seems to me like the media whores didn't read what they were about to publish.How can something be open on one hand and require licensing on the other?!
At least the guys at http://www.mp3pro.com/ (that by the way have nothing to do with Fraunhover) will get hits on their site. :-)
If they can get the same quality mp3(pro) in 64 kbit that today takes 128 kbit, then those limited memory MP3 players (often only 64MB, just enough for an hour music) can hold twice as much music. That seems a big advantage to me.
The flash memory used by MP3 players is expensive enough to make smaller size at same quality very useful.
The fact that you can get sound quality that at 64kbit sounds like a 128kbit MP3 means that you get higher quality at 128kbit, too. In other words, your 128kbit MP3pro might sound like 200kbit MP3 or similar. So a more efficient codec is useful in any case, also since it most likely will give you CD quality at a lower bitrate.
VBR is usually independent of a better compression scheme. I guess, you can employ it for MP3pro, too, without too much trouble.
The format is backwards compatible to MP3, this means you can keep on using all your old MP3 hardware. This is the killer feature that no other format has. Just think of going from black and white TV to color TV, vs. color TV to HDTV (the latter requires that you buy a new TV set).
sometimes its not!
I have a neo25 mp3 player and this uses a 2.5" notebook drive.
currently, the largest you can find is 32gig from ibm, but its FAR from cheap (around $500) and hard to find right now. and still, 32gig doesn't hold half of what I currently have (all at 128k, btw; done with the linux frau. encoder).
for iso cd-r's, you also don't have infinite space - for those car and portable players that use the data cd's.
for home use, yeah, storage is free and infinite (almost). but all other areas are NOT.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
adolf writes:
I don't -want- to see hear bad they can make things sound at 64kbps. And further, I don't care about bandwidth or disk usage, even though I'm behind a 28.8 modem.
I -do- want high-quality downloadable (freely or not) music. By high-quality, I mean indistinguishable from a CD to my own ears (LAME at ~220Kbps average VBR does this for me).
Storage is stupid-cheap these days. Bandwidth is slowly spreading out into much more diverse, and usually competitive, markets.
Sounds like what you are looking for is FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net). It's lossless compression. If you sample at CD resolutions, you get CD quality sound (if you sample at higher resolution from a better input source, you get better than CD quality sound). Only two downsides:
* Less compression than mp3's
* Not finished yet (but they do have working code)
Check it out.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Ok.. what about players not mentioned in the article?
I don't believe you can actually say that we've reached the limit of audio compression. What kind of a researcher are you? Why bother doing a PHD about a "mature" technology that has no where to go? Sheesh.. The lower limit (for size) has already been defined. Have a look at MOD/S3M files. These are systems which store the actual placement of samples into different channels at different frequency/pitch. ie. they actually contain the composition of the song. Reading an S3M file is like reading sheet music with a list of instruments to play. You can get high quality songs, similar in quality to studio recordings for under 300k (although most are a meg these days). These are full length songs. A lot of the S3M's that are produced today contain too many samples which blow out the size. For example, an artist may include the same sample at two different pitches because he/she is not aware that they can use the format to change the pitch. We're nowhere even close to developing a system that can reduce an audio stream to the component instruments and a score format like S3M. Well as far as I know. You're the researcher, so tell us, is it even possible? Isn't this where the research should be focused -- on the hard problem?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Any clues?
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
its annoying but admittedly has nothing to do with the sound.
otoh, vbr without a settable upper limit can cause problems to various hardware based decoders that stop at 192k. there are plenty of them out there, like the lp3 dongle device and various clamshell cdr iso cd players.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
why would they be pissed? I'm sure it will contain some "copy protection" scheme in the format and they will go sue happy over anyone who ignores the "copy bit".
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ok so I am sure that someone else could come up with a much better compression method if they tried. Lets just not accept anything else from a group that tries to extract ungodly amounts of money for using their code. Mp3 was really revolutionary and started a movement which we are in today. But we got it from here. There are too many people in the game to have us dependant upon one group for a new high compression standard.
What do you think??
Kingtut
Technology is only a vehicle. People are the ones that drive it.
