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Lossy Music Formats Compared
Nicholas writes: "Today's Washington Post has an article
detailing the results of having a "a diverse panel of listeners: two members of the National Symphony Orchestra, a high-end stereo salesman, a record producer, a composer and two guitarists" comparing MP3Pro and Vorbis formats. The punchline: "...felt Vorbis was the least realistic, with MP3Pro sounding better and Windows Media Audio best of all -- but none of these formats achieved CD quality.""
Sometimes money actually does win. Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to pay for research to make a better compression algorithm?
I have never heard WMA, but if it's good, then all the more pity that MS wasted that money and removed some algorithms from general use. WMA will always be obscure and never be a standard, precisely because MS doesn't want it to be a standard. They want control over it.
And because of that, no one will ever use it. So Microsoft is effectively just burying technology.
Either/or, I still prefer the sound quality of CDs. There is a noticable loss of sound quality with any compression technique and IMHO there is no comparison to the original.
;)
;)
Kind of hard to conveniently listen to a playlist of 2000+ songs with CD's, though. And they're more expensive.
Anyway, if you want to be a *true* audiophile snob, you should be talking about how nothing can compare to a really expensive turntable system. Really high quality vinyl recordings on really expensive sound systems are superior to CD's - no 16-bit limitation. Granted, they cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the records have to be in pristine condition, but that's no impediment to a true audiophile.
Throwing away data... is bad. Once internet broadband increases, which it will eventually, there will be no need for compressed formats just like no one uses compressed disks under windows anymore (DRVSPACE.BIN).
If you look at the facts - you'll see that the signal to noise ratio of a CD is far superior to that of a vinyl record. That's what allows a greater difference between the most quiet and loudest parts of a song. With vinyl, recording too quiet of a section results in the background hiss and pops/clicks being nearly as loud as the music itself. They have to "normalize" the volume across the whole song much more, making it *less* realistic. (Same problem with cassette tape.) Now, as to why vinyl might sound better to your ear than CD - that's a whole different issue. There's a thing called "coloration" that comes into play. Coloration means tonal changes that occur when sound is reproduced through a particular piece of equipment. Most speakers "colorize" the sound to an extent. Studio "reference" speakers try to do this as little as possible, so recording engineers have some kind of baseline to start from when mixing. Regular home stereo speakers (even some regarded as "very good!") colorize the sound in one way or another. The whole process of converting a vibrating needle on grooves in vinyl into amplified sound through speakers colorizes the sound, too. People often like the colorized sound better than the "flat" sound of the recording, if you heard it raw. This doesn't make it more accurate, though. (Why do you think people like equalizers? 99% of them don't really set their EQ so as to get a perfectly flat reproduction of sound across the freqency spectrum. They use it to artificially modify the sound so it's more to their taste. AKA. Exaggerated bass or highs.) In fact - I used to own a Roland S-50 sampling synthesizer. It was only 12 bit, 21Khz max. sampling. Technically, pretty bad by today's standards.... But lots of people swore it just made samples "sound better" than when they played them on much better quality Akai samplers (44Khz sampling rate, 16 or even 24 bit). Why? Because the Roland had filters it ran everything through, doing some severe coloration of the sampled sounds before they were output - and people liked the "warmth" of the sound that resulted.
>Tell that to IBM. OS/2 was *so* much better than >Win95, but it lost completely. Linux has the >cost advantage, which may be enough, but >technical superiority alone is not enough to >beat the MS juggernaut.
And just how in the world was OS2 (a decent OS, BTW) going to beat out WIndows? Sell more copies? Don't forget that every copy of OS2 came with a Windows license
Shorten can convert a lossless .wav file to a compressed .shn file which is a bit more than half the size. These .shn files are either converted back to .wav and burned to cdr, or played directly on media players like XMMS or Winamp via plugins.
note, however, Shorten is free for non-commercial use only, or something like that, and isn't true Free Software as such.
Nyquist sampling theorem
The reason some cds sound so bad is because of precessing. This applies mainly to pop music. When people listen to the radio they mostly notice the louder songs, and that's what they mindlessly buy. When your song has quiet and loud parts, and it's played as some set volume, the quiet parts will come out too quiet. So the sound is processed so that the entire song is more or less the same intensity at all times. Hence you get a cd with very little range, that sounds ok on the radio played through a set of $5 speakers.
*digs out troll-feeding equipment*
1. I'm not surprised MP3s sound crappy on Bose systems. Most things do. (overblown highs and muddy, loud bass, masking the lack of midrange definition).
2. All the published double-blind studies I've seen have suggested that LAME at 192 VBR will match or beat any format, including CD audio. Care to point to one that disagrees?
WTF? The group decided that WMA sounds best and Vorbis sounds the worst? Don't they know that Vorbis is an open system that anyone can use, and WMA is a closed, proprietory system made by Micro$oft? Doesn't that have any bearing on their decision? Don't they know their history?
I don't have time to be posting this stuff. I've gotta get back to helping port OpenOffice to OSX to keep Micro$oft down to only having 97% of the vital Mac market instead of 100%. Ha-ha, up yours, Micro$oft!
This is true. I just finished ripping all my Blue Rodeo disks onto a "definitive blue rodeo collection" to be played when I'm in a folky sorta mood.
:)
Maybe I should have written it as "If I could use WMA without all the license BS on my car mp3-cd player I would"
This is true, but the fact that mp3 is the most common format out there (and the one used by the car mp3-cd player) I use it anyway. I'd like to convert all my music to vorbis, but ATM it's sort of pointless. I have considered it though :)
It still doesn't matter to me. If I could listen to WMA on my linux system(s) I would. If I could use WMA on my car mp3-cd player, I would.
I can't though, so it doesn't matter. I'm not a musician by any means, nor can I detect the difference between 160 and 192 mp3 compression. So I'll continue using my inferior, yet cross platform, non-license restricted, used-everwhere, mp3 format.
While I agree in general that MS puts out lots of good software and does excellent research, I couldn't let this go:
This is completely untrue for any serious technical documentation. Figures and bulleted/numbered lists top my worst experiences in Word. Excel's data point limit has more than once forced me over to gnuplot.
Office is great for the vast majority of users: business types, one-off letters, etc. It is completely insufficient for anything of substantial size or complexity. LaTeX or Frame wins hands down.
--
If you get serious with dither and error-feedback noise shaping, you can get whatever quality you like, including a characteristic very reminiscent of SACD, all from 16 bit audio CD.
Most CDs out there DON'T have acceptable dithering and the new ones that do, are usually crap in other ways!
I've written dithering that will literally resolve signals -156db down from CD audio, as long as they are bassy frequencies- the noise level increases with frequency like in SACD. Charts and details at http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/TechDetails.ht ml, the software itself is at http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html.
This is not Linux software: it is Mac software written in an easier language than C. But it IS GPLed, and that's not an accident.
CD doesn't have to mean rotten quality, and this is an analog freak saying this. CD just has _historically_ meant crap quality, just as chrysalis describes. What's being described is truncation and bad word length maintenance, particularly if it involves cheap-ass DAWs or digital mixers.
You don't have to do that- though you're not likely to see anything but that from the major labels. They've been using cheaper and cheaper equipment for years, the latest trend is for everything to be all Pro Tools, and the poor mastering engineers are stuck trying to get a musical result out of that...
Even better would be the sound your computer emits as you delete the only copy of the key to that archive.
What the hell do I need digitally encoded music for? I have VINYL! *wild cackling laugh fades into distance*
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
The real Threed's
--Threed
I don't think they had any controls. The testers are quoted saying things like "Vorbis was..." so it was not a blind test. They could have been just reacting to their preconcieved notions of the names of the types! This means nothing. Not news.
:^)
In other words, it's perfectly suited for write-up in Stereophile magazine.
Geoff
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Yes, but the article would have then become a useful comparison. As it now stands it's no different than me rounding up a bunch of Linux users and reporting that 9 out of 10 computer experts think Windows sucks.
A little table explaining methodology (was it a double blind test) and the bitrates for each sample would have at least been something.
Things may change with SCD (24 bits, 96 khz)
I was at the Audio Engineering Society meetings when they were just coming out with CDs, and the consensus was it was OK but the sampling should be 2-4 times higher, with more bits. Now we're there in the pro world, it'll eventually filter down. At the time they just couldn't fit anymore on a CD and get the playing times they wanted. There were also people there trying to prove that you would lose your "life force" by listening to them (using a known parlor trick I might add).
But the CD is definitely something lame for audiophile experts
I've heard this before but I think it has more to do with the personal history and prejudice (and dollars spent?) of the "experts" than anything real. 16 bits is 96DB. Find me a vinyl LP that gives that without about 10db of surface noise!
Maybe if you have a $10k turntable, but otherwise it's just not true in my experience. I regularly listen to the CD version of something I have on LP and hear stuff that was barely there on the original. Maybe some is becuase it was pumped up a bit if they re-mastered, but not all.
And electronic music on vinyl? More punchy? I recently picked up Weather Report's Heavy Weather, and Joe Zawinul's Oberheim is WAY punchier than the vinyl version.
Sorry boss, but I ain't going back even if I DO lose some "life force".
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Dear Mr. Thomason:
.WAV files (uncompressed), and burn a CD with the audio. Then you mearly need to compare the quality of the CDs. This also helps with keeping the identity of the test samples hidden from the listeners.
3 9
I found your article "7 Experts Sound Off After a Music Test" to be rather lacking in the information it provided. First of all, was the test a so-called blind test? In a blind test, the testers are not told what they are listening to. It is a well know fact that if you are told what you are listening to, you may set expectations, and those expectations may affect your perceptions of reality. From the quotes you give, it rather sounds like the testers knew what they were listening to.
Also, you fail to mention the bit rate at which the sounds were recorded. The bit rate winds up affecting the size of the file and the rate of compression. Although a bit rate of 128 kbps is frequently found on files distributed on the Internet, it is fairly well known that in order to achieve a reasonable reproduction of the original music, a rate more along the lines of 192 kbps should be used for MP3. It has been claimed that Ogg Vorbis performs better at the same bit rate. In any such comparision, the bit rate should be mentioned, and care should be taken to ensure that the same bit rate is used on all encoders. The bit rate was not mentioned in your article, nor did you make clear if the same bit rate was used for all tests.
Also, I would hope that the listeners were comparing to a CD listened to via the same "ordinary stereo system". I'm assuming that's the case, because otherwise the stereo system itself could affect the outcome. You also don't mention how the sound was sent to the stereo system itself. If the sound was sent out of the computer's sound card, then the quality of the sound card could also come into play. A better check would be to convert the compressed audio back to
This is obviously a very complex issue. I would appreciate such clarifications, as I'm sure would may others. You may find it interesting to know that your article is being discussed at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/13/15582
If you've made it this far, you might want to consider emailing the author himself at : Robert Thomason <thomason@washpost.com>.
Please remember to keep your comments civilized and direct, of course.
It is nice to see some persons who appreciate music come out and explain the differences between these formats and just how much of the music you actually lose.
Compression is convenient, but it is no replacement for the originals.
You know, XMMS, my preferred music player, has this really advanced "plug-in" thing that allows it to register multiple file loading mechanisms at once so that you can listen to both MP3s and Ogg/Vorbis files with no problems... I have even heard WinAmp is capable of this!
=)
Seriousity moment: Personally, I made a simple choice. When I went from MP3 to Vorbis, I chose to Ogg only the new tracks that I rip, and those tracks that really sound crappy in MP3 format. The old MP3s were still there.
(Well, most of my MP3 collection were nuked due to disk space requirements anyway... and I have the original CDs that I'll rather listen to.)
When changing to different format, you don't need to re-encode the old tracks. (Unless, of course, the player for this format is Evil and will not allow coexistence of other players, but that's another issue.)
This is the very thing that completely dumfounded me about the whole Napster debaucle. Throughout the entire court proceding the differentiation between making a tape recording of a CD and making an MP3 was that the MP3 was an "exact digital reproduction". The very definition of the format contradicts that statement, and yet this never seened to his the spotlight. .... why? Well, I appreciate _quality_. MP3 is nice for a quick and dirty perusual of a song, but that's about it in my opinion. Well, I guess it's also good enough to play at low volumes on cheap PC speakers ...
... I just find it funny that it didn't happen until long after Napster's demise.
Sure you can download all your music from Napster and never have to pay anything, but you are _NOT_ getting CD quality audio. I used Napster to gather many songs for many reasons. Sometimes I had the songs on a media such as 33,45,or 78 vinyl, and simply didn't want to go to the trouble of recording them to disk. Other times I simply wanted to see what such and such group and/or song sounded like. If I found something that I really liked, then I went out and purchased the CD
The Music Industry's attack on distributed file sharing is more about controlling what kind of material gets presented to the public more than about mass bootlegging, in my opinion.
