Sure there is.. even you might notice if you knew what to look for and had a decent sound setup (good headphones, quiet computer, decent soundcard (i.e. not Creative)).
Chances are it sounds *different*, not necessarily much worse. You should try ABXing* with a lossless source and see when you stop being able to tell the difference. LAME is tuned to attempt to produce such a "transparent" file using --alt-preset standard, but obviously with such a limit format it can't work miracles (some music *really* needs more than 320kbps).
* ABX involves taking two tracks and distributing them randomly across (A,B) and (X,Y). You flick between them and try to match X,Y -> A,B. Thow in some stats, and you get a fairly scientific assessment as to whether you can tell any difference. On HydrogenAudio, you can get banned for making a statement about quality without doing this;)
Incorrect; the encoder is going to see a very different WAV to the original; it's going to throw bits at different things (including artifacts in the original) and produce something that's even more different from the original. At such low bitrates, the effects will be quite significant too.
Don't transcode one lossy format to another, and if you must, make sure you tag if clearly with this fact. Ironically, the most sensible solution is to rip and compress with a lossless codec; this way you regain the quality of the original AAC, at the expense of filesize. Again, make sure you tag the source clearly.. we don't want lossless files masquerading as originals, nor do we want second generation lossy files masquerading as first generation ones, whether you're sharing or not.
Your MP3 files can't be up to much if they're 10x smaller than FLAC's. That would put them below 100kbps.
Reasons to use FLAC:
It's free and open; I'm not going to find my files are suddenly unplayable because developers are unable to support it properly. I think it's even part of fb2k's std_input array, meaning it's supported in a player who's installer is less than 800k (the bloated "special" one which will play just about anything and do just about anything to the resulting sound is a shade over 2MB).
It's lossless; I can transcode to any lossy format I like for playback on a portable.. maybe I get a player that only does MP3, maybe I find one which can play back MusePack; either way I can choose to create a lossy file which is tuned to my portable usage (100kbps Vorbis might be a good one for portable use, but man that'll suck on my desktop). Additionally if FLAC were ever to become unusable (maybe someone finds a patent against it or so.. whatever), I can convert to any other lossless format and get the same benefits without worrying about losing anything. I like a futureproof music collection.
It's lossless; even at high bitrates, lossy formats aren't perfect, especially MP3. I don't want to worry about compression artifacts or encoder bugs or what quality setting to use; lossless is an easy choice, with no quality tradeoffs. With 600GB+ of disk space I couldn't really care less about the 4x increase in size.
It's robust; I've lost track of the number of MP3's I've seen with serious sync errors (bit errors, basically). Despite having more FLAC files, I'm yet to come across a corrupt one, even through the less official channels (in fact, I've yet to be able to buy a set of FLAC files complete with.PAR2's,.MD5's and.LOG files). Pirate FLAC files are usually of at least identical quality to a CD you've ripped yourself.. pirate MP3's are usually encoded using stupid settings using a badly configured burst ripper. No thanks.
It's well supported; it even has hardware support, which bodes well for the next few generations of portable audio players (if you had a 100G+ player wouldn't you like to be able to play lossless files instead of faffing about with lossy stuff?)
It's fast. I can encode and decode FLAC faster than most lossy formats, including low bitrate Vorbis files. Yes, this is a big deal when I'm waiting for an album to ReplayGain or transcoding to other formats; going from 1% CPU to 0.5% CPU during normal playback is the difference between decoding at 100x and decoding at 200x.
It's well specified. I'll be impressed if you can point me at a document describing MP3, and even then you're not going to find any metadata standards with an official specification; ID3v[12] and co are unofficial addons, and they suck (ever seen the ID3v2 spec? A ID3v2 reader/writer can be easily twice the size of a complete decoder and metadata reader/writer for most sane formats).
And yes, I've bought a fair few albums in FLAC format from Magnatune and Allofmp3. Why would I pay for anything less?
For the record, foobar2000 handles gapless playback by using sample-accurate seeking, even on MP3 files. This also makes playback from cuesheets and such better, since it can start from an exact sample inside an audio image file (i.e. one big WAV with a.cue indexing the tracks in it, possibly embedded in said image file's metadata).