As a consolation, now you can make any album you have sound just like "Kid A"...
Why isn't this discussion about Yamaha's vqf format? I find vqfs totally indistinguishable from CD at 96kbit. The things take forever to encode and I don't know how well they stream, but for purposes of storing your CD collection it's perfect.
What they should be doing is working on maximizing quality, not minimizing size.
The goal should not be 128kbps quality in 64kbps. It should be 44KHz/16 bit quality (or even better yet, 96Khz/24bit quality) in a manageable size.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
OggVorbis is even more free than GPL/LGPL (for those, who prefer not infecting other software ...). The algorithms and the formats are completly public domain, and you're free to do whatever you want with it (even include it in highly proprietary software). Only the implementation is LGPL (for the library) and GPL (for the demo-player, which IMHO doesn't have any effective value, 'cause there's a plugin for xmms).
I just wanted to support you by pissing at those rio people. HEHEEE! :)~
I carry 20gigs in my Neo 25 so I can afford more than 128kbs. Actually my whole cd-collection is LAME V1
I agree that space doesn't really matter, but bandwith does.
It's not only about napster users, but online broadcasters would love to see their bandwith saved.
(Ok ok, multicast will solve all problems but at the moment you must provide a stream PER USER)
So FhG/Thomson have released a new codec, based on mp3, which they claim gives twice the compression (but probably only does about 1.5x). The guys behind LAME think that if they were to make some changes that weren't allowed by the original spec (just like FhG have done), then within 120 hours of coding they could make big improvements, probably up to the 1.5 mark. What stops them is that existing players wouldn't play it
It is impossible for a 64kbps mp3pro stream to sound like 64kbps to an old player and 128kbps to a new one in the manner they've described. If they ofload large amounts of processing onto the player, the having a 64kbps stream sound like 48kbps on a mp3 player and 128kbps on mp3pro then that I can just about accept
So, why would we want to move from mp3 to mp3pro? The quality improvement isn't that great - vorbis will be able to match that by about release 2, and vorbis is patent free GPL / LGPL and will soon support subtitles and video! mp3pro will be at least as patented and needing licencing as mp3 (don't forgot that lots of companies are now being asked for mp3 royalties from FhG, who haven't gone after royalties for a few years), and quite possibly more. So, when you're in that boat you've also got to consider real audio and media player as serious contenders (they're cheaper than mp3pro is likely to be based on mp3, and sound nearly as good), while Vorbis shines out.
Finally we've got the player issue. You can get an mp3 player for almost every platform out there. Realplayer and media player run on very few, and look at dvds! Are we really gonna see players for linux, bsd, os2, beos?
Yeah, we're going to see some mp3pro, but I don't think it'll oust mp3 just like that, and I really think vorbis is the one to watch. (Vorbis is at http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/)
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
Original file: approx. 24MB
bzip'ed file(*): approx 17MB
MP3 file(**): approx 5.5MB
(*): I made it there after several experiments with blocksize and stuff. Don't ask me about the settings.
(**): encoded using LAME, VBR at highest quality. Average bitrate at about 230.
This makes me think that bzip might actually not be the best compressor available, but for lossless compression it surely is about the best solution.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I was at a reverse engineering conference and happened to sit down next to a guy from the Fraunhofer Institute. They do a lot of research in many different fields and when I asked him about patents he shut up for a minute and then said "yes, we are commercial oriented, that's how we get to do so much interesting research." He didn't seem too happy about it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Its real nice how my school's web proxie wont let me go to any internet site with the word mp3 in it.
but... VBR doesn't stream well. i have an mp3 jukebox running icecast that various machines listen too over the network. VBR crackles and pops.
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Hmm.. for some reason I think that if the muzak corps started producing 900k music files that sound better than today's mp3's people will accept whatever player that have to download to play them and if that player can only be written by people with licenses from Fraunhofer then they will make a lot of cash. Especially if they have some stupid form of copy control embedded.
How we know is more important than what we know.
LAME isn't "free from Fraunhofer mp3 code/patents". They may have finally outgrown their name and become a full-fledged mp3 encoder in their own right, but no matter, Fraunhofer's patent still stands. LAME infringes on that patent.