I know this is a little off topic, but I've sort of been waiting for something like this hit the "general news sites"
RFC2119
Personally, I can't tell the difference on the hardware on which I listen to lossy compressed music. But I can guarantee that in 10 years time, I'll still be able to to listen to my .ogg files.
I have the spec for the format, and the source
code for a sample implementation.
I can't guarantee the same for MP3Pro, WMA, or any
other proprietary format. For that reason alone,
Ogg Vorbis is my preferred format, and will remain
so for the forseeable future...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Oh well, since everybody else here is bitching about how the test was executed, I guess I'll add my two cents.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
Valves closing? Is that a good thing? I can't think of a time when I said "gee, that music was pretty good, but I sure wish I could have heard the valves closing"
Maybe if I was listening the movie Brazil. Otherwise, I can get quite a lot of enjoyment out of music without needing to hear valves closing.
Certain codecs might work better with certain types of music or might sound better to people who prefer genres of music.
You do have a point though, some of the test I've seen online have focused on quantifiable measures of harmonic distortion, frequency response and such from various codecs and at various bitrates. While these kinds of tests do produce hard numbers to toss around, they ignore the point I think you were hitting on, they miss the final measure of the intended destination - the human ear.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
cool, thanks. I think I read an earlier incarnation of that article on the vbr encoding. He links to this c't article in German that looks like a nifty test. Problem is, I don't read (or speak) German and c't doesn't do English articles (what a shame). And of course it doesn't seem to go far enough, only comparing various bit rates with the mp3 format.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
Combine that with no mention of the bitrates used and you essentially have a fluff piece.
I've only seen one test that might be called rigorous and that was a few years back. Does anyone know of quality listening comparisons between various codecs at various bitrates? Blind testing (Double Blind?), listeners with some musical background (musicians, recording engineers, even audiophiles), a wide range of music, maybe even different sound systems? I'm curious, almost (but not quite, I'm also lazy) enough to round up some friends and do my own sorry version of the test.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
No, no, no. You're missing the point, and the previous poster to you was correct. To conduct a proper test for this, the test should have been set up according to the "sample a, sample b" idea. If the judges know beforehand what the format is for each sample, they can be biased against or for that format and reflect that bias in their responses. Have you ever taken a Practical Statistics class?
*cough* straw man *cough*
I really doubt the guy was referring to very
specialized cases such as the rare outlier
software you mention.
Remember the topic here is digital music
decoders not mission critical system. Who
the hell was talking about rocket systems?
Nobody. You pulled it out of your ass to "prove"
your fallacious argument.
-Kevin
Actually they can both be right, as this matter is subjective, not objective.
Yes, I agree with you. I've never tried it, but both the type of differences "audiophiles" reported hearing, and the supposed mechanism by which this "improvement" occured struck me as being complete bullshit.
-- Jeff Paulsen
I'm still ripping / encoding, so I don't know for sure. What I've done so far was just the CD closest to my desk, which happened to be Frank Zappa's Make a Jazz Noise Here. This doesn't have anything so terribly exposed, so it didn't sound too bad on my old encoder. After reading some of the r3mix.net site, I decided to use their presets for encoding quality on LAME 3.89. The results are as follows: It sounds a trifling amount better (again, on this CD it wasn't bad to begin with) but VBR lets it come out 30% smaller. If nothing else, I'd want to re-encode everything just to get back some disk space.
I think that when I try this on the music that would not encode acceptably the way I was doing it before, I'll have a more dramatic improvement. Reiterating: upgrading to the latest LAME and using the --r3mix flag gave me slightly-better results with 30% smaller files.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Bring it on. Some pieces I know I can hear a difference even at over 300 kbps include:
- Any well-recorded a capella stuff (eg, The Bobs, The Persuasions), especially in the soprano / falsetto range.
- Miles Davis "So What". The slight breathiness of tone on his first few entrances does not encode well at any bitrate.
- any damned thing with an exposed ride cymbal part.
- "Minimalist" contempory compositions. Phillip Glass operas in particular are extremely revealing on playback equipment.
I have all of these on CD, and have encoded them with recent versions of LAME at 320kbps. I listened to the MP3s, then deleted them because I considered the quality unacceptable.If the quality is acceptable to you, that's cool. My point is that it is not the same thing as CD quality, and any music lover with a good ear can hear the difference.
-- Jeff Paulsen
I hereby take back what I said above. I compared the version number on my copy of LAME - I was sadly out of date. I am now re-encoding a bunch of stuff according to the r3mix specs, and will, in all likelyhood, find it to be wonderful now.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Hardly. Any musician, or any music fan with a good ear can distinguish between live music, CD-quality music, and MP3 at any commonly-used bitrate. There are significant audible artifacts in MP3-encoded music, particularly in the percussion sounds. Snare drums and cymbals seem to be most affected.
This is not like the subtle difference in sound quality that audiophiles used to claim from painting CD edges green - this is more like the difference between a well-miked drum kit and a pathologically distorted drum kit. Personally, I prefer the Ogg Vorbis sound at most bitrates. I haven't used WMA much.
I would like to see a test done with better controls and better reporting of test conditions.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Actually, it's not just frequency response--it's *dynamic* response too! I often hear significant compression in dynamic range on real music (read: not popular crap that's already been compressed to death anyway) with MP3. Additionally, in electronic music with complicated reverb effects, you can actually hear dropped reverberations!
Lew Lipnick, the NSO's contrabassoonist and an audio consultant, expressed the majority opinion about the tone quality of Vorbis -- that its high notes sounded harsher and its low tones were harder to hear. "It sounds dry and artificial," he said.
Listen to that. He just has oboe envy.
I really think that when the actual author of a product in question posts an important comment about the article like this, the Slashdot editors should at least mention the post in the story itself, so people who don't read the comments can be informed.
I think the point was they should not know which FORMAT they're listening too. What the piece is shouldn't affect their judgement, but prejudgements of a given format could factor into their judgement unless it was a blind test.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
By Joe Sixpack
Wurshington Past Staff Writer
To test loosy summarization techniques, we recruited a diverse panel of readers: two linux advocates, a gamer, a cheerleader, a MBA, and two MS windows users.
We had them read summarized versions of two articles: "MS beats Linux in Mindcraft Test" and "New Detonater 17 Drivers Released by nVidia".
The tests were conducted in a home environment with an ordinary browser. We focused most of our attention on JohnKatz and ZDNet, the two most fanatical formats, with Tom's Hardware and MSNBC, the unbiased and more journalistically responsible formats, given more limited tests.
Of the seven readers, two couldn't differentiate between JohnKatz and ZDNet. The other 5 agreed that JohnKatz was the least realistic, with Tom's Hardware better and MSNBC reading best of all.
"JohnKatz just started blathering in the Mindcraft story. There was a lot of cruft about freedom and how OSS rules, but the real content was cut out completely" said Duke Fraggem, a hard-core gamer. "Tom's Hardware, on the other hand, man, you could even read the friggin' frame rate in the benchmark's section"
Betty Bouncealot, a professional cheerleader, said "I thought it was funny that the MSNBC article cut that Demonitator thingy out completely, not even a headline. But at least it was the least confusing of the articles."
Both of our linux advocates felt that the ZDNet article totally destroyed the readability of the "Mindcruft" article. "It seemed made-up and artificial, like they didn't even review the facts at all," said Colonel Kernel Sanders, a RedHat staffer. "I couldn't even finish reading it, it was to painful" was all Joe "OSS" Bloggs had to say about it.
One thing that all of the readers agreed upon was that JohnKatz was the worst of the summerizing formats. Sanders said the nVidia article lost a lot of "sense." Bob and Clippy, the Windows users, blamed this on the way JohnKatz shaves off the sanity and content from articles. John Doe, who holds an MBA from Harvard, noted that the sanity of a JohnKatz article abruptly terminated, compared to ZDNet's gradual fadeout.
On a tiny PDA screen -- the kinds of environments where many articles are read -- the loss of information would probably go unnoticed.
But Bloggs worried about how the loss of subtle information meant less journalistic integrity overall. "Those little details give you a lot of information about what really happened."
(C) 31337 The Wurshinton Past Company
I'm stealing your comment for my .sig
Any objections, feel free to get in contact.
_____
My Journal
Of course, these compressions are lossless, not lossy. In recompressing an mp3 to another format, you likely will loose even more quality than you originally did.
Simple answer: They encoded the MP3 samples with the new version of Windows that only creates MP3s at 56k. No wonder WMA sounded better :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Before you discount this as pro Microsoft retoric let me assure you that I am not a huge fan of their in the server/serving services arena, but they do make some good multimedia stuff.
Gotta like the atmosphere that the anti-MS Nazis around here have created. Can't just have a post with someone saying anything positive about something Microsoft has done. Naw, gotta satisfy the rabble by bloating it up about 50% with some testimonials about how they actually (really, I promise!) dislike Microsoft. Kewl!
Cheers,
Did the reviewers have to pay for the medium? If so, the results might be different... Download a few hundred MP3 for free or pay $2 per each WMA file and then see which format is in first place.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
The editor used compression on the story.
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
What have we learned?
An article both MS and the RIAA approve.
I don't want to be this cynical, really. But it's hard not to.
When you're done, post it on www.kuro5hin.org
... Let people post with their votes on which sounds best. At the end, post the list of which sample came from which program, and a which bit-rate. At that point, post the compressed files as well so people can verify the results.
I'd suggest doing a blind test, compress the samples with various programs and bit-rates, then convert them back to wav files. Save them with names like "Rock-Sample1", "Rock-Sample2"
If you post that story (or email me for help in writing it and such) vote for it!
Uhm. I guess you think they did everything with the sound car, even play the original CD WAVs. Perhaps. It would be the best way, certainly.
This is not a good idea at all. They are judging the quality of the CODEC's, not the quality of a sound card. The best way would certianly be to convert them to format X, back to WAV, and then burn them onto a CD. For consistency sake they should probably rip the original CD as WAV also and burn that back onto a CD. They then have n burnt CD's - play them all in a good CD player.
The problem with playing them in the sound card is if it is distorting the sound quality more than the CODEC does you won't really be able to tell what's sucking - but everything would be sucking in different ways. If you play it on a CD player (which you know and trust the quality of) then you can throw out any other possible variables and only be judging the codec's.
shorten is a non-lossy compression algorith for music. It doesn't compress nearly as much as MP3, WMA, or OGG, but it doesn't lose any quality. Good for downloading live shows and burning 'em straigh to CD.... Hey, I should go do that now...
If you hadn't been asleep during your Government classes you would know that democracy (And BTW you live in a democratic republic, you would know that as well.) is far from the best form of government. I prefer a benovelent dictator to a corrupt democracy, as the saying goes.
But I'm wandering further from the topic. Just because you have a lot of stupid people doing something doesn't mean that some "law of the many" makes it a smart thing. If a lot of people do something stupid, it is still a stupid thing to do.
On to the interesting part:
That was the kernel of what Genoaschild said. And it makes a lot sense. Furthermore it's the reason my Pentium 200 running Linux is faster than my friend's P2 350 running 2000 Server. Having a fancy GUI on something not even hooked up to a monitor doesn't seem very productive to me. Instead of commenting on this however you chose the ad homenim route.
It is a rather good attempt at a flame, I'll give you that. However you failed to attack his, his parents', sibling's or pet's sexuality so you won't get even close to a highscore. The Babelfish bit was pretty funny though. And from what I've heard they are now upgrading it to translate to ignoramous so you'll get more use out of it then.
If a killbot only does what it's supposed to you don't have a plot. ;-)
Not to sound like a dick,...
But you did anyway ... the school she went to is not a UCLA type school - its one that only a select handful of students can attend at any given time (say less than 20). And besides having that degree, she also has a degree in business from Columbia in Chicago - which is really her main focus.
My apologies for not remembering the name of the school - but it wasn't exactly relevant to the topic (unless someone wanted to start a flame war on good audio engineering schools)
From what I recall, the school is called the Los Angeles Recording Workshop though I don't know if that was just a portion of the degree or not.
Actually, you may not be entirely correct. My fiancee and I have had quite a few discussions about high-end stereo equipment (like discrete amplified channels, speakers such as Definitive, Sonus Faber, and whoever it is that makes the filament speakers) as well as the quality of CD recordings vs. vinyl or tape or digital (DAT), etc. Now, mind you - she is an audio engineer, with a degree from one of the most reputed schools in the country (I think its in LA - I forget what its called).
