I think there's more to it than commonly known, however. I have one mp3 file that's 22.1kHz, 32kbps, and sounds better than any 64Kbps mp3 I've ever heard. I _can_ distinguish it from 128, but it's not intolerable; no artifacts, just slightly muffled. It takes up 700Kb and is ~3 minutes long. I'm unable to explain it. I wish I knew how it was encoded; I bet that for another 10% in size it would sound as good as 128 That must be a MPEG-2 layer III file. What we call MP3 is usually MPEG-1 layer III. "In MPEG-1, audio compression at 32 kHz, 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz is defined. MPEG-2 extends this by the rates 16 kHz, 22.05 kHz and 24 kHz." [1] MPEG-2 layer III targets bitrates of 32 to 64 kbps but can extend up to 160 kbps.
MPEG-2 layer III has not caught on, although the Fraunhofer encoder was available quite early. I remember encoding at 64 kbps and 22.05 kHz back in '98 because that sounded transparent to me at that time with the listening equipment I had. I still have the files and out of curiosity I'm listening to some of them right now. They sound like played through a good quality big-sized old radio, with a good bass but very weak highs; it's a muffled but warm sound.
The files I've seen around (very few indeed) are 22.05kHz (the players round this up to 22.1kHz on display), most of the time at 64 or 96 kbps.
I would like to share a first-hand story I've heard from a Romanian doctor. I've known him while working as a social worker with homeless elderly in Bucharest (yes, we have so many homeless people around here, that it sometimes makes sense to work only with the elderly). One of the colleagues of this doctor died because of a new kind of TB, resistant to all known medicins. She was a doctor and consequently got the best treatment money can get from phase one of the disease (she was aware of the dangers she was exposing herself while working with chronic TB pacients).
The thruth is there are places in the world where you are in danger of contacting a deadly form of TB. As noted, that's because even a little carelessness in taking antibiotics can help TB mutate into drug-resistant forms. At least, here in Romania, TB resistant to treatment has become a very serious threat. Don't understimate this, as it has the potential of changing the world as we know it.
It may sound trollish but I was forced to run a modern distro on a P75 some six months ago when the power supply of my desktop computer died in smoke and sparkles. As I also had a P75 router with 64 Mb of RAM, I pulled out the hard drive from the desktop computer, inserted it in the old one, booted up, reconfigured some devices and I was back online in no time. And I was running Mandrake 9.0 with a fully fledged GNOME 2.4.x desktop compiled from sources using the wonderful jhbuild script. It took some time to boot, but after logging in and loading the programs in memory, it was pretty usable. Galeon 1.3.x (using Mozilla 1.4.x I think) was slooow, but usable nonetheless.
On top of that, I had to write a CV back in those days and I just had to install OpenOffice 1.0.3 on the lowly box. It took forever, but ended succesfully. However it was a pain in the ass to use, menus drawn very slowly and characters would appear on screen two or three seconds after typing them on the keyboard...
However I am confident that using software like XFCE (desktop + window manager), Rox-Filer (file manager), Balsa (e-mail), AbiWord (documents), Gnumeric (spreadsheets) and others in the same league it's possible to revive old hardware with modern Linux software. The only problem would be that there not such thing as a really usable and very light browser for Linux.
I've been using this GTK-shadow patch for some time now, it was included in the 0.22 release of Garnome that I've installed several months ago. My experience with it is that it's nice, it looks impressive but there are two things I really hate about it. When the shadow covers a window with a movie (played with MPlayer) or TV (from my tuner with Zapping) the shadows are not drawn and where the shadows are supposed to be you can see the blue background of that Xv window. Another not-so-important thing is that tearing off a menu completely destroy the effects because somehow the shadows stay in the same place when you move the menu around. The only way to fix that window again is to close the tear-off menu and to open and close it again without tearing off. Other than that it rocks. It even looks great with dark themes (for which I care a lot).
Previewing my comment in Galeon 1.3.5 I've discover a third problem... If you have a menu with shadows that gets covered by a pop-up window (I set Gaim to pop up the replies from my buddies) a certain area around the shadowed menu overwrites portions of the pop-up window. Hmmm... I guess there are enough reasons to not include this sweet patch in the main GTK sources...
The sound card is not that important. The most important thing is the decoding speed of your CPU. Faster procs mean faster decoding. Better FPUs also give smoother mp3 playing (ouch Cyrix & Via!!!). And let's not forget about the mp3 player itself (eg. winamp has better decoding algorithms than some windows media player.) You may not believe it, but the OS is also VERY important. Winamp in NT uses 50% less CPU time compared to the same Winamp with the same settings in win9x. (Linux with winamp in wine is somewhere in between, if you care.) And the best combination is a reasonable fast CPU (with a good FPU, like the AMD ones) with a well design OS and a sane mp3 player (like xmms in linux:-)
Winamp in linux ? Been there, done that ;^)
on
Winamp Alpha for Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
Mpg123, Xmms and the other linux players are all I could ever need to play mp3's in Linux, but just for fun, Wine was good enough to run Winamp in Linux years ago... Here is a screenshot to demonstrate it! Taken on Feb. 23, 2000.
