Microsoft still do make good products - just not software. I'm using a Microsoft Natural keyboard, and a Microsoft IntelliMouse optical, perfectly happily with Linux.
I'd be amazed if they ever hear of.ogg, let alone switch their whole collections over.
And why are you thinking that, just because you encode new stuff to.ogg, that you have to go out and wipe all the.mp3s from your computer? People are already getting used to seeing audio in more formats than.mp3 (through.wma) - what's one more?
Radio 5: Well, does anyone actually listen to radio 5? I hate to say it, but yes, I do. I don't listen to their sport coverage, or the annoying Nicky Campbell in the mornings, but their afternoon/evening news and discussion output is very listenable, and occasionally informative:). It also has some interesting discussions after about 11pm.
The high quality stream used to be around 112kpbs - now it's at 64kpbs, although they've said that they will consider raising it again (and I hope they do).
Alternatively, they can stay at 64kpbs, and wait for Vorbis RC4 (the main focus of which is better sound quality at 80kpbs and less). The aim is to equal WMA at 64kpbs (some people say that it does already, but I disagree).
The BBC do very well commercially, through sales of videos/CDs/broadcasting rights. You're right though about the website -- it would be well within their rights to refuse to show certain content to anyone from a non-UK IP address. However, as a license payer, I'm very happy that the BBC are doing their bit to provide news and information to the world.
Unlike with MP3, at the moment there is only one reference implementation of a Vorbis encoder. There are quite a few frontends, though.
If you are in Windows, your best bet at the moment is to use the incredible but slightly clunky
EAC, with the command line oggenc encoder available from the main site. The main alternative is CDex, but at the moment it only supports RC2 (not RC3). If you are in Linux, then you can use any ripping program you like as long as you use oggenc as the encoder.
What options to use?
You are using LAME --r3mix at the moment, so give '-q 5' a go (with RC3 on, specify a *quality* level rather than a *bitrate*). Quality 5 (out of 10) is nominally 160kpbs, and should be comparable or better than --r3mix in quality.
For more information and discussion, check out the
Hydrogen Audio (Project Mayhem) forum. Many of the developers of various audio formats hang out there, as well as people organising listening tests.
No, I'm not mistaken. Just like Qt, KDE ups the major version number when they break binary compatibility. Yes, this means that KDE 2.0 and KDE 2.2.2 are binary compatible.
In KDE 2.2 they had a load of.pngs to represent the 'throbber'. In KDE 3.0 this has, as you indicate, been replaced - but not by a.mng, but by 1 larger.png, obtained by joining all the smaller ones together.
By 'animated mimetype icons' I meant 'animated mimetype icons'. You can now create.mngs to represent filetypes in the Konqueror file browser. These animations will be played as the mouse 'enters' them. This is the new folder icon, for example (I'm not sure how well webcvs copes with pointing to binaries...).
The KDE release timing has absolutely nothing to do with Gnome. Take a look at the 3.0 release plan -- it's been like this since at least last September.
In fact, I wish KDE had got 3.0 out sooner - it was originally supposed to just be a port of KDE 2.2 to Qt 3, but some new features have snuck in. These range from the productive (much faster html processing, better dcop architecture), to the useful (much improved javascript support), to the useful and pretty (better file selection dialog), to the pretty and useless (alpha blending / transparent menus), to the totally useless (animated mimetype icons).
The real question should be - if he owned the CD why was he downloading the song?
I know quite a few people that would consider it easier to go onto a file sharing network and download a file, than to put the CD into their computer and rip it.
Do you see where I'm going with this? Yes - that hardware manufacturers need to invest some effort in making sure their hardware works in Linux.
For what it's worth, *I* recently bought a Sony Vaio (GR214MP). Linux works perfectly with it. I've got a USP host powered Zip250. The first time I plugged it in, it thought for a couple of seconds, and then up popped a Zip 250 drive icon on my KDE desktop. Simple, easy. With Windows XP (included on the machine) I have to fiddle to get it working.
I also M2'ed two mediocre comments that were posted early in a thread as unfair, because they were not insightful in any way. They were painfully obvious.
Now, wasn't that a little unfair? I'm always very generous in meta-moderation, and very rarely say that an upward moderation is unfair. After all, what these mediocre comments said may have been painfully obvious *to you*, but can never underestimate the knowledge level of the general Slashdot reading populace.
(if you think I'm being harsh, wait until a subject comes up that you know well -- as in the recent article about Ogg for me. There is so much crap and rubbish floating around, that even an obvious post is worth an up-mod.)
and having 5000 mp3's and 1000 ogg's doesn't work to well for control-freaks like myself..
