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Bitrate Peeling with Ogg Vorbis
Yort writes "Thought this might be interesting to some audiophile /.ers - there's been some discussion on the Ogg Vorbis lists, summarized in the most recent Ogg Traffic, about "bitrate peeling". In short, it's where you can simply "peel off" the high resolution data from the ends of an audio stream packet to come up with a smaller, lower quality stream. Brings up a number of geek-cool opportunities."
I really would like to donate, but not through PayPal. Could you please offer some other method of payment like the Amazon Honour System or Element5?
Before encoding my cd collection I spent a month playing with different encoders and settings to find what might satisfy my ears. I eventually settled on lame with the "new vbr method" and the highest quality settings and I've been very happy with the results. If something better comes along, I'll get my CDs out from under my bed and re-encode :) The only time I've been able to tell one of my mp3s from the CD is on albums I am intimately familiar with, i.e. the Steely Dan Box set. I have easily heard it 500 times, and every once in awhile you notice the timbre of a cymbal is just a little bit different then you remembered it.
However, something no one ever thinks about is your mp3 *player* and sound card. An internal sound card is worthless for listening to music (I use a M-Audio Delta1010 which is part of my studio setup). Also the mp3 player makes a *huge* difference. It will probably come as no surprise that Winamp is shit. I like CoolPlayer which is based on libmad -- a 24 bit integer only mp3 decoder. The extra bits are important because they reduce quantization errors during decoding, there is a noticeable difference in clarity between coolplayer and winamp. Also, standalone MP3 players tend to have better mp3 decoding because they (usually) use a DSP to decode the and DSP programmers are well aware of accuracy issues.
My point is, mp3 is tolerable for casual listening even to an audiophile *IF* it's done correctly. The problem of course is that the computer is about the *worst* place to be listening to music because its at such a disadvantage (poor quality signals, noisy electronics, bad DACs, shitty speakers).
However, your need for a higher quality signal is directly proportional to the cost of your stereo. If you have a small portable stereo, the radio is about the best quality you can reproduce anyways. The quality of mp3's is superior to what the average computer can reproduce. But If you have a 30,000$ stereo as some obsessive audiophiles do, its pretty silly to listen to mp3s on it (but you're gobbling up dvd-audio discs as fast as they are made anyways).
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Holographic? No. Progressive (similar to progressive JPEG)? Yes.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.