> Both girls tentatively scheduled to attend refused comment.
You haven't looked around recently have you? MIT is half women, just as nerdy as the men... Our audiences for SWME last time were pretty much half and half and the cast/crew is more than half women.
I know, I know, now your joke sucks even more. Sorry;-)
(who was the sound engineer for the first two times we did Star Wars Musical Edition. This is actually the third Star Wars musical the troupe is putting on.)
I will point out that many pro sound engineers are not also even more pro computer people. I help write DAW software... and couldn't figure out how to work on an existing file without you telling me. Most people who try out Ardour won't complain if they can't get it to work. The majority tends to give up and wander away; that's a problem for all of us.
[also, a disclaimer. I'm only 'semi-pro'; I take money but don't pretend to live on it as a career. That said, I do have an annoying penchant for expensive equipment]
There's a good reason why alot of user-application software happens first on systems like the Mac or Windows and comes to Linux second. It all has to do with what's a commodity and what isn't. The OS is a commodity (always was, actually, although people haven't realized that until lately). Text editors are a commodity. Web servers are a commodity. So are browsers. MP3 encoders are another.
These are all things that, for the most part, people are no longer willing to pay money for. For that reason, you don't see big companies trying very hard to develop them (except for Windows/MS, and that's a special case for oh so many reasons. I expect the Mafia could make alot of money selling ice cubes to Eskimos too;-)
DAWs have happened on commercial platforms first because there was money to be made on the hardware and there was money to be made on the software too. Open Source dogma aside, money *does* fuel innovation, and while a truly new and original application is working out the Right Way to do something for the first time, there's money to be made there... and while these software vendors are small and hungry, money does help the work get done faster.
With DAWs, Paul himself has said 'everyone has converged on the same feature set', an indication that all the innovation is more or less over, all the Big Problems mostly solved, and that this niche is about to commoditize. At that point the margins erode, the previously small fast hungry companies are now big, comfortable slow companies trying to hold onto what they've got and you see nothing really new appear--- although those big slow companies are desperately trying to cram new (mostly useless) 'features' into endless 'upgrades' to get people to keep spending money, be it on their software or their hardware....and this is _one_ of the places where Open Source steps into the picture naturally. When the DAW becomes a piece of commodity public infrastructure, OSS will come to offer the best choice: streamlined, debugged, interested in giving the user what they want rather than taking the user's money first, everything else is second. After all... the purpose of a company is to make money. "You don't need a product to make money... customers alone will do."
Although OSS has driven and does drive innovation, don't overlook that one of its great roles is provide and maintain quality software in all those niches where Corporate America no longer feels like spending a great deal of its attention. Microsoft won the browser war, and hasn't released a new IE in years. Without Mozilla, we'd not have had a new browser in coming up on six years.
So accusing Ardour, or many other OSS workalikes of being clones isn't fair. They wouldn't exist if there was no need.
I don't actually object to that development model in any way; there's nothing unreasonable about it, and I've strongly considered it myself.
I was complaining about one and only one thing: For the life of me, I can't figure out how to make it do *anything*. The number of buttons has nothing to do with this; most of my physical control surfaces have even more physical buttons than six copies of Ardour.
If I knew it would give me something my current tools don't, great! I'd happily buy the manual and figure out how to use it. But given that my needs are fufilled (as far as I know anyway; I'm always looking for better), and I can't make heads or tails of Ardour, I'm instead happily not going to be buying the manual. For now anyway.
So... How *do* you use it to do anything with audio you already have on disk? I notice you didn't answer that question;-)
I'll offer this comment about Ardour; I'm the author of Postfish, Ogg and a regular contributor to Audacity. I've been hearing good thigns about Ardour for more than a year and have thus tried repeatedly to try it out.
a) No manual. No usable manual anyway. I know no one who uses it, so I have no 'live' manual to get me going either. Lots of apps don't have good manuals, but this goes along with b...
b) 'Angry fruit salad' user interface. Lots of functionality [apparently] brilliantly obfuscated by a million buttons in every imaginable color grouped randomly with no real UI intuitiveness to make up for the missing manual. I'm no newbie to pro audio; recording and mastering soundtrack CDs for local theatre groups is one of my pasttimes. But I cannot figure out how to even get started. I spend about an hour on step one every couple of months and have never succeeded in getting it to do anything with the 400G of raw digital audio sitting on my box.
