Joe Barr is a notorious mplayer troll. He wrote that article in response to getting "kicked off" the mailing list. The article contains many half-truths blatant falsehoods, and the exaggerated install difficulties he described which once existed are no more.
Also, some more advanced sound cards have an internal digital loopback. In other words, the sound card "emulates" playback, but since there is no digital to analog conversion, the data is a 100% accurate copy (as long as the CD is in decent condition; might want to use something like Paranoia to actually play it). However, you are still limited to 1X playback, and these cards cost more than your DJ solution.
I regularly report bugs for certain pieces of software, but the kernel is too big of a beast for me. It is considered uncouth to report bugs which have already been reported, but you have to be kidding me if you think I have the time or perseverance to trudge through megabytes of mailing lists.
Another problem is that of information gathering. With something like Gaim or XMMS I can accumulate all I need in a few minutes and fire off a bug report, but proper kernel debugging requires time consuming dumps and backtraces. However, since the kernel now officially supports a fairly modern compiler (GCC 2.95.3), one no longer has to downgrade to the stone age to properly debug.
The 2.5 branch has been infinitely less stable for me compared to 2.3. Out of the twenty or so point releases I've tried, only three have actually booted. All have panicked when I tried to actually do something beyond log in at a prompt. My hardware is far from exotic (and is rock solid under 2.4, just to quell those accusations), so I assume the developers are aware of such showstoppers.
Now I'm not insinuating the kernel is a crappy piece of software or whatever. In fact, I'm fairly convinced my problems are the fault of Via weirdness, but it's hard to test something which won't even boot properly, and I've run out of patience trying 2.5 builds.
I guess you could say I'm lazy, but I'd rather do nothing at all than fill lists with halfway done bug reports, and I'm not dedicated enough to delve completely into 2.5's issues.
While there is no official page for the tuned presets, the particular fellows who do the bulk of the work reside in the Hydrogen Audio forums. In general, Hydrogen Audio is the best audio encoding site on the Internet. A Google search may provide some useful information, but, alas, Hydrogen Audio is not Google indexable.
`lame --alt-preset help` will provide some usage information unless you use CVS, in which case the settings have been merged into the original --preset switch.
However, most "audiophiles" are not convinced by documents anyway, so the recommended method in testing the alt presets versus r3mix is to learn a bit about audio encoding, artifacts, and double blind testing (ABX). r3mix has publicly stated that he does not believe in ABXing, a scientifically sound method, so r3mix's tweaks are based on flawed techniques.
They have to keep the driving age high. If sixteen year olds could get licenses, the insurance rates would become unaffordable for the majority of motorists. It's on the threshold alredy.
The big deal is this law is a placebo. New Jersey is a haven for these accidents, which is an obvious sign of faulty inspection practices. Instead of tackling the tougher issue of bribes and laziness, lawmakers start this ridiculous "no more Gs" campaign.
I rode the said roller coaster many times, though certainly not recently. The last time I rode it must have been 1993 or so, and that ride remains one of the most horrific and memorable events in my memory.
While going up the incline, I heard several faint but audible metal pinging sounds; these were the sounds of metal ejecting from the machine. Once the roller coaster reached the peak I discovered something awful: the back right corner was not secure! During the whole ride the back bucked and jittered unnaturally, and I honestly thought the thing would come off. Afterward, I told everyone I could about my experience, though no one wants to listen to a hyperactive thirteen year old.
Though I love to be right, having a mother and her child die to prove it wasn't what I had in mind...though I did say for years the thing would kill people.
G-Forces my ass; that roller coaster is the same generic thing you see at every carnival. The owners of the park, the Gillian family, have been pocketing inspectors for years. The entire place reeks of disrepair and I refuse to set foot in it. I'm STILL waiting for the litigation against their greedy asses to surface, but they still drive all over town with their fancy cars and personalized parking places.
Inside this article hosted inside Slashdot you'll find out that some inside insiders wrote an inside account about the inside actions inside the insiders inside places of inside employment!
Then just surrender the damn codec(s) as ELF libraries or something and let the existing players take care of it. As far as I know, only the Sorensen codec is needed, and it's not like releasing a UNIX version of it will decrease their market share (just the opposite) or suck enormous revenue.
With just the codec as a library, it won't matter how much the target moves since the existing media players will do the Xv/SDL/GGI/VESA/etc. stuff on their own.