One of the things she explains to me most often is that what you hear (on your CD) is NOT what was recorded in the studio, on stage at the symphony, etc. It is what has been cleaned and processed to sound best on a variety of common setups - like an average stereo, a boombox, and a common (stock) sound system in a common type of car.
So, while many folks believe they can hear more details than others (and admittedly, I'm sure recordings exist that still have these details in them), by and large - these details were lost on the studio post-processing floor. The goal of post-processing is apparently not to deliver the most hi-fi sound - its to deliver the music in a way that it sounds good in the most diverse environments.
To me, this sounds like what we get on CD is truly the lowest common denominator. At that point - encoding into MP3 or Vorbis doesn't seem to make more of a difference. I personally prefer Vorbis because (a) it sounds good (b) the file sizes are small and (c) it is patent free - that means a lot to me. Notice I didn't make any comparisons - I don't presume to say that it is better or smaller than anything else - I don't really care. Its the only format out there that allows me to enjoy my music in a format that is smaller than .wav files and more transportable than CDs whilst knowing that the algorithms are patent free to boot. Sweet deal if you ask me.
Actually, if you listen carefully on very high quality equipment, you can hear the difference between 256Kps MP3 and a CD. Read Scot Hacker's livejournal entry about performing just such a test. Yes, he's the same Scot hacker who wrote the O'Reilly book on MP3 ;-) Part of the entry follows below:
 l
I counter that by saying that the difference b/w 256kbps and WAV is so incredibly subtle, and 320kbps would be virtually indistinguishable in every important way. You still get around 4x compression at 320kbps, and you have the advantage of ID3 tags. Why not take advantage of it?
I could tell there was a difference between the 256 and the WAV in the Wasserman duet/vocal, but had trouble putting my finger on the difference. Mike nailed it down, and had me focus on the spatial relationship or distance between the vocalist near the middle of the room and the cello in the rear left of the room. At 256kbps, there is a sort of "veil" that enshrouds the vocals, and ties it spatially to the cellist in the rear left. It's subtle, but he's right - the spatial distinction between them is just not as pronounced at 256kbps as it is with the WAV.
You're half correct. The release candidate for the version 1 *decoder* has been released, but the *encoder* is still at beta4. The release candidate for the encoder will be released at the end of the month, and that will be the first version supporting channel coupling. There are also several bugs in the psycho-acoustic model in beta4 that will be fixed in the release candidate.
Basically, they released the decoder as soon as they could, so other people can include a decoder in their applications that will play all version 1 Vorbis files.
So -- version 1 will have channel coupling, but it's not quite there yet.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Not only should the test be "blind", but it should also include the original (uncompressed) recording as one of the samples, to ensure the impartiality of the listeners.. (Just think, if someone said that the original sounded the worst, how much stock would you put into the rest of their ratings?)
The article was pure fluff.
Woohoo, another Satriani fan! All of my CDs are encoded to MP3 twice: once at the highest possible quality and once at the second lowest. The high quality MP3s I keep for listening at home, the low quality get burned to CD to play in my MP3/CD player in the car. I use the latest beta (3.88 - whoops, looks like 3.89 just came out) of LAME with VBR.
I have a pretty nice pair of headphones and I can't tell any difference between the high quality MP3 and the CD. Rock, jazz, flamenco, classical, whatever. I've done a number "blindfolded" tests with all the people I can grab, including musicians, and so far not one has been able to tell the difference. Perhaps it would be possible for a select few with a $50k system, but I'm skeptical.
The low quality MP3s are distinguishable with the headphones, but just barely. They actually sound better than most 192kbps MP3s I found on Napster before it went down - a testament to the quality of LAME, I'm very impressed! For listening in the car or on the go, the slight loss of quality isn't noticeable. And averaging around 112kbps, I can fit all 147 Joe Satriani songs on a single CD with room to spare! I've had that one in the car for a few weeks since the G3 concerts. ;-)
Back to the point, I'd love to do a blindfold test with the people who were on this panel. If they really can reliably distinguish between the high quality MP3s (I'll bet the quality they encoded at for their test wasn't as high) and CD, I'll be impressed.
Say hello to zMac.
As long as we have Total Recorder, it's all good.
I know a guy (ahem) who subscribes to audible for audio books. But he wanted to burn them to CD and listen to them on his MP3-CD player in the car, but they required an authentication plugin for Windows Media Player to play.
Now I hear he just starts up Total Recorder and has it capture the audio to an mp3 before he goes to bed each night.
If you can access, or step between, the content management system and the audio driver, there's really no way of creating a foolproof content management system.
load "linux",8,1
I don't see why MP3 is here to stay, even if WMA doesn't replace it.
Because I've already spent hundreds of hours finding mp3's on the 'net and compiling the "Soundtrack of My Life". I don't want to have to go through all that again!
And yes, if I know there are better versions of my music out there, I WILL be compelled to go find it. And I was just getting to the point where I had time to work again...
load "linux",8,1
That's a great tip! Simple, but I hadn't thought of it.
Thanks!
load "linux",8,1
I take it by 'subtle', you mean 'totally non existant'? http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/cd/marking_cds.ht ml for some discussion on the subject.
"What users want"? Maybe, if you want to write to the Least Common Denominator.... Anyway, trading off stability for "usability" is a mistake. A good SW Engr. group should be able to achieve both.
Maybe you missed the reason the AOL / MSFT talks broke down: the Dark Lords of Redmond wanted to tie all A-V formats to WMF with an exclusive contract, freezing out Real, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc. They still want to extend their monopoly any way they can.
I agree with this with some exceptions. If MSFT would compete solely on the quality of their products, I'd have no problem with them. So long as they are trying to extend their turf by leveraging their existing monopolies, and trying to get new monopoly positions, I've got no use for them.
--
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
When I tested this, I noticed that the player I used boosted the high end on Ogg and MP3, presumably to compensate for MP3 crushing it. Since Ogg didn't crush the high end, it sounded wrong. So, they need to choose good players.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Why couldn't they test it with some good music? Like Britney Spears?
I could encode Britney's music with PGP and it would still sound just as good.
*dreams of bouncing breasts*
"He founded this especially troublesome in Vorbis"
I mean, this is the Washington Post, not slashdot or something - I founded this troublesome myself!
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
A quick Google search for "Los Angeles Recording Workshops" revealed that such an institution does exist--it's at 5278 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601--and they have a Sound Engineer School that smells a lot like what you're talking about.
The bit that confuses me is the degree from Columbia in Chicago; I assume you mean Columbia University in New York City...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Hell, I'm getting to where I can distinguish an MP3 ripped off vinyl from an MP3 ripped off a CD. The vinyl rips invariably have better low end reproduction and more sense of "depth", even when done at relatively crappy bitrates.
Of course, I can tell CD from tape as heard over FM radio too, so...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I wish I hadn't used all my mod points earlier this morning..
hehehe, nice post ac.
Well, if you're going to get *really* bitchy about it, don't forget that you can only really appreciate your vinyl album *once*. After that, you're just loosing more and more sound quality the more times you play it.
I personally prefer the sound of vinyls to CDs, but if you're looking for near perfect sound every time, I'd bet on the CD winning.
That's not what the term means. A denominator is the bottom part of a fraction; the smaller you make the denominator, the fewer separate pieces you've segmented the market into, and the larger each market segment is. The mathematical terminology is "lowest common denominator" and "greatest common factor".
What you described about a largest market segment has nothing to do with denominators; and if there's a largest market segment, then they clearly don't all have a common (i.e., identical) size.
Actually, "cd quality" means poor quality. Honestly, a CD has a flat sound. Every CD sounds the same. Unrealistic.
12" vinyl records have much dynamic. More punch. If you listen to classic music on vinyl, you hear every instrument as if it was really nearby you. You don't get that feeling with a CD. Because a CD has only 16 bits of dynamic, music is overcompressed. Quiet music doesn't give anything on a CD. And when parts of the music become louder, there's a small difference of amplitude, but it has nothing to do with what real musicians played originally. Vinyl reflects this in a far better way.
Things may change with SCD (24 bits, 96 khz) . But the CD is definitely something lame for audiophile experts (nothing to do with the original music), for electronic music (the music isn't very punchy compared to vinyl), and for DJ's (I really hate mixing on CD, and I can't imagine hip-hop DJ's with CDJs) .
-- Pure FTP server - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.
{{.sig}}
Exactly.
My suspicion - given the preference for MP3Pro over MP3 - is that it was MP3 at 64kbps vs. MP3Pro at 64kbps.
Even makes sense, after all. Including WMA in the study at all is weird -- and if they encoded the WMA and the MP3 using MSFT's built-in MP3 encoder, they'd have gotten the shittiest-sounding 64k MP3 on the planet.
MP3Pro is designed for streaming audio, and outperforms MP3 at extremely low bitrates (i.e. 64K).
The part in the article where the guitarist said he could hear the valves closing on the clarinet and bassoon... is utter bullshit. He probably heard some flanging artifact and thought it was a valve closure.
Finally - and this is another biggie - for the MP3 section, did they use Blade, LAME, Fraun, or Xing? Some rock on some forms of music, but utterly sux0r on others. And some encoders sound like dog shit on all forms of music.
Sounds to me like a puff piece designed to get people out of (ubiquitous) MP3 and into (proprietary, Windoze-only) MP3Pro and (DRM-encumbered and proprietary) WMA, with Ogg Vorbis thrown in for a "What's that?" appeal.
(Credit to them grokking that lossy compression in music often throws away stereo separation / spatial components, though.)
SNES was better than PS1 Much better games.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Now, having said that, 16-bit 44.1 KHz CD audio is perhaps not the standard we should be striving for. With the DVD Audio standard of 24 bits at 96 KHz, the bar has been raised.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Ogg Vorbis does have a plug-in for WinAmp.
--
Later...
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
I'm going to assume everyone understands that an audio file (mp3 or wave) is a series of frames, where each frame has information about the decibel level of every frequency which makes up that frame (if you're thinking in terms of Amplitude-vs-Frequency). MP3 compression works because of a principle of psychoacoustics called 'frequency masking'. The basic idea is that in your frame, if your amplitude at 440hz is 80db, then that loud sound will mask all frequencies between 430hz & 450hz. (these numbers are all made up, they are only used to illustrate the basic idea).
Now, to the original comment that said '[t]he amount of data that is lost in MP3 compression is tiny', that's full of shit. MP3s @ 128kbps compress wavs about 1:10 or 1:11. Now as for the _meaningfull_ data lost, that's a matter of opinion. Now, the bitrate of an MP3 (128/160/192/etc) is used to denote how much space is allocated the 44100 frames (1 second of music @ 44.1khz). The problem with MP3s is that encoders don't make judgements on when to stop getting rid of information based on how their frequency masks will effect sound, they simply keep cutting the most masked sounds until they get to 128kbps.
For some songs, this makes little difference, because frequency wise, they may not be very complex (and hence not effected by the frequency masks). For some songs (esp those with a lot of range, ie classical music), this encoding turns the music from beautiful to crap.
I'm a big proponent of Variable Bitrate Encoding (VBR) because you can set the quality you want the output file to have (low, med, high) and the encoder will make frequency masks of different sizes for each frame depending on how much space it needs. This obviously makes much more sense, as fixed bitrate encoding requires the same amount of information to convey silence as it does a crescendo.
PS. To the person complaining that mp3s cut off frequencies above 20khz, you aren't going to get any better with cds. CDs are 16bit/44.1khz. A refresh rate of 44.1khz will only detect frequencies up to 22.05khz (which is used so that there is no clipping when you have a 20khz sound. it doesn't actually store meaningful information above 20khz). Now there are some encoders which cut off above 16khz. _Those_ are shit.
This study varies significantly from the study done in Heise link here . That study concluded that high quality mp3s were indistinguishable from CD recordings !!
I can only conclude that one of these two sets of tests were biased or did something wrong. They can't both be right and the quality of digital recordings can't decrease with time !
Superior technology wins every time.
That's a joke, right?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
And because of that, no one will ever use it. So Microsoft is effectively just burying technology.
Actually, a lot of people use it, just not for illegal file trading as is often seen with MP3.
The fact is -- some people actually only rip and encode their own CDs, and a good number of them people do so entirely with WMA.
This will become more prominent in Windows XP, and seeing as how Microsoft has crippled the included MP3 Encoder (or perhaps removed it altogether) WMA will be most people's choice, except for those of us who don't mind spending the high price for Fraunhofer encoder.
I rip and encode my own MP3s. That's a no-brainer. At the moment, MP3 is dominent.