The end result is that I've been unable to figure out how to find the most rudimentary starting-out functions. I already have all my audio; Ardour is too heavy to run on my portable recording boxes-- I have beaverphonic already doing my HD recording for the past several years-- so how do I do anything using Ardour with audio I already have? The manual's tutorials all begin with 'press the record button...' The FAQ says I can use it with my recordings, but the UI and manual conspire to convince me none of that functionality actually exists.
All this *is* a flame-- Ardour is supposedly good software but all it's done is waste my time and for that reason I'm annoyed-- but it's also a genuine request of the Ardour authors to help out all us poor folks that aren't Ardour hackers to get started. I'd love to see what this package can do and give it a fair shake.
I sent a mild rebuttal to Gizmodo about Hugo's article back when Gizmodo first ran it. As it hasn't appeared on Gizmodo, here's the text:
Hi there; it's interesting to see one's software being talked about by others as if it fell from the sky:-)
First off, the original iPod does indeed have the horsepower for Ogg;
the original Tremor codec written in C used approximately 40MHz of a
Cirrus Maverick (720TDMI), an ARM7 chip somewhat more underpowered
than the chip in the iPod. What the Maverick often has that many
other DSPs don't have is access to alot of memory. This was indeed a
stumbling block for a while.
Since then, we've made three mostly seperate branches of the Tremor
codec line (used in the Rio), each tailored to specific CPU and memory
structural differences found in different DSP architectures. Hugo
Fiennes didn't mention which he was using... or if he was aware there
are multiple different branches today (although I expect he is aware,
it's worth mentioning).
From the story:
"The 5002 has a "broken" cache (1 wait state per access for program or
data, meaning you effectively have half the effective clock rate when
running code from external memory). This means that running code that
doesn't fit in the internal 96kbyte SRAM of the player is very
inefficient, both in terms of CPU cycles and power."
He didn't say if he meant code, data or both, but modern Tremor can
fit both comfortably into this space. This is still substantially
faster than the ARM7 DRAM-based access Tremor was originally designed
for (using SRAM as a random-replacement cache with 7-14 wait-states on
a cache miss).
Also, he says it uses more power but also says they didn't optimize
much and so, they're mostly using the stock ANSI C Tremor decoder,
written by a single engineer (me) in a month as a 'starting point' to
help other engineers write a Vorbis decoder for their own
platforms. The mp3 playback is likely handcoded assembly written by a
professional team focused on only that task. This is in fact
astounding! It's also a testement to the power of good modern
compilers. I smile every time GCC soundly beats me at optimizing.
I agree that the newer iPods are more likely to decode Ogg and Vorbis
with ease. I do, however, strongly believe the original iPods can
also do so with room and cycles to spare.
I'll probably get to it eventually actually; ATAPI finally added packet commands for dealing with cache management on ATAPI drives, just like SCSI always had (but most drives just ignored)...Or you can increase the cache thrashing constant and rebuild. These days computers have more than 8 meg, it's probably worth doing;-)
The speed of CDparanoia is not limited by the cdparanoia code. Regardless of future improvements, speed gain would never be one of them. If anything, additional error correction would only ever make it slower. Your limit is Linux forcing programmed I/O because the IDE subsystem doesn't know how to use DMA on non-multiple-of-512-byte sector sizes. CDDA is 2532 bytes per sector. Linux 2.6 partially fixes this.
Also, cdparanoia (III) was finished long ago. It has not bitrotted. As new kernels came out, we+others kept it up to date. The distribution maintainers have added whatever fixes have been necessary for their distros. Nothing that worked in 1999 is broken today.
In summary... paranoia does 100% of what *I* need it to. I write software that I need. I don't have to keep releasing 'improved' versions of software that already works as an ego-trip or to placate a marketing department desperate to sell you the same thing in a new box every six months. Others have expressed interest in doing new things with paranoia, but no one has followed through... at least not yet. Paranoia isn't all that complicated to use or hack. That speaks to a pretty damned low demand for new versions.
The website: yah, OK, I'm lousy at writing HTML updates. My diary hasn't been updated in three years. There is certainly a website attention span problem;-)
Theora: I'm not one of the primary coders today, I only did the initial code import. Also, the Helix project has required relatively little time; Real has done nearly all the heavy lifting on integration there.But, if 'Theora is dead', why does CIA show 500 commits in the past two months?