However, because MP3 sucks, to do it for them it needs to brute-force decode the stream and count the resulting samples, not to mention handle such things as LAME headers and workarounds for bugs in encoders. I wouldn't hold my breath to see this in any other player.
Well, it depends how bad the physics is and how much it runs against your common sense, doesn't it? There's nothing wrong with a little poetic license, especially if you're not skilled enough to pull off something realistic, but when you constantly use it as a crutch to your pathetic talants it gets pretty silly.
Star Trek's a perfect example, from the cartoony CGI (who needs shadows?) to disgustingly badly portrayed.. well, I could say just about anything; AI, weaponry, people, aliens.. there's no moody shadows out in deep space, no spooky red/blueshift at relativistic velocities (which suddenly don't seem so fast anymore anyway), no feel the battles are performed using city-busting+ weapons, not even a sense of the sheer scales involved in space. The less realistic stuff is just so much less interesting/spectacular/fun.
Sure, it's harder to stick to realism because it gives you boundries you need to work in/around, but those boundries are what're interesting; not your latest dubious workaround for avoiding them.
Some of my first CD-R's are only a couple of years old but already have *holes* in the dye layer.
I don't use optical media much now though. I prefer having a TB of disk space; far from CD-R's and DVD-R's being backup media, they tend to be used when I'm in need of an install CD or so.
Design life of a HD may only be 5 years or so, but who wants to run a 5 year old HD 10x smaller than the smallest drive you can get new for 40UKP?
You're better off storing audio as FLAC or so; the format's open, lossless, streamable, error checking, robust, and has a proper metadata standard. Use the space it saves to make a bunch of PAR2's, and you're laughing.
Support for this stuff's not going to disappear overnight; you can keep specifications and reference implementations about if need be.
There's talk of UDF (DVD filesystem) being more resistant to errors than ISO9660; sadly nobody seems to have a source for this. While I doubt anything's going to help much if your CD/DVD-R's have things growing on them, does anyone know enough about these filesystems to comment?
Would be handy to have a little MySQL -> PgSQL cheat-sheet to help MySQL users map their current knowledge onto PgSQL. Getting users over that initial sense of being lost with a system that seems on the surface completely different to what they're used to is probably the most important thing in gaining new users, and that goes for pretty much any application.
Except PHP isn't a whole lot better than Perl; much of it's even worse. Thus there's little pressure to make such a change, aside from perhaps a few PHP converts who will be easily drowned out by the vast majority of developers still happy with Perl.
This is closer to why SlashDot's still on Perl and not using Python, Ruby or Java; the latter three languages are better featured than Perl, and perform similarly or even much better, but even that's not enough to actually insitgate a change. Perl's simply Good Enough.
I believe what you're talking about was an experiment in quantum tunneling; forcing the signal to tunnel through a nonconductive material many times in a row or so; you end up getting the electrons which tunneled reaching the other end of the wire effectively ftl, since they "skipped" parts of the line on the way.
Amiga users never died - there are still thousands of them. It wouldn't surpriseme if they equal BSD users.
Um, maybe not you but I'm sure it would surprise pretty much everyone else. The BSD world isn't small, it's just a lot less rabid;)
Firstly, Amiga have been continuing development for a long time... They've also been developing an embedded technology called Amiga DE which is already in use in several mobile phone units.
With a handful of developers and next to no investment I'm not surprised it's been so long. As for mobiles, can you quote models and such?
Amiga OS 4.0 is designed to run on a new computer, called the AmigaOne. This is a new motherboard designed by the UK company Eyetech, to which you can attach your A1200 motherboard for running older programs natviely, should you want to. Yes, that's right - the A1200 motherboard becomes the AmigaOne's daughterboard.
Ugh, I think you just described the biggest hack in the whole of human existance. And I thought PPC accelerators were bad (although to be fair I did buy one of those;)
The computer is based on the PPC architecture, I believe with G3 or G4 processors. There have been add-ons for the A1200 motherboard which add G3 processors for a while now, but these were expensive and pointless.