I remember when GIF was the most popular image format, too. Does anybody remember VOC?
What about ARC, or LHA?
File formats shift through time. Some come, some go, and some remain in use to small groups. But in time I suspect even JPG will be replaced.
I don't see why MP3 is here to stay, even if WMA doesn't replace it.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I did this one time. I took a rock song with some delicate acoustic parts, loud parts, and a lots of instruments. I burned the song from a CD to MP3. I couldn't distinguish the CD and the MP3 on my $20 computer speakers (w/ no subwoofer). Then I tried it out on a friend's computer. He has it hooked up to a fairly nice stereo system. The MP3 just plain didn't sound as good, especially in the quiet parts. Also there didn't seem to be as much "punch" (as they mentioned in the article). There was definitely a loss in quality. I agree that it was kind of stupid when they complained about losing appreciation of music. What about earlier, when most people listened to recorded music on primitive record players, or maybe low-quality radio. And trust me, the REAL loss in quality with the Stravinsky piece was when it was recorded in the first place. Hear it live if you want to hear it as it was intended. Conclusion: MP3 is OK for my $20 computer speakers ;-)
I've noticed that some players provide clearer sound than others when playing the same file, so I would think that the same would apply to encoders.
This, of course, depends on the implementation of the algorithm used, whether a reverse-engineered algorithm is used or a native one is used, what kind of error correction is used, and so forth.
--Jon
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Whoops. Yup that third party equipment line confuses me too. I meant third party (by which I mean companies that arn't providing the OS as Apple and Microsoft are) which make video codecs. Like say real networks, which you covered. And of course I don't think any desktop oriented video software could compare with the software and hardware of a broadcast quality avid kit, so you can disregard that comment.
-Daniel
Not to sound like a dick, but you said "My fiancee ... is an audio engineer, with a degree from one of the most reputed schools in the country (I think its in LA - I forget what its called)." You are going to marry this woman, be with her through sickness and health, good times and bad, till death parts you, and you don't even know where she went to college?
Maybe you haven't met in person yet. Perhaps you're still virtually snogging via the Internet? Don't worry -- Internet2 will be in 3D.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
???
I talked to him before the story went in the Post
(thus the little sentance about 1.0) and he said
it was neither blind nor structured (and I gave
him my concerns about that on Wednesday)...
OK, I better mail him again and see what's up.
Monty
I spoke to the reporter who did these 'listening tests'... the tests were not structured, were not controlled, were not blind or double blind... in short, the reviewers knew exactly which codec sample they were listening to at all times. The reviewers also came into the test with already formed opinions about which codec was best and-- surprise--- the test seemed to confirm what they already 'knew'.
In ABX blind testing, Vorbis usually surprises the tester, for example, from our happy maniac friends at r3mix forum (MPEGplus and Vorbis won this ABX test first and second place over mp3pro, AAC, WMA8, TwinVQ and ATRAC3):
That is, he knew for sure... incorrectly. A brilliant example of the power of suggestion.In any case, after talking to the Post reporter he feels a little sheepish about the whole thing... he thought he balanced the article by mixing positive traits of the openness of the code with a critical quality review and has agreed to be more fair to the first 1.0 encoder release candidate.
Monty
MP3's do suck, but the article didn't compare or contrast MP3's to other formats. It compared MP3-pro. Big difference.
That said, I haven't heard mp3 pro or wma, so I cant comment on the substance of the matter.
Can you tell me the difference between these two statements?
1) I've noticed that some players provide clearer sound than others when playing the same file.
2) If you find a decoder (player) which gives crappy output on a good mp3/ogg file, well then that player is crappy. Yes, I know that such players exist.
Answer? None. 2 is in no way a correction to 1. It is in fact just a restatement of it, with some bad attitude added. Think on them for a moment, and you may see that the original poster might be talking about some of the very relevant details left out of the article. What player was used? What encoder was used (could have been many different ones for the mp3)? What bitrate? An mp3 of a rock song might sound worse on player 1 than on player 2. But an mp3 of a classical song might sound worse on player 2 than on player 1. It is not an issue of "oh, that one's crappy".
It was a flawed experiment, as was pointed out earlier the listeners shouldn't have known what they were listening to. A valid experiment would have been to play the same piece encoded in several different formats, at several different bitrates, on several different players. And that would only show that listener's opinion of the encoder/player combinations for that one piece. This would have to be repeated for each different piece, and different genres have different ranges and characteristics. Electronic dance music is affected differently by compression than classical is, as far as the changes in apparent sound. What you'd be left with is a list of which player is best at playing songs encoded at a particular bitrate by a particular encoder in a particular musical genre. A very interesting experiment. Evidently not one that these reporters wanted to get involved it.
What is shorten (.shn)? Never heard of it before.
The big lie is that since vinyl is an 'analog' medium, the sound waves direct from the recording are going to be pressed on the record. NOT! It would sound like drek if it was, as the old records did. In almost all cases VINYL IS DIGITALLY MASTERED BEFORE PRESSING! This lets sound engineers do all the tweaking we've come to expect, it is not a simple loss of quality. So any 'analog' benefit is lost before the pressing. You do though get the wonderful analog degradation as micro-scratches and dust accumulate on your record. Being analog, the grooves on your records are the actual shape of the sound waves, but since your records were digitally mastered before pressing, they're not smooth analog curves, they're slightly boxy representing the sampling.
:)
If you like vinyl, using a record preservative like LAST record preservative (review here) can extend the life of your records dramatically. But it can certainly never make them sound better than they did when they were digitally mastered. If you REALLY don't want to damage your record, there are even laser turntables (here) that just scan the grooves. Now I just need one of those in my car
If it were really diverse, they wouldn't just have music professionals on the board. They'd have a deaf person, some giggling schoolgirls, a super-intelligent killbot, and maybe a monkey.
--
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E2 IN2 IE?
There is also a lot of information coming from the Lame Project, particular of your interest may probably be reading the mailing list which probably answers all your questions.
In your particular case, in my opinion you should try experimenting with the --r3mix switch using the latest Lame3.89beta or maybe even a Lame3.90alpha, which should give you VBR files averaging 170~220kbps. In any case reading the forums there is the best way to keep up to date with each Lame development.
In my opinion, Lame exceeds by far Fraunhofer's quality, but only if allowed to use the higher bitrates. On the other hand, Fraunhofer can't do better than average even with higher bitrates.
Ogg is on its way, but it is *still* behind the current state of mp3 encoding quality. Due to its design, it seems it has all what is needed to improve in both quality and size constraints; but its not there yet, needs a lot of testing and tweaking, a process very time consuming that needs a lot of people. I don't think its even fair to test it before the first non beta release is made, much less compare it.
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
or...
"MSNBC told me Microsoft created this new revolutionary audio technology, WMA, so this should be good."
I love corporate control of our media, schools and government.
agreed. I've had to use word for technical documentation. One of my docs doesn't have a figure 3. 1,2,4-29 work fine, but not 3. Track changes is a nightmare when working with outlines. and numbered outlines themselves rarely number correctly.
This was done over at somebodys crib... I don't think they had any controls. The testers are quoted saying things like "Vorbis was..." so it was not a blind test. They could have been just reacting to their preconcieved notions of the names of the types! This means nothing. Not news.
Do you have the best encoder, decoder for the format. Are you running at comparable bit rates? Is the audio hardware decent. Even if the audio hardware is decent how do you get the audio to the amp?
I know that I can play the same mp3 on my computer/soundcard hooked up to my receiver's rca jacks or from my audiotron to the receiver's optical digital input and the mp3 sounds much better with the reciever doing the DAC.
That always seemed to me to be the issue- If I copy a tape from a friend who copied it from another friend, each generation of copies degrades significantly. Every generation of copies of a digital file is identical to the first rip, aside from the usual Napster problem of losing the last 4 seconds of every song you download :-)
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
- Impressed in comparison to.... what? Have you tried some third party video equip? Did you try Quicktime or DV equipment? Have you had any oportunity to look at an avid system?
Compared to using MP3 for audio, real and quicktime for video. Giving my choice I would use QuickTime Streaming Server on FreeBSD, but this isn't my choice. I have to work within the confines of the project.I do shoot on DV and I have worked on projects where I capture/edit and dump back to tape and others where I dump to a .wmv to stream.
I don't quite understand how your comments about third party video equipment or an avid system come into play in this comment. Of course, when I shoot and capture video I am using third part video equipment. Last time I checked Microsoft didn't make a DV camera. As far as an Avid system goes, I don't see how other than maybe making my life as an editor easier it would have ANY effect on the picture quality of the final output.
On a side note - I find it interesting that the software I capture/edit and then compress video with captures to QuickTime to create an end result of .wmv
-----
Before you discount this as pro Microsoft retoric let me assure you that I am not a huge fan of their in the server/serving services arena, but they do make some good multimedia stuff.
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Last time I asked, (I think) Vorbis did not support mid-side stereo encoding. That means that it couldn't take advantage of the correlation between the two channels. It would do better than MP3 on mono signals and worse on stereo. Does anyone know whether it's still the case. That could explain the results.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Point well taken about "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing." But in this case, as you suggest, who decides what is evil? I really don't think Microsoft is really that evil. Lots of people here are using Linux or UNIX, so they obviously haven't ruined your life too much. I see what you are saying about good not always automatically winning over evil, but I don't think the lines between good and evil are clearly defined.
I disagree, I think the billions and billions of money spent on research has more than paid off for Microsoft and users. Like it or not, through their research on what users wants, Microsoft makes huge advances in useability, although sometimes at the expense of stability, etc.
Also, why do you have to stop them? If you don't like them, don't buy their stuff and recommend that your friends do the same. I really don't see the need for a focus on stopping Microsoft. If they are as horrible as most people here think, they will stop themselves.
The fact is that people have choices now in terms of computing. Microsoft doesn't need to be stopped. Make a better product and make it as easy to use as Windows and Microsoft's hold of computing with lessen.
...it's crippeled to 56kbit. It uses frouphefer (spelling?) encoder, you know, the guys who made MP3?
Fouhenipher (heh) MP3 It's the best encoder out there, however one should not that mp3 is very bad at 56kbit compared to WMA, which would explain your ignornace.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Anyone who promotes linux and "license free software" and still promotes mp3 is a idiot. Fraunhofer-IIS has massive licensing and patents on MP3 and MP3Pro.
next time you promote your hippy ways rememeber to push Vorbis, that is the correct response.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Thing is, these are people who are theoretically vey sensitive and perceptive about such things. They didn't try to include John A. Consumer in the study.
I think the experts raise some valid points in the end of the article about poor sound quality not necessarily being excusable. But then, I'm a musician, so I may have different views on the matter.
And, wow, I had always wondered whether "Vorbis" was a Discworld reference. Cute. I thought "Ogg" might be, too, but I guess not.
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Yes, I concur. Vorbis was rather important. Villains generally are. He was also, to an extent, symbolic.
Karma: T-rexcellent.
actually the valves he heard were those from his heart as that would be the only sound to hear in the room when Windows locks up. hehehe
TIME is the Aether...
Why does inclusding WMA not make any sence? It's a study on lossy music compression, and that's what WMA is.= \=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\
Which, I'll warrant, means no double blinding and no level matching. Probably not even single blinding (where the testers know what's being listened to, but the testees don't).
It seems rather obvious to me that the testing was not blind at all because the individual test subject critiqued what they felt was wrong with each particular codec. My opinion of this test is that it was purely a putup job to make the "relatively" unencumbered (mp3) and free (Vorbis) codecs look inferior to the more proprietary options. Is it possible that Microsoft was involved in the test design
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
utter rubbish
The goal of experiments are unbiased, objective results. When you tell someone ahead of time what they are hearing, you effectively ruin that sample. It doesn't matter if "they don't care" like you claim for your sister. (Most people will recoginze the name Microsoft, btw)
Come back to us in 5 years when you've had a research/stats class, or at least when you understand the Scientific Method. In the mean time, this "study" means jack sqwat.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Actually, with the tara plugin, you can play Real files with Winamp. And if you can play them, you know what that means, don't you? Yes! That means you can write out the .wav! I used that frequently when 2600 still hadn't converted their Off the Hook Real Audio shows to .mp3. Very handy. It needs the Real codec installed, of course, but it doesn't use its interface. Just a nice, boring one.
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
It, of course, depends on what you're encoding. WMA has been long known to add artifacts to certain kinds of sounds during the encoding process, such as pre-echo. Some sounds, like drums, can be quite distorted by this, although obviously in the case of the article, some of the listeners actually liked the pre-echo -- "On MP3Pro, I could hear the valves closing on the clarinet and the bassoon".