From the Vorbis FAQ:
(note that this question isn't on the faq from vorbis.com, it's from xiph.org.
No matter how hard LAME tries, it is another MP3 encoder, and as such, infringes on mp3 patents.
Higher quality closed formats is not the answer. Higher quality open formats are the only way.
Jeremy
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
Why is this so hard? Really, if you are the music company and you have the individual channels of the song, then you can do remarkable clean channel encoding and mix them together on the client side. I believe this is what mp4 does.. someone back me up here. So think about it. If music companies and individual artists (the only folk who can do this) produce music files that are better encoded and drastically smaller than "ripped" music files, wouldn't we pay for them? The RIAA is running around talking about Napster and laws and copy control but they really can't give us a good reason why we would want to pay money for the official stuff instead of grabbing the free stuff. Isn't this a reason? or am I out on a limb here?
How we know is more important than what we know.
This seems to be a first for Microsoft eh?
Making their end products smaller and less bloatish than everyone else, while at the same time getting the jump on the market as a whole.
;)
Does it go on forever?
Lets breath in and take a moment! .....
Now, we do not know really how good the format is
and maybe it is simply an attack at present mp3
format. So what? Most compressed media devices
support MP3. MP3Pro is perhaps a preceived way
by Fra.... whatever to stuff gene back into the
bottle. It can't be done. Even if it is 50% better
than mp3, even then 128 isn't that great, 160 is
somewhere around listenable quality, unless it
happens to be a rip of britney spears CD from
Napster by people to who sound is two computer
speakers.
They are falling forward to make a strike, albeit
a very clumsy one. If they'd done their homework,
they should've done some tests, perhaps rigged
ones, not just say, hey all stuff out there
sucks so dump it and go for our new thing, that
you will HAVE to pay money for.
Just another of lowball stories on hype the world
coming to an end, corporation will own you type
thing...
yes.. there is no justice in the moderation system.. we are all owned.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Vorbis is GPL/LGPL too, which is a definite plus to many geeks :)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
if they claim they can heve the same quality in half the data, does this also maen they have better quality in the same ammount of data?, e.g. is this going to improve the quality of a 128 kbps compression?
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
This kind of thinking from xenoweeno must go. Just because some company came up with something doesn't mean they are automatically good! We need to have more faith in our brothers and sisters that create truly great open source works.
At the very least we can do is to wait til the darn thing actually came out before crying "Uncle"...
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
If the Fraunhofer people think we should start using a new audio codec, perhaps we should. But if we're going to be starting over from scratch, why not make it a free codec? Why should I reencode all my mp3s in mp3pro (hmm.. "What should we name our new audio codec guys?" "Uhh.. who cares?" "Mp3pro it is then") when I can just as easily reencode them to something else that isn't restrictively controlled? Perhaps this is a good chance for free codecs to gain ground..
Just a thought, but it might be interesting to write a codec that would create a MOD/STM like file. That is, identify instruments, sample them, then encode the music as a sequence of notes (as MOD's/STM's do). You'd also need a delta track to encode differences from the MOD (i.e. bending notes on a guitar, vibrato, voice). By trying to encode it as a MOD/STM you could remove wide frequency bands filled with instruments from being encoded. Then again, the delta track might be bigger than an equivalent mp3. And identifying instruments would probably be very computationally intensive. But interesting.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
vbr encoded files almost always have problems (in players) with time elapsed and time remaining; in the display portion of the decoder.
Recent encoders actually have a tag somewhere in the MP3 file that explicitly sets the track length. I believe this was started by the Xing (ick, don't use it) encoder. I know that Lame 3.83 does it. The Ogg Vorbis encoder, which currently only does VBR, also does this, and the plugin for Winamp picks it up.
Someone else noted that VBR doesn't stream well. I don't personally listen to much streamed media, so this isn't a problem for me. However, I recall a friend of mine at Real Networks stating that VBR makes streaming very difficult. I am certain that this problem is being worked on by a number of companies and projects...
At my age I find coming up with a witty signature too exhausting.
now that fraunhoefer has made the announcement, i am sure the RIAA has contacted their lawyers... I just hope that the internet community can embrace as many standards as possible so as to put the RIAA out of business by way of lawyer-cide....