And because Linux can use it automatically means FreeBSD and others can use it as well through Linux emulation.
Granted this will never happen since Apple will feel it'd be better to have nothing at all than have anything less than a fully "featured" client.
A good alternative are GUS patches, along with timidity (which I believe also reads SoundFonts now).
Still not possible to accurately reproduce exactly what the creator heard when he put the piece together (unless you are sure you use the same soundfont), but it still sounds great.
Not only do you need the same soundfont, you need the same hardware (speakers, headphones) and maybe even software (not all sequencers are equal).
Perhaps I am out of date, and your points sound rational. I'd be interested in reading relevant articles if you have any links.
I'm not really a "CD quality forever!" zealot. I'm just sick of reading statements like "some guy told me this was the highest quality so he must be right" without any backup. I'm trying to become more informed in the realm of audio quality, a realm which includes less signal to noise than $2.50 PC speakers.
However, what about the analog nature of the environment? What about things like microphones, minute air currents, etc. Not everything can be digitized, and, at a point, "imperfections" in the environment are going to be present no matter what the sampling rate.
Another side note. In Japan CDs are very very expensive. Like 40$. People buy them a lot however.
However, Japanese CDs tend to be more extravagant. Most of their stuff comes with better packaging compared to US fare and some even come with printed scores (in the case of instrumental music). Yes, it's mostly more expensive for the same reason that everything is more expensive in Japan, but there are some other reasons as well, as you pointed out.
The problem is that there isn't much discernable quality difference between an mp3 and a CD.
You've obviously never downloaded someone's 128 kpbs Xing-encoded MP3 before. Let me tell you that they're more like cell phone quality.
Now, if you said optimized LAME-encoded MP3s, you'd have somewhat a case. However, few outside the audiophile community use these settings (or LAME) or even know they exist (or care). Xing can encode a forty-seven minute CD in 1.2 minutes and that's all they care about.
The obvious (to me) solution to this is to release better quality audio.
Unless you're doing actual studio-type work, there's absoluetly no reason to go above 16 bits/44 kHz. CD technology as it is saturates the human ear. However, more channels in music is a desired option, and at 16/44, you'll need 75 kBps/sec for each channel.
just that some have found reason to disagree.
There are too many wannbes who "just disagree" these days (and usually without adequate reason). About the same number that claim 64 kpbs WMAs are "CD quality." Post a link to reliable ABX tests and then you'll have a leg to stand on with this statement.
I mean, 96,000hz and 24bit equipment has a market for a reason.
Yes, for creating audio work.
And if the media provided a higher level of content, the players would too, I imagine.
I guess more players would support 24/96 natively, but 99.9% of people do not have equipment that comes anywhere near what the current CD spec can offer. Those who do care already have the equipment.
mencoder, then. I think that it ither can or is close to be able to.
If Divx requires 35% of my Athlon 1.2ghz to encode at full quality, I imagine on a 100Mhz ARM [i.e digital video camera or something] it would be way too much.
Yes, I agree. This is why I said above that MPEG4 will not be on the level of MPEG1 for years. When you said "MIPS," I thought you meant the chip, not the abbreviation.
20 years ago, 20K of RAM in a "Personal Computer" was a REAL big deal.
No it wasn't. Even cheap, consumer-grade Atari computers had that much, and even the "stripped down" version had 16K.
Keep in mind how much MPEG1 is still in use and how old that is. It's getting dated, but not many are "laughing at it." MPEG4 may be the hot new thing, but it can't boast the ubiquity, stability, and portability that its ancestor can. Granted it's only twelve years old or so (compared to 17-20), but I really doubt MPEG4 will be on the scale of MPEG1 this year, next year, or the year after that.
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Joe Barr is a notorious mplayer troll. He wrote that article in response to getting "kicked off" the mailing list. The article contains many half-truths blatant falsehoods, and the exaggerated install difficulties he described which once existed are no more.
Not a very good argument: the developers themselves acknowledge the use of ffmpeg (which is LGPLed) and Xvid (which is GPLed).
PuTTY is under the MIT X license, but that is GPL compatible.
Also, some more advanced sound cards have an internal digital loopback. In other words, the sound card "emulates" playback, but since there is no digital to analog conversion, the data is a 100% accurate copy (as long as the CD is in decent condition; might want to use something like Paranoia to actually play it). However, you are still limited to 1X playback, and these cards cost more than your DJ solution.