This would be why I've thrown away all my ripped MP3s, and am currently reencoding all my CDs with Ogg RC3 quality 5:)
Re:Why wouldn't I want to give up on mp3s?
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 1
Here is a good explanation of why ID3v2 is bad. (Note that the page I've linked to has a really annoying piece of Javascript it in which will dump you back to the main website. Either disable Javascript, or click on the crossed out ID3v2 in the bottom right).
To sum up: ID3v2 is a nasty hack, that should have been aborted at birth. It's almost impossible to correctly remove if the tag is damaged, is insanely complicated, and is badly supported. ID3v1 is limited, but fairly well defined and fairly well supported.
Re:APE is good for losslessly archiving audio
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 1
How are you 'saving it for posterity' if you are using an undocumented Windows only format?
Use FLAC or Shorten - they are the only decent lossless compressors that are truly cross platform.
You're right on all points apart from speed.
If you compare default Monkey's Audio (-high) to default FLAC (-5), you'll see that Monkey's Audio is about twice as quick and gives you 1% better compression.
This is utterly outweighed though, as you say, by the fact that MA is Windows only. That alone is enough to stop me using it.
This uses the most up to date versions of the encoders, and includes a useful comparison chart of the features of the various lossless formats (of course, in his comparison chart, Flac wins:).
What the app needs to do for it to be really useful is to NOT EXIST.
Please don't transcode from one lossy format to another. Vorbis doesn't know which bits of the audio are original, and which are MP3 encoding artifacts, so it will do its best to encode both, possibly amplifying the MP3 artifacts, all while adding its own artifacts.
Unless you're planning on reencoding to half the bitrate or less, transcoding is pointless.
You might find something like HawkVoice useful - it's a Windows/Linux LGPL voice-over-network API. It supports GSM, LPC, CELP, LPC10, plus some others.
You should probably report a bug on oggdrop (go to http://bugs.xiph.org ) - they are very interested in getting all of the default tools working right.
Just to check - oggdrop is a very simple tool, where you drag.wav files onto it, and it will automatically convert them to.ogg. That is what you are trying to do with it, yes?
One reason for this may be that WMA has quite a low upper limit on the frequencies it cares about -- certainly lower than Ogg.
In general, as you age, your high frequency hearing dies away, and so the older listeners would notice more what the encoders were doing to low frequencies than to high frequencies.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't seen anything "good" since.
Microsoft still do make good products - just not software. I'm using a Microsoft Natural keyboard, and a Microsoft IntelliMouse optical, perfectly happily with Linux.
GPL projects need a cult of personality.
Quick - who's the leader of KDE? (No, not Ettrich, he doesn't work much on KDE any more).
I'd be amazed if they ever hear of .ogg, let alone switch their whole collections over.
.ogg, that you have to go out and wipe all the .mp3s from your computer? People are already getting used to seeing audio in more formats than .mp3 (through .wma) - what's one more?
And why are you thinking that, just because you encode new stuff to
Radio 5: Well, does anyone actually listen to radio 5? :). It also has some interesting discussions after about 11pm.
I hate to say it, but yes, I do. I don't listen to their sport coverage, or the annoying Nicky Campbell in the mornings, but their afternoon/evening news and discussion output is very listenable, and occasionally informative
The high quality stream used to be around 112kpbs - now it's at 64kpbs, although they've said that they will consider raising it again (and I hope they do).
Alternatively, they can stay at 64kpbs, and wait for Vorbis RC4 (the main focus of which is better sound quality at 80kpbs and less). The aim is to equal WMA at 64kpbs (some people say that it does already, but I disagree).
The BBC do very well commercially, through sales of videos/CDs/broadcasting rights. You're right though about the website -- it would be well within their rights to refuse to show certain content to anyone from a non-UK IP address. However, as a license payer, I'm very happy that the BBC are doing their bit to provide news and information to the world.
Unlike with MP3, at the moment there is only one reference implementation of a Vorbis encoder. There are quite a few frontends, though. If you are in Windows, your best bet at the moment is to use the incredible but slightly clunky EAC, with the command line oggenc encoder available from the main site. The main alternative is CDex, but at the moment it only supports RC2 (not RC3). If you are in Linux, then you can use any ripping program you like as long as you use oggenc as the encoder.
What options to use?
You are using LAME --r3mix at the moment, so give '-q 5' a go (with RC3 on, specify a *quality* level rather than a *bitrate*). Quality 5 (out of 10) is nominally 160kpbs, and should be comparable or better than --r3mix in quality.
For more information and discussion, check out the Hydrogen Audio (Project Mayhem) forum. Many of the developers of various audio formats hang out there, as well as people organising listening tests.