DirectShow issues can be summed up as 'ugh, what an awful system'. But we'll make it work. The discussion about mux was proposed changes to spec. Voluminous discussion reveals what we have now is still the best option, as designed five years ago.
It's odd to keep hearing this code referred to as a 'fork'. Yes, it's based on our reference code while doing further tuning just like all the free MP3 encoders are based off of the original dist8 or dist10.
Fork seems to imply that they're trying to make something incompatible or doing it without our blessing. Neither is true! We never wanted to have *the* only encoder. Nor did we want to be the only people trying to improve Vorbis's encoding.
AoTuV is a 100% real Vorbis encoder and the results of the test speak for themselves. Aoyumi and crew deserve kudos, and I'm glad to see them working on improving Vorbis encoding.
Openminded? I think you mean Icecast, not shoutcast.
And for that matter, to be fair to Real, the the Helix server/player/tools are also Open/Free (both Speech and Beer).
That doesn't really address the 'free Real player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night' comment... Real's own employees have bitched about that for years, God knows the rest of us have. Hopefully that gives the Open movement within Real (the Helix Community) a little more leverage in selling their case to the more hardline business folk still trying to figure out why their user base is evaporating.
OTOH, I'm a bit pissed off... I have a free Real player (with all the source) that works great. Thanks Click and Clack, I can't listen to your program anymore. That 'free' windows player comes with a $200 Windows tax attached.
Nothing like a damned fool 'statement' that flies in the face of common sense.
Subject sez it all. Although I must admit the build system on PPC requires a minor bit of chainsawing, and there's some trouble with gcc 3.3 due to gcc de-supporting varargs....
Monty
Stop on by the #icecast channel
on
Icecast 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You should probably describe more the setup and the situation under which this is happening; networks are finicky beasts and if this is passing over a cablemodem link or DSL or WAN routing, burst loss or bandwidth assymetry or ARP warring could certainly cause it. Or the clock on your PC may be way too slow/fast. It's unlikely WinAmp or XMMS, but there's easy ways to figure that out too.
Slashdot is the wrong place to debug this further, but if this is causing you headaches (it seems it is) and you want to figure it out, drop by #icecast on irc.freenode.net and we'll get it sorted. It might take a few appearances in the channel to be there at a time when there are the right folks to help you out, but you'll definitely catch us without too much effort.
Monty
You misunderstand how the rate control works
on
Icecast 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It always worked properly; you misunderstand how the timing has to work.
When a connection is momentarily interrupted, the streaming server doesn't just stall the timing on the connection; it's still tracking how much data had to go out in a given period of time. The total output at any time will always be up to date. Thus, if the network connection is interrupted momentarily, the data will indeed burst forward to the correct point when connectivity resumes. It's like squeezing off a very stretchy hose for a short time.
The connection is dropped only if connectivity disappears for longer than a certain threshold. Oh, and naturally, if you're trying to listen to a broadband bitstream over a 28.8 modem, you're going to get kicked pretty quickly. The hose only stretches so far, and if it bursts your connection gets dropped. That's not a bug.
Also, a client that falls behind on its own will eventually burst the hose. That's a bug in the client; you won't fall further and further behind unless a) your playback rate is way off or b) your buffering is pooched. It's the client's responsibility to accept data at the rate the streaming server sends it. The streaming server's timing is correct; if something happens to mess with the client timing, the client has to deal with that.
As for 'flooding data at the beginning of a connection', that doesn't really make sense in a system where every client has a configurable, different sized prebuffer.
Apologies; an ill-timed cron job strangled the disk throughput on the web server.
But really, who the Hell reads Slashdot before noon? Jeez people, go sleep. CVS will still be there come dusk...
Monty
another for fans... _Star Wars: Musical Edition_
on
LOTR The Musical!