I regularly report bugs for certain pieces of software, but the kernel is too big of a beast for me. It is considered uncouth to report bugs which have already been reported, but you have to be kidding me if you think I have the time or perseverance to trudge through megabytes of mailing lists.
Another problem is that of information gathering. With something like Gaim or XMMS I can accumulate all I need in a few minutes and fire off a bug report, but proper kernel debugging requires time consuming dumps and backtraces. However, since the kernel now officially supports a fairly modern compiler (GCC 2.95.3), one no longer has to downgrade to the stone age to properly debug.
The 2.5 branch has been infinitely less stable for me compared to 2.3. Out of the twenty or so point releases I've tried, only three have actually booted. All have panicked when I tried to actually do something beyond log in at a prompt. My hardware is far from exotic (and is rock solid under 2.4, just to quell those accusations), so I assume the developers are aware of such showstoppers.
Now I'm not insinuating the kernel is a crappy piece of software or whatever. In fact, I'm fairly convinced my problems are the fault of Via weirdness, but it's hard to test something which won't even boot properly, and I've run out of patience trying 2.5 builds.
I guess you could say I'm lazy, but I'd rather do nothing at all than fill lists with halfway done bug reports, and I'm not dedicated enough to delve completely into 2.5's issues.
While there is no official page for the tuned presets, the particular fellows who do the bulk of the work reside in the Hydrogen Audio forums. In general, Hydrogen Audio is the best audio encoding site on the Internet. A Google search may provide some useful information, but, alas, Hydrogen Audio is not Google indexable.
`lame --alt-preset help` will provide some usage information unless you use CVS, in which case the settings have been merged into the original --preset switch.
However, most "audiophiles" are not convinced by documents anyway, so the recommended method in testing the alt presets versus r3mix is to learn a bit about audio encoding, artifacts, and double blind testing (ABX). r3mix has publicly stated that he does not believe in ABXing, a scientifically sound method, so r3mix's tweaks are based on flawed techniques.
Just when I think the limits of chiptunes can't be pressed any farther. Commodore and Amiga fans rejoyce!
--r3mix is considered outdated by just about any expert's opinion.
Check out --alt-preset standard or --alt-preset prefered_bitrate if you wish.
Thank you for the elaborate and helpful explanation. I'd like to debate further, but my memories from ten years ago are not too sharp.
However, regardless of whether my hypothesis was correct, two facts remain:
- I was correct: the roller coaster would eventually kill people
- The roller coaster broke in a fashion consistent with my complaint
I hardly think asking for proper inspections is "retarded."
They have to keep the driving age high. If sixteen year olds could get licenses, the insurance rates would become unaffordable for the majority of motorists. It's on the threshold alredy.
The big deal is this law is a placebo. New Jersey is a haven for these accidents, which is an obvious sign of faulty inspection practices. Instead of tackling the tougher issue of bribes and laziness, lawmakers start this ridiculous "no more Gs" campaign.
I rode the said roller coaster many times, though certainly not recently. The last time I rode it must have been 1993 or so, and that ride remains one of the most horrific and memorable events in my memory.
While going up the incline, I heard several faint but audible metal pinging sounds; these were the sounds of metal ejecting from the machine. Once the roller coaster reached the peak I discovered something awful: the back right corner was not secure! During the whole ride the back bucked and jittered unnaturally, and I honestly thought the thing would come off. Afterward, I told everyone I could about my experience, though no one wants to listen to a hyperactive thirteen year old.
Though I love to be right, having a mother and her child die to prove it wasn't what I had in mind...though I did say for years the thing would kill people.
G-Forces my ass; that roller coaster is the same generic thing you see at every carnival. The owners of the park, the Gillian family, have been pocketing inspectors for years. The entire place reeks of disrepair and I refuse to set foot in it. I'm STILL waiting for the litigation against their greedy asses to surface, but they still drive all over town with their fancy cars and personalized parking places.
Inside this article hosted inside Slashdot you'll find out that some inside insiders wrote an inside account about the inside actions inside the insiders inside places of inside employment!
...of the episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where Rocksteady and Bebop have to pedal to keep the Technodrome's power running. Yes it does.
...X-Windows existed before it for a similar kind of thing.
Don't let ToG hear you say that. They'll bash you in the skull with rocks whilst chanting, "Call it X-Window [System]!"
Can you check your hotmail account with a POP-client?
