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."

Comments

Re:Forced?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was always one big issue: (unintentional) bias

When testing audio codecs it's important to do a double blind test. (On HA they would call it "ABX", I think that was because that's the name of the program)
The easiest way to do it is to give a program the source file and the encoded version.
(Or two encoded files with diffrent codecs, depending on what you wanted to accomplish.
For transparency, ie can you tell the diffrence between a MP3 encoded with X options and the source file?, you would give source and encoded.
For comparison between 64 K Vorbis and WMA youi give two of those files)
The program would play them 8 times (or so), first one then the other, but you can't know which file is which since it would alternate.
You listen carefully and give it a score.

At the end the program tells you which file you preferred.

With psychoacoustic encoding that's the whole deal: you want to encode the file in such a way that for a human it seems as close to the original as possible.
Because of bias, a double blind test is THE ONLY way to accurately rate lossy encoders

But the newbies would come and say:
Hey this codec is better then that codec.
How do you know?
It sounds better
Have you done a ABX?
No, but my ears are golden

Or they would come:
I compared a graph of the source with the encoded file and this codec produces files that seem the most identical.

Both of these are totally wrong, and sometimes you would have dudes that would insist that one of these methods are good, no matter how much you try to talk some sense into them.

And another problem: misinformed audiophiles
"Oh no the stereo image is holy, joint-stereo is from the devil!"
Never mind that LAME has an excellent joint-stereo system.
And they would come with other crazy theories, for example challenging Shannon's theory that to encode a X Hz signal you only need 2X of bandiwdth.

So that's a part of it

common among many OSS projects

[asv108]

Its really quite simple, developers tend to not understand basic principles of marketing, or in many cases understand that their names are obfuscated but want to keep with tradition of using obscure "geeky" project titles and acronyms. The best example is GNU, which hardly anyone can pronounce the first time anyway but then Stallman's insistence on using GNU/Linux. How many consumer products do you know with a / in their name? There is reason for tha to you know :) How many consumer products do you know of that use strage/recursive acronyms?

Now many people will argue that if you code an OSS project you can name it whatever the fuck you want. This is very true and it suits me just fine but developers should start to consider their potential user base before naming a good software product with a title that most people can't understand or at least partially derive from product name what it does. Here is just a small list of products with bad names:

• OGG, OGG Vorbis, or whatever you want to call it
• MP3 (is this video?)
• GNOME
• Kanyhting
• GNU/Linux

Here are some names that are good or partially good:

• FLAC (you can derive the purpose from the name)
• Linux (Sounds like UNIX)
• Audacity
• X-Chat
• Evolution

Dysfunctional organization

[Anonymous Coward]

They've posted a notice stating that they're rethinking the standards of the community, and how they're enforced.

Translation: key primadonnas are really sick and tired of all these stupid people who just don't get it and all their incompatible ideas they keep having to reject over and over and over. Sounds like one of those dysfunctional organizations. Death will be the best thing for it.

Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

HydrogenAudio only did what Slashdot would have done had Slashdot not become a business. If you ran HA (or this site for that matter) and had watched it become a pit of uninformed discussion, social posturing, and pointless debate, wouldn't YOU also think about closing it down?

Nevertheless

[rkuris]

One does not take down a community on no notice, just because there's some heated discussion. They spend all this time building a community, people probably have friends there, and POOF! Suddenly, everyone else has to scramble to find someplace else to meet.

Corporate sponsors or not, if there is a large community (as they claim), plans must be made to shut it down.

Gee, what would happen if /. did that?

Well, I'm glad to see this story...

[lumpenprole]

...even though I'm really sorry to see they're having problems. As somebody who is forced to use a Win box at work, I've found foobar to be the best audio player hands down. It's really small footprint means I can work using three open memory hogging programs at once and still listen to music. If only it did streaming windows media, I'd never use anything else.

I'm really hoping that this story leads to more attention being paid to foobar, as I think it's a real gem.