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Low-bandwidth Net Radio
An anonymous reader writes "Slate has an article about Internet radio stations that use the aacPlus codec from XM satellite radio instead of MP3. Some of the ones they link to sound pretty good even at 24 kbps."
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Um... psychoacoustic modelling IIRC isn't part of the standard. The standard mandates things like bit format and DCT precision.
So if your MP3s sound like crap
- up the bitrate to something reasonable
- Get a good source to encode from
- change the encoder [lame -q 0 is great]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Reading the article, my first thought was "so what? So we can ultracompress audio so it sounds good at low bandwidth? What's the point?" Truth is, everyone (at least in the west and industrialized Asia) has or will get broadband, *especially* those who are interested in things like net radio.
Then you get to this bit:
It seems crazy until you try it, but Mostly Classical proves that aacPlus can sound great at 24 kpbs. At 48 kbps, it's almost as crisp as a CD. At 128 kbps, it can deliver 5.1 channel surround sound.
Using the compression to deliver multichannel surround sound is pretty cool. In 5, 10 years, we'll probably have a really flash standard for home audio, and it's nice to know that some folks are thinking ahead to make sure we'll be able to get it streaming on our DSL lines.
that folks are (again) distinguishing between the quality needed for casual use (having background noise) and sit-and-listen-to-it quality (CD/live).
One of my peeves about broadcasting over the net is that so many people want perfect signal, regardless of what they're using the broadcast for. The added bandwidth needed for studio-quality everything just means ever fatter pipes are demanded, raising the cost/price of the whole infrastructure and adding to the net congestion.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Actually the purpose of those technologies are specifically geared toward music. For speech, there are many researches done for exactly that purpose. The state of the art in speech coding can go as low as 4 or even 2 kbps AFAIK while maintaining toll quality speech.
Your ordinary GSM cell phone works at 16 kbps, off the top of my head, I don't exactly remember. Your landline works at roughly the same bitrate. The reason why we don't see an increase in speech quality is due to existing equipment that'll be too expensive to replace. Plus, basically all we need is the ability for us to recognize the speaker on the other end. There's heaps of research done on this topic, and what we're using on the phones are actually old technologies.
The fields of speech and audio coding are quite different. Currently I'm doing audio work, so I'm not really an expert in speech coding, although I know just enough. But I know for sure that if your application is geared toward speech coding, using a coder that is designed for general audio is overkill and inefficient.
I seriously doubt that you can run VLC on Amiga, ReactOS, Hurd, Atheos, Plan9 or VMS. But If you're hiding ports on these systems somewhere, please share with us.
Besides, why make MacOS a special case? The cumuled marketshare of all Linux distros is well over the Apple one.
Please, don't try to hide the bias when it's obvious.
Ah, the joy of posting anonymous.
The one thing which will revolutionize Internet radio (and Internet TV and filesharing) is IPv6 with working multicasting. No longer do you need a fat pipe to service hundreds or thousands of listeners. You can run a popular radio station over your DSL line if you want. AAC and other codecs are just babysteps which are immediately undone by licensing and DRM issues.
OK, so Winamp isn't installed by default, but is is becoming the player of choice for the IT cogniscenti in place of WMP.
Hm. First off, I wouldn't say that Winamp is becoming anything - it already is, and has been for a while. People, and not only "IT cogniscenti" (aka geeks), have been using Winamp in the days when WMP wasn't a generally known acronym. To me, Winamp was the player of the period when MP3 was still new (remember oth.net and AudioGalaxy?). I kind of doubt the number of users is still increasing, in fact I imagine that if anything, the number is decreasing.
I might be wrong, though - so, what is the choice among the geeks these days? Do you all still use Winamp? Personally, I've been using Foobar for a long time now, mostly because of it's small footprint, straightforward interface and out-of-the-box global hotkeys. Because I'm so happy with it, I really haven't even looked out for any other new players, so I'm curious as to whether I've missed anything. (And I don't mean iTunes for Windows.)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Sorry, but I have to say mp3 streaming is crappy. Just because most players support it, doesn't make it good.
AAC is indeed better.
I just wish the general public would download newer players that supported things like Vorbis, AAC.
But unfortunately,
mp3 = music file
Not "format of music file". but "music file". If it's not mp3, it's not a music file.
I think step 1 is to get rid of this carma that mp3=audio. make mp3=old audo format.
Until we do that... mp3 will be sticking around, and sucking.