Yeah, it's a shameless plug, but there are some people interested in using Winamp's plugins in Linux. Well, that's the way to do it... Using Wine in Linux, Winamp uses even less cpu time than in Win 9x... Some of the plugins run just fine (see the screenshot for an example)
Slashdot Mirror
How about Midori? It is a lightweight web browser with a GTK+ 2.x interface and the WebKit rendering engine. Details at http://software.twotoasts.de/?page=midori
At least on Usenet the 8-bit binary content is far more usual, so you don't get the 33% overhead that usually is associated with mail attachments.
MPEG-2 layer III has not caught on, although the Fraunhofer encoder was available quite early. I remember encoding at 64 kbps and 22.05 kHz back in '98 because that sounded transparent to me at that time with the listening equipment I had. I still have the files and out of curiosity I'm listening to some of them right now. They sound like played through a good quality big-sized old radio, with a good bass but very weak highs; it's a muffled but warm sound.
The files I've seen around (very few indeed) are 22.05kHz (the players round this up to 22.1kHz on display), most of the time at 64 or 96 kbps.
[1] http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/techinf/layer3/
HTH,
You've got to be kidding. I used to work with autistic people, if only things would be so simple as you see them...
The thruth is there are places in the world where you are in danger of contacting a deadly form of TB. As noted, that's because even a little carelessness in taking antibiotics can help TB mutate into drug-resistant forms. At least, here in Romania, TB resistant to treatment has become a very serious threat. Don't understimate this, as it has the potential of changing the world as we know it.
--
It may sound trollish but I was forced to run a modern distro on a P75 some six months ago when the power supply of my desktop computer died in smoke and sparkles. As I also had a P75 router with 64 Mb of RAM, I pulled out the hard drive from the desktop computer, inserted it in the old one, booted up, reconfigured some devices and I was back online in no time. And I was running Mandrake 9.0 with a fully fledged GNOME 2.4.x desktop compiled from sources using the wonderful jhbuild script. It took some time to boot, but after logging in and loading the programs in memory, it was pretty usable. Galeon 1.3.x (using Mozilla 1.4.x I think) was slooow, but usable nonetheless.
On top of that, I had to write a CV back in those days and I just had to install OpenOffice 1.0.3 on the lowly box. It took forever, but ended succesfully. However it was a pain in the ass to use, menus drawn very slowly and characters would appear on screen two or three seconds after typing them on the keyboard...
However I am confident that using software like XFCE (desktop + window manager), Rox-Filer (file manager), Balsa (e-mail), AbiWord (documents), Gnumeric (spreadsheets) and others in the same league it's possible to revive old hardware with modern Linux software. The only problem would be that there not such thing as a really usable and very light browser for Linux.
--
I've been using this GTK-shadow patch for some time now, it was included in the 0.22 release of Garnome that I've installed several months ago. My experience with it is that it's nice, it looks impressive but there are two things I really hate about it. When the shadow covers a window with a movie (played with MPlayer) or TV (from my tuner with Zapping) the shadows are not drawn and where the shadows are supposed to be you can see the blue background of that Xv window. Another not-so-important thing is that tearing off a menu completely destroy the effects because somehow the shadows stay in the same place when you move the menu around. The only way to fix that window again is to close the tear-off menu and to open and close it again without tearing off. Other than that it rocks. It even looks great with dark themes (for which I care a lot).
Previewing my comment in Galeon 1.3.5 I've discover a third problem... If you have a menu with shadows that gets covered by a pop-up window (I set Gaim to pop up the replies from my buddies) a certain area around the shadowed menu overwrites portions of the pop-up window. Hmmm... I guess there are enough reasons to not include this sweet patch in the main GTK sources...
The sound card is not that important. The most important thing is the decoding speed of your CPU. Faster procs mean faster decoding. Better FPUs also give smoother mp3 playing (ouch Cyrix & Via!!!). And let's not forget about the mp3 player itself (eg. winamp has better decoding algorithms than some windows media player.) You may not believe it, but the OS is also VERY important. Winamp in NT uses 50% less CPU time compared to the same Winamp with the same settings in win9x. (Linux with winamp in wine is somewhere in between, if you care.) And the best combination is a reasonable fast CPU (with a good FPU, like the AMD ones) with a well design OS and a sane mp3 player (like xmms in linux :-)
Yeah, it's a shameless plug, but there are some people interested in using Winamp's plugins in Linux. Well, that's the way to do it... Using Wine in Linux, Winamp uses even less cpu time than in Win 9x... Some of the plugins run just fine (see the screenshot for an example)