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
That's what running a big business is all about. Mc Donalds, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart...
You don't make much money catering to the elite.
The way I remember it, some of them could distinguish it with significant certainty, though not 100%.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I think the answer to why it should scare me should rather be that they're coupling WMA with their rights management system, backed by Passport and deployed by pressplay. This really scares me.
We live in a time when a crackpot claims that God helped him invent the perpetual motion engine, of which he will have a prototype that actually works Real Soon Now, and a national prime-time news program on a major network will actually send reporters out and cover, and provide, at best, just one or two sound bites from actual scientists pointing out that such a thing is impossible.
And given this, a reporter doing a listening test without proper methodology is a surprise?
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Small or not it's quite perceptible. Play on my stereo an MP3 vs. a CD of the same song I will 100% pick out the CD as being better each time based on the sound alone, and I could point out the differences to anyone and make them see it too. Lots of people can; MP3's are simply no good for at home, pure listening purposes. For just about everything else, they're fine (computers, joggers, cars, DJ's, parties, etc...) for the most part.
Okay, let me rephrase that, then: a compressed version of a set of data can't beat the uncompressed version. Remember, the MP3 is almost without exception ripped from the CD. You can't possibly have better quality, though the original poster suggests you can have something that we perceive as better quality. The point of my post was that if there's some way of increasing the perceived quality, they could just do that to the original without compressing it and you'd still lose.
sometimes a less true sound going to the speakers will result in you thinking you hear something more true. [...] If I were the boss of a project to design a new digital format for the Internet, the goal would not be to make it sound as much like a CD as possible. The goal would be to make it sound as good as possible.
Interesting idea, but I think that would be a seperate project from designing a compression scheme. If there were some set of translations you could run on the audio to make it sound more realistic, sooner or later the people who print the CDs would run it on them before they print. They'd be doing essentially the same thing but not compressing, and would sound better. Compressed formats just can't beat uncompressed formats. The only thing you can really hope for is to get the two close enough together that no one can tell the difference.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can't believe in this comparison they neglected one of the most unique formats of all time! I mean, this format has nearly zero compression, a limited spand, is fairly lossy in level (although it has a better frequency range), and is extremely easily corruptible and nearly impossible to repair.
I mean, the vinyl record didn't even earn its due in this battle! Although I understand that if you're willing to take a shorter piece of music, the media can be compressed to half its original diameter.
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You and I shouldn't have to worry about re-encoding our existing collection of songs (MP3, RM, pick the format) into new formats providing the existing collection is electronic.
We're not talking about different mediums here as in the case when everyone changed from LP to CD. At that time, listeners were repurchasing the medium (CDs) and the delivery mechanism (CD players). In this case, the delivery mechanism is software on your PC that is upgraded at the click of a button and each click could add new support for existing and emerging formats.
If your existing collection is in format X and better format Y comes out, each format can co-exist and be used together. The only issue is if you WANT your existing format 'upgraded'.
kill_9_1
Here's an interesting web site that lets you do the comparisons:
x .h tm
h tm
www.pcabx.com
Also see
www.pcavtech.com
for some results
and
oeonline.com/~djcarlst/abx.htm
for explanation of ABX in general.
This url:
http://www.pcabx.com/product/coder_decoder/inde
contains samples to compare FOR YOURSELF several codec variations.
This url:
http://www.pcavtech.com/play-rec/summary/index.
contains some results... Apologies for not posting with html...
Mark
"... Vorbis was the least realistic, with MP3Pro sounding better and Windows Media Audio best of all -- but none of these formats achieved CD quality."
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Why would anyone want a super-intelligent killbot? Killbots only need to be intelligent enough to properly carry out the owner's orders. Further intelligence increases the probability of betrayal.
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
I'll stick with my winamp, thanks.. although I'm forced to use [WiMP] for video files
The VidAmp plugin for Winamp can play avi, mpg, and mov formats. The developer couldn't add support for the RealPlayer formats because RealPlayer's EULA makes it not embeddable.
Will I retire or break 10K?
12" vinyl records have much dynamic. More punch.
They're also impractical for use in moving automobiles or around small children.
Because a CD has only 16 bits of dynamic, music is overcompressed.
Each bit of linear PCM after the first provides about 6 dB of dynamic range, giving CDs approximately 90 dB of range. If you turn up the volume so as to hear the sound at 0 dB (threshold of hearing at 1-4 kHz), the sound at 90 dB may damage your hearing. Even THX movie soundtracks are mixed at 75 dB for dialogue, and most home theater setups run things 6 to 10 dB lower than that. Heck
Vinyl records sold in the 1970s have more punch than CDs sold today not because of limitations of the CD format but because of limitations of FM radio. According to the Myths section at r3mix (which uses JavaShit to prevent deep linking), the real cause for modern CDs' lack of dynamic range is the application of heavy dynamic compression to get the music to sound louder on the radio.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Apart from the fact that, as other posters have noted, there's no information given on the bit rates or encoders used, the article straight-out admits that "the test sessions were done in a home environment with an ordinary stereo system".
Which, I'll warrant, means no double blinding and no level matching. Probably not even single blinding (where the testers know what's being listened to, but the testees don't). Level matching is essential; different encoding methods may play back at slightly different levels, and just turning up the volume a tad will convince a large proportion of casual or professional listeners that something's improved in the sound.
Without a proper scientific test, psychoacoustic effects can swamp even quite large real differences in sound, and can cause people to hear quite large differences that they wouldn't hear if they didn't know when they were listening to what.
As can trivially be demonstrated, when you look at the number of golden-eared but scientifically ignorant audiophiles who are utterly convinced that marble plinths for solid state equipment, little discs made of Mpingo ebony that you sit on top of your components, incredibly expensive special power cables and CD "demagnetisers" all make a clear and definite difference to the sound of their hi-fi system.
If you do a proper scientific test and find an audible difference between an amplifier whose transistors have had voodoo incantations spoken over them and another otherwise identical amplifier that has not been so treated, then I'll give you my rapt attention, despite the fundamental ridiculousness of the concept. If the evidence supports your contention, then your contention has value, by definition.
But if you don't do a proper test, your results are going to be random. From what little this article says about the test's methodology, I see no reason to believe a word of it.
I'm not a MS fan either, I use Linux exclusively (at home, anyway).
But one thing I always wonder is people saying that the Windows OS/kernel is crap and office software is their strength. I would say it's vice versa - I can use Windows (although I prefer Linux), but Word I wouldn't touch with a 5 foot long pole. Installing LaTeX (or some other tool, suitable for the task at hand) is usually the first thing to do when I have to use Windows. And the Windows kernel's not really that lousy, although a little buggy (but certainly better than the office tools, I'd say).
A bit by bit comparison doesn't really make sense. Neither does frequency response analysis. These encoders were designed specifically to alter these things.
The only thing which matters is, "how good does it sound to the listeners". And that's indeed the most scientific way of testing it I can think of. Blind tests, comparing with real CD quality.
It definitely will. Lossy image compression seems less and less attractive as higher bandwidth and more storage space becomes available. For any professional use, i.e. when you really need all the detail you can get, it's certainly not what you want.
The same can obviously be said about lossy audio and video compression, but for the moment (at least when it comes to video), it is totally unpractical to use anything else. So they will stay much longer.
What the names mean
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
A bit by bit comparison doesn't really make sense. If you meant comparing binary audio data bit by bit, you'd be right, but "bit rate" here means, how big the resulting compressed file may be; how big compression ratio is achieved. Since higher compression ratios trade quality to quantity (higher compress ratio means lower sound quality, without an exception for well-designed compressors), it should be trivially obvious to anyone that bit-rate, then, is absolutely totally completely relevant here, as an input parameter. Comparing applets to apples; it's not fair to use 256 kbps for some formats and 64 kbps for others. The only possible case where different bit rates should be used, then, would be the "highest possible quality" if the formats have upper limit for input bit-rate... But that's bit silly, too, since the whole point of these formats is to compress.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Also... you are assuming all the world's music is already here, and in MP3. There'll be new music created that can be encoded using better formats, and of course not everyone has converted music to mp3 yet in the first place. There's plenty of room for new better formats.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Why do you have to stop Stallin? If he really is as bad as you say, his people will revolt and kick him out, we don't have to do anything. Why do you have to stop Hitler? If he really is as bad as you say, the Germans will stop him themselves, we don't have to do anything.
[RehtoricOff]
Sorry about the 'touchy' Nazi comment, but I think that we need to be reminded occasionally that just because something isn't good (or we think something isn't good; others may think it's better than sliced bread, which makes this sort of thing even harder) doesn't mean that it will be defeated. History is full of horrible stories of evil going unchallenged. There is truth in the cliche "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing."
They may not be, but that line is one of the most important things we can discuss and act on. If I think that Communism is good/evil my actions in relation to that politico-economic system will follow. Whether we can agree on where the "Line of Evil" (TM by Microsoft :) lies, we will each act according to what we believe.
Essentially, we don't have to agree on where the line is, we don't need concensus, we will each act in a manner consistent with where we believe the "Line of Evil" to be.
. . .
If you can think of an example which fits all of those criteria, please let me know.
What do you mean, a commonly-used bitrate? I can bet a lot of money on that if you give me a CD with any music and let me play it to you together with the same CD encoded at 256 kbps ABR high-quality pass with LAME 3.88, on an SB Live! hooked up to a good amp and a good pair of monitor speakers (play the CD on your favorite CD player hooked up to the same amp), you would not be able to hear the difference between the CD and the mp3. If you state otherwise, you're full of shit. The audio quality difference at this bitrate, with this encoder, cannot be heard by any human ear.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
try using Total Recorder with quicktime. Your attempts will easily be foiled. Its like they have some sort of macrovision-like protection on their audio streams (protected or not)
http://etree.org cares a lot.
I was speaking strictly in the sense of the discworld series as a whole, not a single work.
Death is a major charecter in this light. Susan really isn't, even though she's a lead charecter in one book and a appears in a few others.
Certainly in ONE book she is a major charecter.
KFG
Bullshit. Most classical music and jazz recordings are not processed at all. The Trinity Session by The Cowboy Junkies was recorded live, in a church, with one stereo microphone. Ben Folds Five's Whatever and Ever, Amen was recorded in Ben Folds house, and minimal cleaning up was done to it: you can hear a telephone ring in one of the tracks with decent equipment. Hell, even The Art of Noise's music, which is totally digital (I hesitate to say synthezied), sounds far better with more detail on good audio systems.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
So they make a comparisson about compression formats, get together several "experts" in the field and the writer sums up the conclusions in a few oversimplified statements for the lazy reader.
God forbid they actually told you ALL the aspects of the story, the complete facts: what're the compression rates? which one compresses more? is there a relation between file size vs. quality (well, of course there is, but is some form of compression significan enough to justify lower quality? or the other way around?)
Sorry for the ranting, but I've been trying to catch up on what's going on in the world today and the more I read the more frustrated I get with regular articles from regular sources (the CNN's and MSNBC's). And has anyone noticed that it's becoming less and less of a practice to actually link the original source of the information?
Oh, and why is slashdot so slow today? maybe I should have named this post "A bad day...".
I apologize again for the negative tone.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
it really deserves a second linking, www.r3mix.net is the difinitive source for the developing area of music archival on mp3.
it's pretty obvious w/o even reading the arkle that the 'test' is garbage.
before you get hot and bothered about lossy codecs for archival, check it out. it works in Real Life(tm).
Your five-second wait is under the 10-second response time built into Windows. Sometimes processes can suck up CPU time and make a system unresponsive. It can happen even in Linux. In both cases, it's almost always a misconfiguration.
;-)
One minor point: One can hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc and find and kill an offending process in Windows 2000 without taking one's hand from the keyboard. Ctrl-Shift-Esc, then Ctrl-Tab, then Tab, then type the first few letters of whatever's pulling 99%+ CPU usage, and Alt-E. Sounds like a lot, but it takes only seconds. It's a different method, but the first sign of getting old is a refusal to adapt.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Ever been to an orchestra? I used to date a girl who plays the French horn, and the individuality of the concert notes in real life makes even my orchestral MP3s at 256 and higher sound poor. My CDs are a bit better, but there's little that can replace the true sounds using current CD-level recording. I look forward to new, higher-fidelity recordings to replace my existing Strauss, Holst, and Beethoven collection.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I am working on an article detailing the results of having a "a diverse panel of horny Slashdoters" compare real live Porn to various other Porn. The punchline: "...felt Playboy was the least realistic, with Penthouse being a bit better and DVD Porn movies best of all -- but none of these formats achieved Live (dirty sex with a drunk co-ed) quality."