I encode 99% of the audio I listen to, and since storage is so cheap I use FLAC to do it. It takes a while to encode, but the result is a great lossless file. Check it out. Anyone have experience with other lossless coders?
How many of the portable mp3 players currently available support reflashing of the software to support new formats like this? Odds are that a new format with better compression and quality will come along and replace mp3 as the popular choice sooner or later. Have many or any of the manufacturers taken this into account with the design of their player?
The invoking of Hitler or Nazis is widely held to be an automatically losing move in a debate. I'm wondering if Red-baiting shouldn't be equally potent weapon for rhetorically shooting yourself in the foot. The only difference I can see is a leftward ideological skew for making differently flavored flamebait.
that Fraunhofer will keep a tighter lid on this patent, if, and when they are successful. This is good news, tho. I love music, and anything that will let me store gobs and gobs of music on my harddrive, and other places is very welcome.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Seeing the different reactions taught me that:
- There are more lines of reasoning then just the one I postulated
- People tend to react on something I already stated: this could be a stupid question
I can immagine you are supprised this got modded up. So was I. However, simple questions by people who want to check their assumptions in order to gain deeper understanding are not trolls. Maybe they should be modded up, since they show that what is clear to the majority ofSig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Shorten files.
Lots of Phish/DMB files are in this format (some tapers don't like mp3 qualitiy)
Files are Lossless and can play in some programs without uncompressing. Files are very very big though compared to mp3, it seems like a bzip sort of compression
And you assume this new format will take over the world? Lightning doesn't strike twice, they will try and fail just as all others have.
Compressed audio != uncomressed audio -> ( audiophile -> not happy)
Hence the word audiophile, spend ~3K+ on stereo
sound. Many amps have digital bypass for simple
stereo amplification, true audiophiles avoid
digital circuitry like fire, let alone god forbid
any compression. I however draw the line,
where people say that vinyl sounds better than
mp3/128.
Funny they add PRO to the mp3, because it is like
sticking a label in gold and red saying something
to effect 1000+1000Watts! P.M.P.O. just makes me
take compression format with less seriousness,
just as I would take a whimsical burp of a
marketing team.
Many people seem to overlook VBR mode, i have yet to find a player that doesnt handle it, the rio, xmms, winamp all handle it fine (the bitrate meter goes silly, but hey) and you can get much better quality for the space, as it ramps the quality up and down as required, so your not wasting a few hundred kbps on the silence.
or maybe even shorten.
encoder: shorten-3.1.tar.gz
xmms plugin: xmms-shn
it's loseless compression, too. this software is somewhat more complete (and mature?) though.
SiCAS uses the same mathematical process as STFT but adds a few features. It uses variable length STFT to reduce Blur on rapid tone changes. It uses Only the Cosine Terms(Even Terms) of the series, which reduces cancellation through mutual orthogonality, and it adds compensation for the DeBragg Effect(or is it affect.... never can remember).
That's the Differences from a Physicist's point of view.... if you need help understanding any of it, let me know.
Pat
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
For my Ph.D. research I work a lot with audio codecs and the statement that they want a 64 Kbps bitrate to sound like 128 Kbps MP3 is doubtfull. They claim the MP3PRO format to be downwards compatible, the MP3 standard does not leave any room for a 50% reduction without a giant breakthrough.
A new technology is needed such as sinusodial coding.
MP3PRO Open technology? also doubtfull.
Johan.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
LAME _has_ improved upon it. The LAME encoder can do VBR correctly, something which almost no other encoder (including the commercial ones) can do. VBR, when done correctly, is a great balance between audio quality and file size, yet most FAQs you read out there advise against it, not because the decoders can't handle it (they can), but because LAME is the only encoder that really does a nice job with it.
Sotto la panca, la capra crepa
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
No new compressed audio format is likely to excite me, at least not while "CD quality" is the standard benchmark. I have a large stash of 256 and 192 kbps mp3's. I don't think I've ever been able to tell the difference between a CD and 256kbps mp3 version of the same song*, and very rarely do I hear flaws in the 192kbps mp3's. So all I'd gain from tighter compression is disk space and transfer speed, which aren't too limiting now and becoming less so all the time.