The original accelerators were based on what you'd probably call G2's, unless you're talking about some newer ones I'm unaware ever made it out of vapourland.
My A1200 has a 603e PPC which over the course of it's life mostly did RC5. A brief look at MorphOS impressed me quite a bit, but after how Amiga and H&P and such treated it, well, Amiga can bite me.
As for software and games, there are several developers still producing software and many excellent games too (a recent one which springs to mind is Nightlong, a very graphics heavy point-and-click adventure, like Broken Sword 3).
Wow, *several*! The independent developers on the IRC channels I hang out in probably outnumber the devteams of them all put together:o
Don't get me wrong; I love my Amiga - it helped make me who I am today (ok, so maybe I should hate it, but nm;), and if I had a compelling use for it I'd quite happily bring it back to life. But, with three PC's running WinXP, Debian Linux and FreeBSD just in my room, well.. I only have so many monitor inputs and power outlets:)
To those struggling, just use FastCGI; it'll perform just as well if not better, it'll easily halve the size of your httpd's, and it neatly circumvents any collisions with your favourite MPM.
Re:$33 cd? It is going to decrease profit
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Maybe it would make more sense to charge per minute of song, or by bandwidth.
http://www.allofmp3.com/ charges by bandwidth, and offers some losslessly encoded CD's, as well as encoding to a large veriety of lossy formats. I've bought 5 albums from them so far, and I've been very impressed:)
http://www.magnatune.com/ also offers losslessly encoded files, and charges on a sliding scale letting you pay between about $5 and $15 per album iirc.
This is what I was waiting for. iTunes and co can go jump in a lake with their silly lossily-encoded DRM-encumbered overpriced music.
That's after squeezing it's surface area into less than 1cm square... what's next up from copper for conductivity, without being too soft/expensive to make a decent size heatsink with?
The interface is endlessly customizable, from fonts, colours, format scripts etc, all the way up to entirely different column-based and skinnable replacements. The mass-tagger's never failed me, and frankly blows the likes of Tag & Rename out of the water with it's format-agnostic approach.
WinAmp has plenty not to like about it.. it's just those things tend to be more oriented around it's awful skins and lack of support for all sorts of things I use daily, like playing cuesheets without broken and hacked together plugins and bundled support for any format I'm ever likely to encounter with a footprint that puts WinAmp to shame.
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Sure there is.. even you might notice if you knew what to look for and had a decent sound setup (good headphones, quiet computer, decent soundcard (i.e. not Creative)).
;)
Chances are it sounds *different*, not necessarily much worse. You should try ABXing* with a lossless source and see when you stop being able to tell the difference. LAME is tuned to attempt to produce such a "transparent" file using --alt-preset standard, but obviously with such a limit format it can't work miracles (some music *really* needs more than 320kbps).
* ABX involves taking two tracks and distributing them randomly across (A,B) and (X,Y). You flick between them and try to match X,Y -> A,B. Thow in some stats, and you get a fairly scientific assessment as to whether you can tell any difference. On HydrogenAudio, you can get banned for making a statement about quality without doing this
Incorrect; the encoder is going to see a very different WAV to the original; it's going to throw bits at different things (including artifacts in the original) and produce something that's even more different from the original. At such low bitrates, the effects will be quite significant too.
Don't transcode one lossy format to another, and if you must, make sure you tag if clearly with this fact. Ironically, the most sensible solution is to rip and compress with a lossless codec; this way you regain the quality of the original AAC, at the expense of filesize. Again, make sure you tag the source clearly.. we don't want lossless files masquerading as originals, nor do we want second generation lossy files masquerading as first generation ones, whether you're sharing or not.
Reasons to use FLAC:
- It's free and open; I'm not going to find my files are suddenly unplayable because developers are unable to support it properly. I think it's even part of fb2k's std_input array, meaning it's supported in a player who's installer is less than 800k (the bloated "special" one which will play just about anything and do just about anything to the resulting sound is a shade over 2MB).