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Are they going to notice the difference? Probably not.
Granted this is nice information to have. But I don't see the average user caring much. The MP3 format itself was lossy but no one seemed to care.
Most MP3 compression utilities filter out frequencies above 20kHz or below 20Hz; CD-quality sound can produce frequencies at 44kHz and the inverse of the length of the sound. Clearly, the data filtered out is not tiny.
It is true that most low-grade speakers and headphones cannot produce frequencies above 20kHz or below 20Hz (check the frequency response), but higher grade equipment can. This is often the reason somebody can't tell the difference between CD sound and MP3.
Psychoaucustics models say that few people can hear frequencies, by themselves, above 20kHz. Suppose that you can't. However, multiple frequencies above 20kHz can produce frequencies below 20kHz. Try playing a root and a fourth on a very well-tuned string instrument. It should resonate and octave below the root. Playing a root and an octave above it also produces and octave below the root. Various other combinations produce different tones.
The frequencies above 20kHz do matter, whether you can hear them or not. These high frequencies often contribute to tone; differences in ambouchere, reed, mouthpieces, instruments for reed players, differences in strings, where the string is played, plucking/bowing style for string players.
Another way to think about it: try to produce a square wave with only sine waves. To reproduce it exactly, you need the wave that has the same period, then period/3, then period/5, then period/7, etc. When you take away the high frequencies, the wave isn't the same.
Higher bit rate MP3s are not CD quality sound. MP3 still distorts the original, and many find that objectionable when hearing it from quality equipment.
For actual CD-quality sound, I suggest a lossless algorithm such as shorten (.shn).
Even if you have the bloated monster v7 on your system, the older, lighter player should still be there. At least it is on WinMe. Look for mplayer2.exe, and manually assign it to play MPG, AVI, etc. You may have to leave some of the newer streaming formats assigned to WMP7.
I haven't seen WMP7 pop up in MONTHS and I am SO happy.
all of the good details. Like how they where encoded at what bit rate etc. Also why did the listeners know what they where listening to. The comments should have been sample a sounded better then sample b not about which format sounded better. Also they did not mention file size or any of the other reasons that people use lossy formats in the first place.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
It is surprising, however, that Media Audio comes out on top...Not because it's a Microsoft product, but because anecdotally, I've always found it to be the worst player for my system...An intense resource hog as compared to other player/compression pairs. I guess one could say it's the more 'professional' of the three (Ogg, MP3, WMA)
"On MP3Pro, I could hear the valves closing on the clarinet and the bassoon," said Peter Hubscher, a rock guitarist. "I couldn't on Vorbis." An interesting quote, how good were these recordings?
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
CD-quality sound can produce frequencies at 44kHz and the inverse of the length of the sound. Clearly, the data filtered out is not tiny.
CD sound, if the anti-aliasing and playback filters are perfect brick walls (which is impossible) would produce an maximum frequency of 22.05kHz. The Nyquist sampling theorem states that to store a given frequency in a sampled medium, the sampling rate must be at least twice as high or you get aliasing. In practice, though, the sampling rate is increased a bit more to compensate for non-ideal filter rolloffs. This response is helped somewhat by the use of oversampling and neat DSP techniques during playback, but the frequency response generally follows that of a sinc function (sin(x)/x).
Sampling theory is pretty fascinating stuff! HammerSound has a decent explanation of basic audio recording theory, and there are plenty of other sources if you are interested.
What is shorten (.shn)?
From what you've just told me, you have a linear combination C, made up of single frequencies A and B. You can remove B to get A and vice versa, because (as you said) it is linear and can be decomposed. But if you start taking it apart, you won't have C any more, you'll have parts of C. So what does it matter where in the frequency spectrum A and B are, it will still affect C (the resultant sound that you WANT to have in the end). Besides, can't sound waves resonant with each other to produce new sounds? Isn't that what harmonics are all about?
You can email me if you'd rather. Or just ignore me, that works too.
Alakaboo
There was a fellow back in the day, when the recording industry was beginning to become mainstream, and he designed some of the most brilliant devices and consoles, the principles of which are still in use today. He had a theory about music and recording which has pretty much been proven by modern means, and it goes something like this:
Say you're in a small room with another person and the two of you are having a conversation. As the sound of your speaking leaves your mouth and resonates inside your chest, it generates sound waves that flow away from your body, almost like water. (Patience, I'm getting there.
Now the trick here is to place a single microphone in the room and capture all of the above discribed chaos going on. And you really need to, because this guy's theory says that the frequencies that are NOT audible to the human ear will resonate and affect the net sound of the frequencies that we can.
This effect becomes more potent when you have an entire rock band or symphony orchestra performing a piece. Sure there are sounds that you will not be able to hear, but those inaudible sounds are what makes the difference between watching them perform live at the theatre or in a bar, and sitting at home and listening to a recording. It's just not the same.
As if the trouble with COLLECTING all the sounds isn't enough, now we have trouble REPRODUCING these sounds. When a song is dubbed to tape, it loses an upper and lower bound of frequencies because of a limitation of the medium. When the song is pressed into vinyl, is loses another set of frequencies. By the time it makes it to CD, it's crammed down to 20Hz-20KHz (or so, I don't know what the newer CDs are capable of) instead of the (potential) 0-undef it would be if you were standing right there when the sounds were originally produced.
The fallacy of music compression is the idea that unused (or nearly unused) frequencies can be removed without detriment to the quality of the music. This is wholly untrue, and I dare anyone who says otherwise to take a classical piece on vinyl or an older song from an LP and compare it to a 128Kbps CD-rip of the same recording.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't enjoy being able to store every song The Beatles ever recorded on two CDs. I just wanted to make the point that while it's convenient, it sounds terrible compared to what the artist inteded you to hear from the beginning.
Alakaboo
>>> :)
He probably heard some flanging artifact and thought it was a valve closure
>>>
Exactly my thought
This is why you really must do blind A/B tests.
>>>
(Credit to them grokking that lossy compression in music often throws away stereo separation / spatial components, though.)
>>>
Grokking? Nah, more like: 'lets try to sound smart'
They managed to blame the sole codec that does NOT use intensity/joint stereo of losing stereo definition.
Which nicely sums up the reliabily of their test...
--
GCP
>>>
Play on my stereo an MP3 vs. a CD of the same song I will 100% pick out the CD as being better each time
>>>
At what bitrate?
I'd be really really really surprised if you
could do this for 256Kps MP3 with a recent
encoder (LAME 3.88 or Frauenhofer even)
As for 128Kps, no doubt. I can do it too,
but not for all songs (and with headphones
only)
--
GCP
>>>
On the other hand, the comment about loss of spaciousness showed some insight. One of the things most of these lossy formats don't preserve is the phase information between channels.
>>>
I've corrected this elsewhere as well:
The format where they noticed the loss of
spaciousness was the ONLY one that actually
preserved all stereo information. (because it
is not implemented yet)
This is one of the clearest indications their
testing methodology was completely wrong.
--
GCP
>>>
:)
The way I remember it, some of them could distinguish it with significant certainty, though not 100%.
>>>
Do you have a reference for that? I just reread the article and see no such thing, but then again it is in German so it's easier to miss something.
The maximum score was 51 points (perfect recognition), but the maximum that was actually scored was 26 points. This includes the 128Kbps
score. 14,1 points were needed to get a non-guessing score, again including the 128Kbps samples. Considering there were 17 samples I don't see how this can imply that any were able to spot the 256Kbps with any kind of certainty, assuming that if they spot 256Kbps they will also have spot 128Kbps.
Funny is that the best scorer actually had damaged hearing - the psychoacoustics didn't work for him
--
GCP
>>>
This is so misinformed (hence the Slashdot traditional 5)
>>>
I think that has more to do with the fact that it attempts to invalidate a test which shows something Microsoft made in a good daylight and the OS in a bad. Then again, Slashdot does moderate anything remotely sounding correct up, mostly because there is no -1 Wrong moderation.
>>>
Lew Lipnick spent at least a decade as a hi-end audio reviewer
>>>
He didn't set up the test. He only listened. The only way his expertise credits this test is in his listening experience, not in the test setup.
>>>
was apparently accurate enough to clearly differentiate between codecs.
>>>
Where do you get this? There isn't any reliable data about that whatsoever. Please read the journalists response. The test was highly flawed.
>>>
Audio reproduction has come a long way in the last two decades and a modest home system can be very good indeed.
>>>
Uh. An ordinary stereo system is usually budget Japanese consumer electronics. The difference between my Sennheisers and my JVC stereo makes my cry.
>>>
Ummmm, do you think that's why they picked classical and heavy metal sellections? To highlight those differences?
>>>
How does this invalidate the fact that only 2 samples were used?
>>>
If anything, the tacky marketting moniker 'Pro' would bias most audio reviewers against a product. Pro audio gear has long been held in general disdain in hi-end circles as rugged but unmusical.
>>>
Could be true. Then again for software it is usually the reverse, and it were audio codecs they were comparing.
>>>
Rubbing my eyes in disbelief here. Accurate is good! This is what an exciter is for?!?!?
>>>
My mistake. With exciter I'm referring to the kind of 'MP3 enhancer' products that are sold. They just increase the treble a little and boost the basses. Sometimes this makes the music sound better. It doesn't make it more accurate. MP3PRO does just this.
>>>
Double bonk. The sensation of space is created as much by the proper reproduction of room reverberation as it is by directionality. If codecs suppress ambience, a reasonable assumption since they work by discarding low level sound, then yes a space can sound smaller.
>>>
I still remain unconvinced. I agree the spaciousness is dependant on mutiple factors, but I still find it highly suspect they 'thought' Vorbis was worst at this, when this is directly against what would be expected.
I have never experienced this effect in any listening test, although it is hard to compare ithout knowing the bitrate they used.
>>>
How do you know what they've collectively read? Is it impossible they heard this artifact?
>>>
It is not impossible. But it is much more likely
they thought they heard this artefact, because they thoyught they knew how the codec works. It was NOT a blind test.
>>>
Regarding the top end ringing, there's no way to say anything meaningful without knowing what the bit rates were.
>>>
I have to agree with you here.
>>>
I really don't give a rat's ass which codec is superior, I'm just dead tired of seeing misinformation moderated so highly.
>>>
I do give which codes is superior, since I am archiving quite a bit of audio material.
My choice for now is LAME (r3mix settings but
with lower lowpass filer, I can't hear at 19Khz anyway), but when Vorbis 1.0 comes out I will do new listening tests.
--
GCP
>>>>>
There is a noticable loss of sound quality with any compression technique and IMHO there is no comparison to the original.
>>>>>
Yes, thats what the audiophiles in the c't test (which was correctly conducted) said.
Unfortunately for them, they couldn't distinguish
mp3 @ 256kbps and the cd's AT ALL.
--
GCP
Well, besides the obvious missing details, there
is a lot that is wrong about this:
>>>>>>
The test sessions were done in a home environment with an ordinary stereo system. We focused most of our attention on MP3Pro and Vorbis, the two newest formats, with Windows Audio Media and MP3, the older and more familiar formats, given more limited tests.
>>>>>>
Notice 'a home environment with an ordinary stereo system'. So esentially any more subtle loss in sound quality should have been lost. Great environment for listening tests eh. Note that this isn't compensated by the fact that is what most people use. The distortion between such systems varies widely, and hence what sounds good on one system doesn't necessarily sound good on another.
>>>>>>>
We had them listen to digitally encoded versions of two songs: the opening of a recent recording of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" and the Who's "Love Ain't for Keeping."
>>>>>>>
TWO songs? We have hundreds of music genres and they used two songs for a comparisation? Christ. Encoding Heavy Metal (very bitrate heavy) is a whole different job than encoding classical music(very sensitive for minor distortions).
>>>>>>>
Of the seven listeners, two couldn't discern much difference between MP3Pro and Vorbis. The other five felt Vorbis was the least realistic,
>>>>>>>
Discern difference between the codecs? The way
this paragraph is put makes it highly unlikely
they were doing blind A/B tests.
More likely they actually told the test subjects
which codes it was each time.
This is _always_ going to favor mp3pro., just
because of the name. Also, the point of a good
encoder is to replicate the original music,
not to make it sound good! That is what an
exciter is for.
>>>>
Most thought the beta version of the Vorbis encoder poorly represented the natural sounds of the individual voices or musical instruments.
(A few disagreed, saying certain instruments sounded more synthetic in MP3Pro.)
>>>>
This convices me even more the setup of the test was failed. As I stated in a previous post, mp3pro 'makes up' the high end of the music. This is why some people must have thought it sounded better, while the better trained ones where able to pick up the fact that the high end was artificial.