Not directly, but you can use gotmail to fetch it in a similar fashion to fetchmail.
Then just surrender the damn codec(s) as ELF libraries or something and let the existing players take care of it. As far as I know, only the Sorensen codec is needed, and it's not like releasing a UNIX version of it will decrease their market share (just the opposite) or suck enormous revenue.
With just the codec as a library, it won't matter how much the target moves since the existing media players will do the Xv/SDL/GGI/VESA/etc. stuff on their own.
And because Linux can use it automatically means FreeBSD and others can use it as well through Linux emulation.
Granted this will never happen since Apple will feel it'd be better to have nothing at all than have anything less than a fully "featured" client.
A good alternative are GUS patches, along with timidity (which I believe also reads SoundFonts now).
Still not possible to accurately reproduce exactly what the creator heard when he put the piece together (unless you are sure you use the same soundfont), but it still sounds great.
Not only do you need the same soundfont, you need the same hardware (speakers, headphones) and maybe even software (not all sequencers are equal).
In case you're curious, Zophar is the super-villain from Lunar: Eternal Blue, but he doesn't have Zoltar's cool animating jaw.
Virt? The guy who just adores Trax in Space and that punk melvyl? ;)
Perhaps I am out of date, and your points sound rational. I'd be interested in reading relevant articles if you have any links.
I'm not really a "CD quality forever!" zealot. I'm just sick of reading statements like "some guy told me this was the highest quality so he must be right" without any backup. I'm trying to become more informed in the realm of audio quality, a realm which includes less signal to noise than $2.50 PC speakers.
However, what about the analog nature of the environment? What about things like microphones, minute air currents, etc. Not everything can be digitized, and, at a point, "imperfections" in the environment are going to be present no matter what the sampling rate.
Another side note. In Japan CDs are very very expensive. Like 40$. People buy them a lot however.
However, Japanese CDs tend to be more extravagant. Most of their stuff comes with better packaging compared to US fare and some even come with printed scores (in the case of instrumental music). Yes, it's mostly more expensive for the same reason that everything is more expensive in Japan, but there are some other reasons as well, as you pointed out.
The problem is that there isn't much discernable quality difference between an mp3 and a CD.
You've obviously never downloaded someone's 128 kpbs Xing-encoded MP3 before. Let me tell you that they're more like cell phone quality.
Now, if you said optimized LAME-encoded MP3s, you'd have somewhat a case. However, few outside the audiophile community use these settings (or LAME) or even know they exist (or care). Xing can encode a forty-seven minute CD in 1.2 minutes and that's all they care about.
The obvious (to me) solution to this is to release better quality audio.
Unless you're doing actual studio-type work, there's absoluetly no reason to go above 16 bits/44 kHz. CD technology as it is saturates the human ear. However, more channels in music is a desired option, and at 16/44, you'll need 75 kBps/sec for each channel.
just that some have found reason to disagree.
There are too many wannbes who "just disagree" these days (and usually without adequate reason). About the same number that claim 64 kpbs WMAs are "CD quality." Post a link to reliable ABX tests and then you'll have a leg to stand on with this statement.
I mean, 96,000hz and 24bit equipment has a market for a reason.
Yes, for creating audio work.
And if the media provided a higher level of content, the players would too, I imagine.
I guess more players would support 24/96 natively, but 99.9% of people do not have equipment that comes anywhere near what the current CD spec can offer. Those who do care already have the equipment.
I'm talking about both encoding and decoding.
mencoder, then. I think that it ither can or is close to be able to.
If Divx requires 35% of my Athlon 1.2ghz to encode at full quality, I imagine on a 100Mhz ARM [i.e digital video camera or something] it would be way too much.
Yes, I agree. This is why I said above that MPEG4 will not be on the level of MPEG1 for years. When you said "MIPS," I thought you meant the chip, not the abbreviation.
20 years ago, 20K of RAM in a "Personal Computer" was a REAL big deal.
No it wasn't. Even cheap, consumer-grade Atari computers had that much, and even the "stripped down" version had 16K.
Keep in mind how much MPEG1 is still in use and how old that is. It's getting dated, but not many are "laughing at it." MPEG4 may be the hot new thing, but it can't boast the ubiquity, stability, and portability that its ancestor can. Granted it's only twelve years old or so (compared to 17-20), but I really doubt MPEG4 will be on the scale of MPEG1 this year, next year, or the year after that.