Slashdot Mirror
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."
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