It should be "the University of Nottingham has."
Using 'have' is acceptable in UK English. Nottingham University is in the UK.
No, I'm not mistaken. Just like Qt, KDE ups the major version number when they break binary compatibility. Yes, this means that KDE 2.0 and KDE 2.2.2 are binary compatible.
By 'animated mimetype icons' I meant 'animated mimetype icons'. You can now create .mngs to represent filetypes in the Konqueror file browser. These animations will be played as the mouse 'enters' them. This is the new folder icon, for example (I'm not sure how well webcvs copes with pointing to binaries...).
The KDE release timing has absolutely nothing to do with Gnome. Take a look at the 3.0 release plan -- it's been like this since at least last September. In fact, I wish KDE had got 3.0 out sooner - it was originally supposed to just be a port of KDE 2.2 to Qt 3, but some new features have snuck in. These range from the productive (much faster html processing, better dcop architecture), to the useful (much improved javascript support), to the useful and pretty (better file selection dialog), to the pretty and useless (alpha blending / transparent menus), to the totally useless (animated mimetype icons).
The real question should be - if he owned the CD why was he downloading the song?
I know quite a few people that would consider it easier to go onto a file sharing network and download a file, than to put the CD into their computer and rip it.
Excellent choice! I'd forgotten that those two movies were a pair. (The Hustler's much better than The Color of Money, though).
Do you see where I'm going with this?
Yes - that hardware manufacturers need to invest some effort in making sure their hardware works in Linux.
For what it's worth, *I* recently bought a Sony Vaio (GR214MP). Linux works perfectly with it. I've got a USP host powered Zip250. The first time I plugged it in, it thought for a couple of seconds, and then up popped a Zip 250 drive icon on my KDE desktop. Simple, easy. With Windows XP (included on the machine) I have to fiddle to get it working.
Well, I have just metamoderated, and *have* had the chance to mm some of the replies on this thread.
More specifically, two moderations on the original post - one as 'interesting', one as 'troll'. I marked both as 'fair'.
I also M2'ed two mediocre comments that were posted early in a thread as unfair, because they were not insightful in any way. They were painfully obvious.
Now, wasn't that a little unfair? I'm always very generous in meta-moderation, and very rarely say that an upward moderation is unfair. After all, what these mediocre comments said may have been painfully obvious *to you*, but can never underestimate the knowledge level of the general Slashdot reading populace.
(if you think I'm being harsh, wait until a subject comes up that you know well -- as in the recent article about Ogg for me. There is so much crap and rubbish floating around, that even an obvious post is worth an up-mod.)
and having 5000 mp3's and 1000 ogg's doesn't work to well for control-freaks like myself..
:)
This would be why I've thrown away all my ripped MP3s, and am currently reencoding all my CDs with Ogg RC3 quality 5
To sum up: ID3v2 is a nasty hack, that should have been aborted at birth. It's almost impossible to correctly remove if the tag is damaged, is insanely complicated, and is badly supported. ID3v1 is limited, but fairly well defined and fairly well supported.
How are you 'saving it for posterity' if you are using an undocumented Windows only format?
Use FLAC or Shorten - they are the only decent lossless compressors that are truly cross platform.
You're right on all points apart from speed.
If you compare default Monkey's Audio (-high) to default FLAC (-5), you'll see that Monkey's Audio is about twice as quick and gives you 1% better compression.
This is utterly outweighed though, as you say, by the fact that MA is Windows only. That alone is enough to stop me using it.
http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html.
This uses the most up to date versions of the encoders, and includes a useful comparison chart of the features of the various lossless formats (of course, in his comparison chart, Flac wins :).
What the app needs to do for it to be really useful is to NOT EXIST.
Please don't transcode from one lossy format to another. Vorbis doesn't know which bits of the audio are original, and which are MP3 encoding artifacts, so it will do its best to encode both, possibly amplifying the MP3 artifacts, all while adding its own artifacts.
Unless you're planning on reencoding to half the bitrate or less, transcoding is pointless.
You might find something like HawkVoice useful - it's a Windows/Linux LGPL voice-over-network API. It supports GSM, LPC, CELP, LPC10, plus some others.
You should probably report a bug on oggdrop (go to http://bugs.xiph.org ) - they are very interested in getting all of the default tools working right.
.wav files onto it, and it will automatically convert them to .ogg. That is what you are trying to do with it, yes?
Just to check - oggdrop is a very simple tool, where you drag
One reason for this may be that WMA has quite a low upper limit on the frequencies it cares about -- certainly lower than Ogg.
In general, as you age, your high frequency hearing dies away, and so the older listeners would notice more what the encoders were doing to low frequencies than to high frequencies.