>>>>
giving higher tones a better ring.
>>>>
Yep. More ringing on the hing end. Sounds like mp3pro for sure. Nevermind that the original music doesnt have it.
>>>>>>
"In the compressed format it sounded as if they had all moved their chairs together," said Hubscher. He founded this especially troublesome in Vorbis.
>>>>>>
BONK. Vorbis is the only format that does NOT
use any kind of joint/intensity stereo coding.
(it will in the 1.0 release)
Then how can it ever get a smaller stereo image??
This isn't making any sense at all...
>>>>>>>
Vrbsky and Lipnick blamed this on the way digital compression shaves off the beginnings and ends of notes.
>>>>>>>
Hahaaaa. They heard something about temporal
masking I'm sure. Too bad they don't have a clue.
--
GCP (who did his own listening tests)
------
C'mon, flame me!
No sig for the moment.
And before people bark at how lousy the OS is, there's a difference: with the OS, they have a huge legacy they must support without recompiling code. With applications, they have the benefit of being able to set their own standards over and over again repeatedly (as is the general complaint from Open Source people).
So while this has the effect of making it hard to copy, it also allows them to freely change anything they want.
Now, I'm not much of a MS fan, however, it must be pointed out that their office software does work very well, and works well with itself. So, while you can argue that the OS is brain-dead, the software, (minus the paperclip) is of decent quality.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
As for mixing with CDs ... no problem. So many of my friends do it well with no real issues. I really enjoy it, too ... modifying a song or getting strange samples and sound effects, burning them to a CD and playing them out the same night.
As for hip hop mixing with CDJs ... check out this video ... the new Pioneer CDJ-1000s are VERY impressive:
http://www.rhythmatik.com/cdj-1000.rm
-Christian
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
Transparency is great, but most people who know the contortions that a sound engineer goes through to create the illusion of stero sound will tell you, audio reproduction is still as much an art as it is a science, and sometimes a less true sound going to the speakers will result in you thinking you hear something more true. It's all smoke and mirrors.
If I were the boss of a project to design a new digital format for the Internet, the goal would not be to make it sound as much like a CD as possible. The goal would be to make it sound as good as possible. Who knows, maybe some mad genious out there will come up with a format that uses fewer bits, yet sounds better than CD's.
Then maybe someday people will be saying "sure that new CD format sounds okay, but it can't compete with MP8 quality, like you get from web streaming."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Yep, it can do that kind of stuff. Yet another viral transmitter from MS.
I recommend that you find ver 1.3 of VirtualDub, the one with ASF support, and resave the asf file as an AVI. Select direct stream copy for both audio and video. You'll get your seeking back. Don't know about framerate, but that should increase too. And the file will be somewhat smaller. Best thing is, you're back to a pure multimedia file w/o the imbedded links or whatever they are.
Firethorn
I don't read AC A human right
This isn't correct.
To start with, only a small portion of the music that is released is given the "ultra-compress" treatment to make it car-radio friendly. Whole genres like jazz, classical and electronic are not treated at all in many cases (there's a whole school of purist classical recordists now who use 2 mics and NO processing of any type), or are treated in such a way as to emphasize the small details.
Your average jazz or classical buff would return a CD that was treated like a radio hit!
Second, even the radio treated stuff has a great deal of detail that is preserved. Engineers go to ridiculous extremes to come up with the correct reverberation, envelopes for drums (particularly) and the like. Their idea is NOT to reduce detail but to manage dynamics and presentation so that the mix sounds good on a car radio. If you don't believe this is true, A/B compare something radio-ized like the Spice Girls against The Who.
Frankly, if you spend 10 minutes with a decent set of speakers and compare a CD against an MP3 of the same song, you'll hear what I mean, you really don't have to be an audiophile to appreciate it. You get better results as your bitrate increases but there's a dramatic difference.
Try something demanding like a chamber orchestra recording. (I like to use The Orb's Orblivion to test systems but it's not as good if you don't know it really well).
If you are listening on your average computer speakers, well, it'll all sound a bit thin anyway so it'd be hard to tell the difference...
Why? Well, it's quite good; apparently the billions and billions Microsoft has spent on research has finally resulted in a payoff. And Microsoft has managed to dominate market segments with complete shit products before; now that they actually have something decent, it's going to be difficult to stop them.
True musicianship is Elvis at Sun records going into a 1-track tape, or Muddy Waters on the Delta going into a portable 1-track, or Blind Willie McTell in Atlanta playing into the horn of a wax cylinder recorder; or the Beatles on a three-track - and then all of these played over a tube radio in a '58 Ford - and the musicians having the ears to hear that this is their target. In the mid '70s Garcia had a private pirate radio station in Marin so he could broadcast the stuff he was working on in the studio for himself as he drove around town - playing it at low volume.
... differently, and works with that.
Many guitarists prefer tube amps because they've learned to exploit and incorporate the distortion they lend, which tends to ring more than the distortion out of transistors. A good vocalist knows that all microphones distort
A good musician releasing stuff in a lossy format composes for it - it's like a ballplayer hitting a ball into a crosswind - if you can't handle it, you aren't pro.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
>said he could hear the valves closing on
>the clarinet and bassoon... is utter bullshit.
>He probably heard some flanging artifact and
>thought it was a valve closure.
Okay, if you read the article, you know that the classical piece they listened to was the beginning of Stravinsky's Firebird, which you SHOULD know begins with a BASSOON SOLO! I don't know what particular recording they listened to, but my Reference Recordings recording of the MN Orchestra playing this piece has very audible bassoon-key clicks at the beginning of this piece, and I imagine most other recordings would too. If you dont believe me, email me and I'll send you an MP3 of the beginning of this piece - the clicks are VERY audible, even in an MP3!
What is most surprising is that the listener said he COULDNT hear the clicks on the compressed audio, not that he COULD on the cd... they must have used a VERY low bitrate to drown out those clicks!
moo
Seriously though I use Lame with V2 with a min bitrate of 192 and a max of 320. Only on a rare few of my techno mixes does it ever even touch 320 for a moments time and otherwise spends the rest of the time around 256 with frequent drops to the 192 level. This puts me at about a 8:1 compression level and about a 200-240kbps equivilent bit rate. The quality, when played through my Onkyo is very good and the bass, played through a Sunfire True Subwoofer is very good (for those that say mp3 kills bass). And no, I didn't pay full price for it >;-)
One question I haven't been able to find the answer to though is: What criteria does the encoder use to determine what bitrate to use, and are some more or less conservative than others?
If you can't be good, be good at it!
If I had to guess they used a low bit rate for MP3Pro under the assumption that everyone will shoot for the same quality they do with MP3 but with the Pro versions greater compression. Personally I plan on doing all my futere encoding at the same bit rate looking for the (hopefully) improved quality over MP3. The same comment applies for Vorbis as well.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
this is true, a blind test is definitely the way to go. but some quality control definitely needs to be instituted, as well as revealing the "brand x" that sounds so good afterwards. this "test" does none of this, it just gives us some random pseudoexperts who say that this format is the best, and this one is not.
--
also, how did these people encode their mp3/ogg/wma files? there's no indication of bitrate, sampling frequency, encoder, encoder settings, nothing!. without this info, these results are even more invalid, and misleading to people who believe them. for example: in mp3 encoding, a file encoded at 128 kbps with a newer version of lame will sound much better than a piece encoded at the same bitrate with bladenc. why? cuz lame is much better, that's why!
i'm not supporting one format over another, but please, please don't base anything on this crap. i don't know how this even got posted.
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They were convinced that since MP3's did not offer CD-quality, folks wouldn't bother encoding music. If you remember, they were quick to jump on the "DAT Tax" which was a non-lossy encoding scheme. My Panasonic SV-3700 which features the "pro" quality digital copy capability (as well as the S/PDIF version) has a switch to defeat SCMS. SCMS was put in to prevent the making of more than 1 copy of a DAT tape. The SV-3700 was priced way out of the league of a consumer. S/PDIF ladened DAT decks went for hundreds of $$ less. People forget that this has been an issue for 10 years! Only until it affects their MP3 collection do they notice. Us musicians have been getting the shaft by these dweebs for years and from more than 1 angle!
As others have pointed out, the article lacks technical details. The most important detail of all... did the listeners KNOW which file format was being played? If they did then name branding could have had a play in some of the results. Can you imagine thoughts like...
"Ogg Vorbiss, what kind of name is that? Sounds like crap too." or...
"Microsoft, they got a lot of money for R&D. This should be good."
i know this is all fine and well, but who really wants to change to a different format if they have to completely re-encode their entire mp3 collection?
How much did the guitarist drink before the test? What did they smoke?
What instruments did the second classical musician play? Oboe? Piano? Percussion?
Does the audio saleman sell Harmon-Kardon or NAD?
It's hard to believe that the Washington Post could be so sloppy with important details! Who do they think is reading these articles, anyway?
I've compressed my entire 13 CD Joe Satrianni collection down to 1 disc of MP3s. I don't own speakers good enough to discern the difference between the original and the copy. Plus, it's so much more portable. Led Zeppelin is next.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
I agree with your comment : an appropriate test would show results like :
...
...
:
...
:
....
classical music :
1. mp3pro at 256 kbps (encoded with THIS)
2. vorbis at 256 (encoded with THAT)
3. vorbis at 192
4. mp3 at 256
5. wma at 256 (encoded with ANOTHER)
12. mp3pro at 64
13. wma at 64
rock music
some mostly voice song
I think I will do some kind of test for myself, as I know a bunch of artists and composers.
Bookmark this comment and come back in a week or two (time to gather them), I will post a url.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
The US are a republic, not a democracy. You only have to look at the latest presidential election to know the difference.
I downloaded an asf off of Gnutella, i open it up: its different. I can't use the slider, its about 1 frame/sec, and the WORST THING: It opened up my default browser to a web page!!! WTF! The beautiful thing about an insecure, unmanageable network like Gnutella, is that if someone ever modifies the mp3/mpeg/asf you want, the worst that happens is you don't get the content you want. Not with asf, if it could bring up a web site, and i hadn't installed Mozilla, it could have done some serious damage! It didn't even ask me! Thanks Microsoft!!!
.asf file, i just had no idea an asf could do that sort of thing
-Scott
BTW~ No, it is not a virus, i rebooted into linux and took a look at the file, it is an authentic
I agree wholeheartedly with the complaints about lack of information on testing methodology. It's a shame to gather a panel of experts and then ruin your results by telling them what they're listening to. It's a real waste of these people's time, even if they don't know it. Should have been a blind test at the very least.
On the other hand, the comment about loss of spaciousness showed some insight. One of the things most of these lossy formats don't preserve is the phase information between channels. Phase is one of the factors in the human auditory system's "imaging" sense, that is, it's ability to guess where a sound is coming from. Understanding of psycoacoustics is still fairly limited, with lots of clues as to what's going on, but no complete picture.
I worked at Bose a few years ago, and they had some very interesting demos involving sound imaging. Several demos involving only 2 drivers that seemed to very clearly move sounds around you such that you could point to precisely where you thought the sound came from. The recording methodology is very important for this kind of effect though.
My personal experience is that with good headphones (studio reference units), my untrained ear can hear the problems in MP3 at 128 kbits, but probably not at 192. Considering how rarely I listen to music under these pristine conditions, I'll live with MP3 until something better and universally supported comes along.
I pity your users if you're running a server on 8MB of RAM. RAM is cheap, splurge a little.
And if you really want Windows 2000 Server, a better computer is needed.
Tell that to Google.
Which to a lot of admins and users, equals a better program. Microsoft's success proves it.
I know the origins of the term, but I still fail to see the link to usage defining market forces.
What other versions of Windows are there, besides MS products?
Wait, hold on. I don't think I can follow all your technical reasonings here....Could you scale that down some for me?
Nothing like /. for some well-thought out, logical reasoning on something....
If CD's were really produced for the "lowest common denominator", then there would be very little (almost non-existent) bass, strong mid-range, and an abrupt drop in the high end. Because, that's what would sound good on $3 headphones or your clock radio. By producing for the largest market segment, however, we come to a compromise. CD's sound good on mid to low-level systems, and don't necessarily sound any better on high end systems because the detail isn't there to reproduce. And they still sound like shit on low-end systems. Don't believe me, let me loan you my Sharp boombox...
I'm not sure I understand. If the human ear can hear only frequencies between X and Y Hz, then we only need to capture those frequencies. The harmonics, reflections, and acoustics of the room mean nothing to us unless they produce sound between X and Y.