- It's lossless; I can transcode to any lossy format I like for playback on a portable.. maybe I get a player that only does MP3, maybe I find one which can play back MusePack; either way I can choose to create a lossy file which is tuned to my portable usage (100kbps Vorbis might be a good one for portable use, but man that'll suck on my desktop). Additionally if FLAC were ever to become unusable (maybe someone finds a patent against it or so.. whatever), I can convert to any other lossless format and get the same benefits without worrying about losing anything. I like a futureproof music collection.
- It's lossless; even at high bitrates, lossy formats aren't perfect, especially MP3. I don't want to worry about compression artifacts or encoder bugs or what quality setting to use; lossless is an easy choice, with no quality tradeoffs. With 600GB+ of disk space I couldn't really care less about the 4x increase in size.
- It's robust; I've lost track of the number of MP3's I've seen with serious sync errors (bit errors, basically). Despite having more FLAC files, I'm yet to come across a corrupt one, even through the less official channels (in fact, I've yet to be able to buy a set of FLAC files complete with
.PAR2's, .MD5's and .LOG files). Pirate FLAC files are usually of at least identical quality to a CD you've ripped yourself.. pirate MP3's are usually encoded using stupid settings using a badly configured burst ripper. No thanks.
- It's well supported; it even has hardware support, which bodes well for the next few generations of portable audio players (if you had a 100G+ player wouldn't you like to be able to play lossless files instead of faffing about with lossy stuff?)
- It's fast. I can encode and decode FLAC faster than most lossy formats, including low bitrate Vorbis files. Yes, this is a big deal when I'm waiting for an album to ReplayGain or transcoding to other formats; going from 1% CPU to 0.5% CPU during normal playback is the difference between decoding at 100x and decoding at 200x.
- It's well specified. I'll be impressed if you can point me at a document describing MP3, and even then you're not going to find any metadata standards with an official specification; ID3v[12] and co are unofficial addons, and they suck (ever seen the ID3v2 spec? A ID3v2 reader/writer can be easily twice the size of a complete decoder and metadata reader/writer for most sane formats).
And yes, I've bought a fair few albums in FLAC format from Magnatune and Allofmp3. Why would I pay for anything less?For the record, foobar2000 handles gapless playback by using sample-accurate seeking, even on MP3 files. This also makes playback from cuesheets and such better, since it can start from an exact sample inside an audio image file (i.e. one big WAV with a .cue indexing the tracks in it, possibly embedded in said image file's metadata).
However, because MP3 sucks, to do it for them it needs to brute-force decode the stream and count the resulting samples, not to mention handle such things as LAME headers and workarounds for bugs in encoders. I wouldn't hold my breath to see this in any other player.
Well, it depends how bad the physics is and how much it runs against your common sense, doesn't it? There's nothing wrong with a little poetic license, especially if you're not skilled enough to pull off something realistic, but when you constantly use it as a crutch to your pathetic talants it gets pretty silly.
Star Trek's a perfect example, from the cartoony CGI (who needs shadows?) to disgustingly badly portrayed.. well, I could say just about anything; AI, weaponry, people, aliens.. there's no moody shadows out in deep space, no spooky red/blueshift at relativistic velocities (which suddenly don't seem so fast anymore anyway), no feel the battles are performed using city-busting+ weapons, not even a sense of the sheer scales involved in space. The less realistic stuff is just so much less interesting/spectacular/fun.
Sure, it's harder to stick to realism because it gives you boundries you need to work in/around, but those boundries are what're interesting; not your latest dubious workaround for avoiding them.
Hm? My first PC was a P200 MMX; I'm pretty sure that's not a Pro :)
They had ickle 40mm fans, typically. They'd usually run quite happily with just the heatsink though, given they only disapated, what, 15w or so?
Does IE support data: URI's yet? :/
That's MagnaTune.com. It is good.
Some of my first CD-R's are only a couple of years old but already have *holes* in the dye layer.
I don't use optical media much now though. I prefer having a TB of disk space; far from CD-R's and DVD-R's being backup media, they tend to be used when I'm in need of an install CD or so.
Design life of a HD may only be 5 years or so, but who wants to run a 5 year old HD 10x smaller than the smallest drive you can get new for 40UKP?
We can already do that; don't you watch CSI? Tsk!
