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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."
New problems, such as the rising cost of reliable high speed hosting...
I think that has just became an even bigger problem!
echo $close($site)+$slashdoting($site->server) +" very effective"
or am I too late already?
I'm not sure why parent wasn't modded as Off-Topic but Hydrogenaudio != Ogg Vorbis. Hydrogenaudio is a forum for discussion of audio compression, and isn't affiliated, although Ogg Vorbis is one of the favoured codecs (along with MPC, AAC and of course, MP3) and has its own dedicated forums.
However, recently Ogg Vorbis has been falling out of favour because of some questions beinr brought up and currently still unanswered about the truth of the statement that Ogg Vorbis is "patent-free" because of a few patents uncovered recently which Ogg Vorbis may have infringed on. So far Xiph has not answered the questions to the satisfaction of the administrators of the forums... but I doubt all this is the main cause of the forum to suspend service, but maybe one of many. *shrug*
Just a couple of things to make some things clear to the slashdot crowd:
1. HydrogenAudio is/was the No. 1 place on the net regarding the development of audio codecs and other audio related tools. Think of it as "the bugtraq of audio". Several developers of open- and closedsource codecs participated regularly in the discussions and the community helped by providing blind test results (some of them appeared on slashdot even), problem-samples and ideas/general input. It was the center of development of the widely used lame --alt-presets, which brought a new level of quality to MP3 and the foobar2000 audio player.
2. No legal problems whatsoever are connected to the closing down.
3. HA is going to come back shortly (= some days).
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
So let me get this straight, a web site with no code or corporate involvement was hoping to create a standard for audio?
No. Hydrogenaudio is an audio discussion board where development and testing of various audio formats/encoders and the foobar2000 player takes place, but this is not the main aspect of the board. It's just an informed community (well, mostly) that maintains a high standard of discussion (unlike this place).
Which is why I wish this had never been posted here, now look at the mess and all the misinformation flowing here already... >:(
However, recently Ogg Vorbis has been falling out of favour because of some questions beinr brought up and currently still unanswered about the truth of the statement that Ogg Vorbis is "patent-free" because of a few patents uncovered recently which Ogg Vorbis may have infringed on.
To give air to the otherside of that flamewar, the 'unanswered' questions had more to do with a misunderstanding on the part of some forum members about how the patent system works in the US. "Patent-free" does not mean no one will sue you ever, because anyone can sue you anytime for anything. It's all about the negotiation of expectation for who would win at what cost in a potential legal action.
In that context, and because we feel Xiph.org the organization is a likely target of punitive legal action, we unfortunately feel the less said about what we think about specific patents, the better, to avoid advertising routes of legal attack. Hardly the usual values of openness, but that's what the US legal system argues for.
What Vorbis needs is independent defenders who understand the issues, not demands for justification from groups that should mostly be on the same side.
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:
Here are some names that are good or partially good:
I have been a member of Hydrogenaudio for a while and I have to say that I have throughly enjoyed it. Even though I didn't post that often, it was an awesome resource.
I hope that it returns soon.
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
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?
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
I'm really hoping that this story leads to more attention being paid to foobar, as I think it's a real gem.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
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.