If we then play back our recorded sound with equipment that will faithfully reproduce between X and Y, then our job is done. Unfortunately, it won't sound the exact same as the live session, because our room acoustics, placement of listeners, etc. are all different. This means that our sound waves will reflect differently and combine differently, producing a (slightly) different set of frequencies.
No, the fallacy of audiophiles is that you can ever recreate the live session on a recording. Unless you record each instrument direct from the source (with no reflections), and then play back those recordings precisely synchronized, from the same exact spot the instruments were in (same height, as well), in the same exact room, with the same amount of ambient noise, then your whole theory falls apart.
Uhhh...yeah, those are all Microsoft products. I'm pretty sure I was paying attention...
Step 1, stop monitoring all your memory bits. Step 2, don't click on things you don't want to start up. Step 3, find the offending 100% CPU user and figure out what's wrong with it or kill it. Step 4, never be impatient with computers. Step 5, perhaps you should try Ctrl-Shift-Esc for the Task Manager instead of Ctrl-Alt-Del.
First off, I'd love to see your "legal" proof of being a genius. Secondly, if you are a "genius", I'd suggest taking a few grammar and spelling courses before you go off spouting it.
Secondly, me being from the US and all, I feel that democracy is a pretty fair system. Therefore, largest market and average IQ can very well correlate to the subjective notion of "better".
I don't even know what the hell this means. Evidently, your "genius" has come full-circle to babbling idiocy, because you seem to have forgotten half the words in these incoherent ramblings. Unfortunately, they seem to be the most important part. I tried running it through BabelFish, but it abended.
Get the Resource Kit. Kill away.
You're right, we should ignore that, I guess. Why? I don't know...I guess it's because you couldn't figure out those complicated keystrokes...
I guess your server doesn't have a SCSI controller, then, huh? Of course not, I forgot. You're running a 386 with 8MB of RAM off a floppy disk. Hint, hint: neither LRP or FreeSCO count as an Enterprise OS.
I never mentioned running more stuff on the OS. You, or someone earlier in this nightmarish thread, mentioned that Windows 2000 Server wouldn't run on a 386. A comment was made that we're interested in UPscaling, not DOWNscaling, so 386's weren't important. The Google example illustrates that 4-Way, 8-Way, 16-Way, etc. systems are very important in enterprise OS's. 386's are not.
As for my "cause", I don't have a cause. I know Google is running Linux. I like Linux. I like the flexibility of Linux. I also like Windows 2000. There's a place for both. The point still remains that Google has uses for upscaling, but no uses for downscaling.
Hmmm...that's what they said to me after my last drug test, but I fail to see the significance here.
Well, I know that, if I make a cd from a bunch of mp3s...same album, same artist..and use 128, 160, and 192, I can tell the difference in my car, right away, and pick which is which bitrate..on the computer, since my speakers are pretty dinky, its harder to tell, but 192 always has nicer highs...
.kb
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
eat shit and die, Bambi!
The problem with the vinyl record is that it's much more complicated to use then modern music media.
When you'd like to play a CD, you just snap it in the tray, and press the play button.
When I'd like to listen to a record, I need to take it slowly out of it's package, put it gentley on the turntable, and gently lower the needle into the groove.
But in return, I get a magnificent sound. Without DACs to distort it in the transport from the plastic to my ears.
Wear and tear is almost non-existent, when handled propely. Damn it - I got 30 years old records that sound better then five years old CDs!
I see what you mean...although I would argue that I can definitely tell a difference between the sound on a pair of Klipsch(sp?) speakers and the crappy CD players you would pick up at Target or Wal-Mart. However, thanks for the correction about the production on CD's...and although I didn't state it, I was thinking more about live performances when I was discussing the difference between what an untrained and a trained ear might hear.
If it's supposed to move and doesn't, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape.
I think you're completely off the mark on this one. Often times musicians can easily pick up on aspects of sound quality that the average user can't. It's just like some people can smell better than others. Just because I can't smell something doesn't mean it's not there, and the same thing can be said for the quality of music. I might not be able to pick up on something, but my roomate who has been playing the double bass for years often can.
That having been said, I think that these musicians overate the importance of sound quality on MP3s, because most people's stereos are not capable of producing high enough quality sound to make much of a difference.
If it's supposed to move and doesn't, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape.
Napster 99% lossy
-nd
Let's face it, 200db in the clubs, and 30 year old speakers that many pubs/lounges use don't exactly make for high-fidelity sound. Nor do most car stereos (never mind the fact that the car running tends to distort this further), kitchen radios, dentist's offices, elevators, grocery stores, etc, etc, etc...
Funny game to play with your friends: take their favorite music that they hear all the time, and play a CD of it on a very expensive system. 9 times out of 10, they'll tell you that it 'sounds wrong', because they've probably never even really HEARD it before!
Then again, I'm the type of person who actually reads his books, opens his limited edition action figures, and thinks cars are designed to take you from point A to point B. Maybe I'm just an un-vain cynic :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
that people with formal musical training are going to pick up on small details (like the valves on the clarinet) that J. Random User won't
I think part of the point of the article was that although we not be *consciously* aware of such things, the subtle nuances do make a difference in the quality of the music we're listening to, whether we notice them or not. They probably have a greater affect, in fact, if we don't consciously notice they're there.
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
Additionally, the goal of compressed audio is not to replace cd's, but to aid in the dissemination of audio data, or music. Whichever technology has grassroots appeal and is more importantly free, will be embraced by the millions of people who use audio compression everyday, leaving higher-end solutions to professionals and audiophiles. This is illustrated well in the audio hardware industry: How many people have 20 000 dollar sound systems, or DVD audio collections? Not enough to be more than a niche market. This has been previously discussed on Slashdot....
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
The point is that the OS should run on a minimum of resources. The best server OS would run on a 8086/512k RAM (or even less!). That way, when you run it on a dual Athlon 1.2ghz/2GB RAM, you can serve an order of magnitude (or two) more people than you would be able to with 2k, without the server buckling. He said that the OS should be able to run on a 386, not that you should run it on a 386. There's a big difference.
...
string* plamenessFilter =
...
string* plamenessFilter =
*plamenessFilter = "Flaming Death!!";
Afterall, the size gets less and less important, not withstanding the coming doomsday when the harddisk capacity ceases to grow exponentially.
Versions of Windows. 3.0, 3.11, '95, '98, nt, 2000, ce, and soon to be released XP.
and has a tendency to go into lala land whenever you try to do anything useful Like when a bit gets changed and instead of going to 0xff8342, it 0xff3843. Something like that. It starts to execute a program I don't want it to execute or has some weird logic that does something that executes a program that takes every single CPU cycle in existence so it takes a minute to kill and impatiently, I press CTRL-ALT-DEL 20,000 times until it reboots. Lala land, the land of the lalas.
----
Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
To answer your first question(misunderstood it in the first post), products like MsWord have a tendency to run on windows 98 and before even 2000 comes out on 2000. Other games from third parties will give you warning or crash when they run on 2000 but Microsoft products seem to just roll on by without reference to the OS(via 3.1, 9x, or 2000). Other people, like Norton AV, have to make many changes before their product works on Microsofts newest bloatware.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
Not what I'm talking about. Maybe you should actually *GASP* try to understand the program before commenting on it. It's called bloatware. Haven't huge configuration programs that attempt to make our lives simpler by executing wizards that executes wizards. Sometimes you accidentally click on the wrong thing and the program goes on a tangent and you're trying to kill it and eventually do but in the end, it's a pain. Give me proper documentation and I would rather modify it with a text editor or a very very simple front-end.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
I hate waiting. I should not be forced to wait on a task that should be more simplified and not take so much logic. Waiting sucks on tasks you really don't want running and most of the time it is actually quicker to reboot the computer than to wait for the task manager to come up. Why can't it be more simple to kill tasks like linux. Kill -signal processid. Be a hell of a lot more simpler then trying to press ctrl-shift-esc select CPU usage and clicking kill. I've been in this market longer than I would like to talk about and I've grown to hate Microsoft. Forcing me to do extra tasks that I can't do without taking my hand off the keyboard(you could probably do it without the mouse but let's ignore that) is going to make me mad. If the window doesn't pop up in five seconds, their goes the power switch. I can get my computer back in less then a minute. Why should I wait on a product that should make this task simplified, not ignorance proof?
/mnt/windows2000
By the way, you missed a step. Step 6: rm -r -F
----
Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
Which to a lot of admins and users, equals a better program. Microsoft's success proves it. No, economics and average IQ proves this. Microsoft is going to enter the market that gives them the most sales, not the best design with reduced sales. Legally, I'm a genius and don't need all these extra functions because most of the time they cost me time which money in my pocket. I don't need a GUI that simplifies things beyond belief but the average admin might and that is who MS is aiming for, not me. Simple Economics. Whatever sales the product to the most people and who can we broaden it to later.
I pity your users if you're running a server on 8MB of RAM. RAM is cheap, splurge a little. I'm not saying computers should 8 mb of ram, I'm saying you should be able to configure and maintain you computer on very little memory. How much actual memory does it take to run an FTP server, HTTP server, and a Microsoft Network Client. Not very much. Resources aren't a premium right not but does not mean we should explurge the OS to the point that resources are being wasted beyond belief. The GUI is not the OS and is not needed. It's a great feature but it is still not the OS. If you want a good server, using as few resources as possible not being used as a server, then a GUI is not the ideal solution. If you want the server so you don't have to think about it and maybe it crashes every six months or so then the extras are fine.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
Tell that to Google. First of all, the google example is not the same thing. Google isn't running more stuff on their OS, they are just running more computers. Completely different upscaling. Have you noticed, google is running Linux. Linux can use as few resources outside the server as possible and still be a good sample. So, your sample is actually a counter-example to your cause.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
Because other developers tend to diregard MS warnings and use APIs and interfaces clearly marked as non-portable or "for old compatibility only, to be removed."
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
And some encoders sound like dog shit on all forms of music.
What exactly does dogshit sound like?
--
Aaron J. Shaver
http://aaronshaver.com/
And suddenly, the floor started shaking, noticably. You see, MP3 seems to clip anything below 60Hz. Human hearing goes down to 40Hz normally, 20Hz for some people, but you can still detect a 10Hz waveform... Vorbis allocates much more data to the low-frequency end of the spectra than MP3, as was evidenced by the much higher utilization of my subwoofer.
Too bad the specification is still lacking... Vorbis is a nice format and I've been trying to write a player. Hard to do it all from sources.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
The point is that humans only hear a certain range of frequencies, but not only that, they only hear prominent frequencies. Vorbis took advantage of this moreso than MP3 by implementing a Bark-scale to differentiate the frequency subbands, instead of an arbitrary scale.
The point is that, if you hear a note at 400Hz at 50dB and one at 401Hz at 2dB, you won't notice the second. Your ear just cannot receive it. Lossiness comes in when this "masking" effect (where a frequency blocks out one of a similar frequency but lower amplitude) does not mask the noise introduced by the frequency quantization. The more advanced the psychoaccoustics, the more of this noise will fall below the "masking threshold". Some people have better masking thresholds than others.
The salient point here is that the more data you throw out, the harder it becomes to keep a perfect SnR (by the human ear that is, you obviously lose a lot of actual signal). The 128kbit is probably going to stay the standard, period, since bandwidth is getting so much cheaper. With improving psychoaccoustical models, the quantization noise should fall well below the masking thresholds of even the most astute listeners.
Without more sophisticated pickups (IE something better than human ears), files with some compression will eventually sound identical from the listeners perspective.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
"...felt Vorbis was the least realistic, with MP3Pro sounding better and Windows Media Audio best of all -- but none of these formats achieved CD quality."
I think these guys are full of it. The amount of data that is lost in MP3 compression is tiny, and is mostly sounds out of range of human hearing. And if the files are recorded at higher bit rates CD quality sound can be achieved. I think these guys just felt they had to say something to the reporter, so as not to look like idiots. And at the end of the article, when the guy "worries" that we are losing our appreciation of music because of MP3s, I realized that this was an article about nothing, with quotes by people who knew nothing.
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Hey man, can I bum a sig?
I mailed Rob Thomason and he replied & told me
the test of MP3pro vs. Vorbis was a blind test
after all. The testers didn't know what they
were listening to but he did.
The time constraints of the evaluators didn't
allow for a greater variety of music.
So it might be interesting to have some sort
of more thorough testing done once the new
Vorbis is out.
I have several sets of bose speakers and other high end setups. On these speakers, the difference between mp3 cds and audio cds is HUGE! I want even listen to mp3s on those speakers because it sounds so crappy. But, the article is right, Windows Media does sound better. Especially with wma encoder version 8.