* The funny thing is, a few time's I've been listening to music and thought to myself "Damn, this sounds a little off. Is 256 not enough?", only to realise I was actually listening to a CD.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Regardless of the philosophical implacations of the GPL, you *can* sell software that you give the source away too.
You're a programmer; you sell your service to write code, for whoever will buy your program, whether it be a business, end user, or whatever.
As a personal preference, you have every right not to want to give away your source code. But there is a distinction between selling software and writing source.
Software has been tested, debugged, packaged, polished and marketed.
Source is just that, source, like the distinction between architectural blueprints and a house.
If a GPL based company actually wanted to buy your source, is that any less or more a transaction than buying the software? The intent of some people, as regards Open Source, is that when you buy the software, you can get access to the source, otherwise you're relegated to a 'service', of providing support and fixes and improvements to a program, where the purchaser cannot fix, modify, or tweak the code to their taste.
That's just one view, at least.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
It's called ISDN. I remember reading about studios recording remotely at least as far back as 1990, and I think even earlier than that.
Also -- there's the phoned in guitar solo on one of the early TMBG albums (Lincoln I think);-)
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
er, who's the moron who encoded this 320kbps mp3 in joint stereo!
However, I know that this won't happen. We're happy enough with MP3 for now, and when someone open-sources a better standard, we'll try it out. But for now, Fraunhofer IIS remains the "mp3 nazis" of the world.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
32gb for 500 is "stupid-cheap" to people with a long time frame in computers. Think back ( not so long ago ) when storage hadn't reached the $1 / meg mark.
Not to sound pragmatic, but with any luck the new 'mp3' format will fizzle and die.
I don't -want- to see hear bad they can make things sound at 64kbps. And further, I don't care about bandwidth or disk usage, even though I'm behind a 28.8 modem.
I -do- want high-quality downloadable (freely or not) music. By high-quality, I mean indistinguishable from a CD to my own ears (LAME at ~220Kbps average VBR does this for me).
Storage is stupid-cheap these days. Bandwidth is slowly spreading out into much more diverse, and usually competitive, markets.
The focus should not be to make the files smaller (Realaudio G2, anyone?), but to make the quality better. The data distribution and storage capabilities of the Internet at large are progessing leaps and bounds ahead of the state of human hearing (which is actually moving BACKWARDS due to higher levels of everyday ambient noise) - once the epitome of perceptually perfect encoding is deemed possible for the masses, I'll settle for smaller files that reach the same end. Until that point is reached: Fuck off, Fraunhoffer.
And, dispite my freedom-esque views on life, I'd like to see high-quality encoding forced forced upon the populace, as the most infuriating members don't seem to mind even 96Kbps joint stereo mp3s either due to the fact that they are deaf, use equipment that is absolute shit, or just have never heard anything better.
It's for their own good, really - most illicit MP3s come from teens-to-20somthings who don't have to the cash to spend on quality (as in, "you can't buy this at Circuit City") audio equipment, but who (given the forward momentum of consumer electronics) will, at some point, be disappointed with the sound quality of the typical 128KBPS MP3 (of which they will have amassed several tens of gigabytes by such a point).
You idiots who bought a Diamond Rio (or similar) with only 64 megs, being pissed that you can only get an hour's worth of still half-assed-sounding music on the device, are no exception. You should have realized that flash memory is hideously expensive -before- you made such a purchase.
Feel free to moderate this down as flamebait. It's not like karma doesn't grow on trees.
Kid-proof tablet..
The main problem of mp3 vs. most propietary stuff is that mp3 is too flexible and complicated for most people.
E.g. that guy who stated he encoded 22khz/64kBit-mp3... he obviously has no clue, used even more obviously a bad encoder and absolutly obviously wrong parameters. There is absolutly no reason why one should limit himself to 22khz when using 64kBit.
lame -Vx would have done a much better job and from my experience and Klaus "Werewolf" great ears nothing beats lame -Vx. Use bladeenc instead and you are toast.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair