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Hydrogenaudio Closes Doors For Now
verloren writes "The Admins at Hydrogenaudio, the community site discussing audio compression and related issues, have temporarily closed the site. They've posted a notice stating that they're rethinking the standards of the community, and how they're enforced. It seems to have been sparked most recently by a debate over what media players to use, but has been brewing for some time as the objective standards required at the site have been overlooked by many posters. The sister sites Foobar2000 and Rarewares are still available."
Talking about what code to write never works. The rule is:
He who writes the code, gets to say what to do with that code.
Hydrogenaudio was noble, but misplaced. What is needed, simply, is less talk and more action on the codec front.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
That is all nice and well... however, I don't see how a non-profit community intends to create a new audio standards.
To my knowledge, we haven't seen an audio format or codec that has reached tier 1 status (RedBook, MP3, WAV, MIDI, etc.) that did not have major corporate involvement in its development. Even with DivX, we often see industry-standard audio codecs used... I don't see a community-based codec group inventing a new codec that gets used for anything more than illegally ripping DVDs and posting them on KaZaA.
MP3 is an evolutionary dead end
So are sharks and lichens.
But they're not going to disappear anytime soon, and I doubt MP3 will either. Other formats may be technically superior, but (like technically superior primate brains) also require superior resources to support them; superior processor speed (OGG) or superior storage space (FLACC or Monkey).
MP3 also probably has the largest share of the compressed audio formats, and there are definite drawbacks to transcoding: loss of fidelity, time to transcode, need to store both the old format and the new during the transition phase. So a significant portion of the corpus in MP3 will likely not be replaced with newer, better formats.
And just as plenty of music has been compressed with MP3, plenty of players play MP3 -- and only MP3. Players like my 60GB portable. I've invested quite a bit in my portable, and that locks me into MP3. MP3 will stay around, because people with MP3 (only) players will still want music.
Since MP3 is sufficient unto my needs, I certainly won't abandon it until and unless my portable breaks down (it's an Archos, so that might be soon). Even after my portable breaks down, I'll still have over 7000 MP3s, many of which were purchased through emusic.com, so I can't re-rip them. Unless transcoding to $next_format sounds better than a MP3, I won't be transcoding those files, which means when my portable MP3 player breaks down, I'll insist that the replacement play MP3. Only if my next portable plays both MP3s and $next_format will $next_format begin to interest me at all.
So MP3 may well be an evolutionary dead end, but evolutionary dead end and species extinction are two very differnt things that don't necesarily correlate.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I'm rather amazed at how people are misreading the topic.
/. closed down for a week or two and said "we're rethinking the standards of the community" (which, btw, is not what their page says) would you think that they're trying to change OSS/Linux/geek standards, or just doing some serious rethinking of how the posting/moderation/meta-mod system works?
The site is closed temporarily to rethink the standards of the community -- of the HydrogenAudio community, not of the music encoding community as a whole. They're not trying to create new audio compression standards while closed -- they're trying to formulate new rules to reduce flamage on the forums (which is pretty much all that HA is). If
One does not take down a community on no notice, just because there's some heated discussion.
/. did that?
If it's a flamewar on a previously quiet board you may.
Corporate sponsors or not
HA has no corporate sponsors. Foobar2000 is a free program (not OSS IIRC, but no money to use).
Gee, what would happen if
People would bitch and whine and find something else to do with their time. Subscribers would be the only ones with a valid issue.
Free online forums have no obligation to their users to remain available. If the costs get too high, if the site becomes too much of a chore, or if things just aren't working as the site owners want them to they have every right to close up shop either temporarily or permanently.
Other formats may be technically superior...
You are right, but I guess that for a lot of people, a MP3 encoded at 128k sounds the same as the original. That can happen for several reasons: you may have a low-quality output device (bad speakers, cheap and lousy headphones), a bad sound card, you may have some kind of hearing disability (you may be deaf for some high or low frequecies).
So, agreeing with you, why should these people reencode their files using a better audio format? Like you mentioned, they already have several MP3 files, so it's kinda pointless to do so.