You're better off storing audio as FLAC or so; the format's open, lossless, streamable, error checking, robust, and has a proper metadata standard. Use the space it saves to make a bunch of PAR2's, and you're laughing.
Support for this stuff's not going to disappear overnight; you can keep specifications and reference implementations about if need be.
There's talk of UDF (DVD filesystem) being more resistant to errors than ISO9660; sadly nobody seems to have a source for this. While I doubt anything's going to help much if your CD/DVD-R's have things growing on them, does anyone know enough about these filesystems to comment?
Would be handy to have a little MySQL -> PgSQL cheat-sheet to help MySQL users map their current knowledge onto PgSQL. Getting users over that initial sense of being lost with a system that seems on the surface completely different to what they're used to is probably the most important thing in gaining new users, and that goes for pretty much any application.
Except PHP isn't a whole lot better than Perl; much of it's even worse. Thus there's little pressure to make such a change, aside from perhaps a few PHP converts who will be easily drowned out by the vast majority of developers still happy with Perl.
This is closer to why SlashDot's still on Perl and not using Python, Ruby or Java; the latter three languages are better featured than Perl, and perform similarly or even much better, but even that's not enough to actually insitgate a change. Perl's simply Good Enough.
Not just the license; the DBA to manage it, the devtime moving existing data to it, the support contracts etc. That could buy a lot of hardware :)
This is, of course, much easier with multimonitor.
I happily IRC away while playing games, barring a few games which *really* dislike alt-tab.
This isn't an Amiga, you don't get away with taking over my system.
I believe what you're talking about was an experiment in quantum tunneling; forcing the signal to tunnel through a nonconductive material many times in a row or so; you end up getting the electrons which tunneled reaching the other end of the wire effectively ftl, since they "skipped" parts of the line on the way.
Um, maybe not you but I'm sure it would surprise pretty much everyone else. The BSD world isn't small, it's just a lot less rabid
With a handful of developers and next to no investment I'm not surprised it's been so long. As for mobiles, can you quote models and such?
Ugh, I think you just described the biggest hack in the whole of human existance. And I thought PPC accelerators were bad (although to be fair I did buy one of those
The original accelerators were based on what you'd probably call G2's, unless you're talking about some newer ones I'm unaware ever made it out of vapourland.
My A1200 has a 603e PPC which over the course of it's life mostly did RC5. A brief look at MorphOS impressed me quite a bit, but after how Amiga and H&P and such treated it, well, Amiga can bite me.
Wow, *several*! The independent developers on the IRC channels I hang out in probably outnumber the devteams of them all put together
Don't get me wrong; I love my Amiga - it helped make me who I am today (ok, so maybe I should hate it, but nm
Of course, there's always WinUAE...
They'll just add a drunken-button-mashing key binding.
To those struggling, just use FastCGI; it'll perform just as well if not better, it'll easily halve the size of your httpd's, and it neatly circumvents any collisions with your favourite MPM.
Maybe it would make more sense to charge per minute of song, or by bandwidth.
:)
http://www.allofmp3.com/ charges by bandwidth, and offers some losslessly encoded CD's, as well as encoding to a large veriety of lossy formats. I've bought 5 albums from them so far, and I've been very impressed
http://www.magnatune.com/ also offers losslessly encoded files, and charges on a sliding scale letting you pay between about $5 and $15 per album iirc.
This is what I was waiting for. iTunes and co can go jump in a lake with their silly lossily-encoded DRM-encumbered overpriced music.
That's after squeezing it's surface area into less than 1cm square... what's next up from copper for conductivity, without being too soft/expensive to make a decent size heatsink with?
The interface is endlessly customizable, from fonts, colours, format scripts etc, all the way up to entirely different column-based and skinnable replacements. The mass-tagger's never failed me, and frankly blows the likes of Tag & Rename out of the water with it's format-agnostic approach.
WinAmp has plenty not to like about it.. it's just those things tend to be more oriented around it's awful skins and lack of support for all sorts of things I use daily, like playing cuesheets without broken and hacked together plugins and bundled support for any format I'm ever likely to encounter with a footprint that puts WinAmp to shame.
Source to the various foobar input plugins are available. Feel free to check :)