·
· Score: 1
For those who didn't know about it, the MIT Musical Theatre Guild staged an original musical version of the Star Wars trilogy. Well, IV through VI are written but we've only staged Episode IV at this point... we're hoping to do Empire in 2005 or 2006. Don't forget to put it on your calendars:-)
[It was worth nearly all the work just to hear C3PO (Nori Pritchard) get into a rant and call R2D2 an "upstaging little bitch". That wasn't onstage, sadly, 'twas a 'family friendly' show, like the original movie]
Ogg Theora exists, but is not in full release. I reserve 'vaporware' for products that are more glossy brochure than code. Theora is substantially in the form it will take for final release; it's waiting on Ogg infrastructure, not codec hacking....and Vorbis is currently well ahead of MPEG4 audio. AAC+SBR is purely catch-up (as practically the entire world is ahead of AAC at the moment). Run a few tests for yourself if you don't believe me.
By the time AAC+SBR is finalized, I hope to be on to Vorbis II. But that truly is vaporware at the moment.
I'm not going to flame here because it sounds like the author means well, OTOH, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. This one frankly belongs on the same list as UFO coverups and Flouride Conspiracies. He doesn't indicate any in-depth knowledge of what he's writing about, just the kind of layman-level understanding psychosomatics get when they scare themselves silly reading anatomy texts.
Perhaps our author really is state-of-the-art, but I see nothing in his article to indicate that. Everything cited can be found in beginner's texts on the subject. Nor is anything cited particularly relevant to his conclusions.
Let's not forget that the CD itself is a 'data reduced' sampling of a real world signal, at best an approximation of the original. And so was vinyl. I don't see many claims that the harsh approximations of the 33 1/3 LP are damaging ears by the very nature of their artifical reproduction... Unless, of course, you play them too loud:-) Volume can certainly damage.
Living in a modern city, it's nearly impossible to not end up with some level of permanent tinnitus, and it worsens with age. However, there's an interesting paradox here: Background noise is required for the auditory system to function properly. Perfect dead silence, for prolonged periods, will also damage the auditory system-- through atrophy due to lack of stimulus (an unexpected discovery from a few fascinating experiments)
You'll need to license over a hundred actively defended patents to play in the MP4 kiddie pool.
The standard is well and publicly specced, and this is indeed a much better thing than it being secret. But you're required to pay money even for the right to build your own from scratch.
Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I wish the posters here would find a bit of INDEPENDENCE.
Yeah, me too! I'm SICK to DEATH of Slashdot posters just COMPLAINING! I mean these losers have nothing better to do but bitch and moan about other people's nasal, annoying posts and... oops, damn!
Slashdot Mirror
> Both girls tentatively scheduled to attend refused comment.
;-)
You haven't looked around recently have you? MIT is half women, just as nerdy as the men... Our audiences for SWME last time were pretty much half and half and the cast/crew is more than half women.
I know, I know, now your joke sucks even more. Sorry
Monty
Not only does it have a tapdancing Stormtrooper line, it's done to a burlesque version of the Imperial March ;-)
Monty
> So, in this production, does Han shoot first?
:-)
*NO*. Everyone involved is agreed on that
Monty
(who was the sound engineer for the first two times we did Star Wars Musical Edition. This is actually the third Star Wars musical the troupe is putting on.)
I will point out that many pro sound engineers are not also even more pro computer people. I help write DAW software... and couldn't figure out how to work on an existing file without you telling me. Most people who try out Ardour won't complain if they can't get it to work. The majority tends to give up and wander away; that's a problem for all of us.
[also, a disclaimer. I'm only 'semi-pro'; I take money but don't pretend to live on it as a career. That said, I do have an annoying penchant for expensive equipment]
Monty
There's a good reason why alot of user-application software happens first on systems like the Mac or Windows and comes to Linux second. It all has to do with what's a commodity and what isn't. The OS is a commodity (always was, actually, although people haven't realized that until lately). Text editors are a commodity. Web servers are a commodity. So are browsers. MP3 encoders are another.
;-)
...and this is _one_ of the places where Open Source steps into the picture naturally. When the DAW becomes a piece of commodity public infrastructure, OSS will come to offer the best choice: streamlined, debugged, interested in giving the user what they want rather than taking the user's money first, everything else is second. After all... the purpose of a company is to make money. "You don't need a product to make money... customers alone will do."
These are all things that, for the most part, people are no longer willing to pay money for. For that reason, you don't see big companies trying very hard to develop them (except for Windows/MS, and that's a special case for oh so many reasons. I expect the Mafia could make alot of money selling ice cubes to Eskimos too
DAWs have happened on commercial platforms first because there was money to be made on the hardware and there was money to be made on the software too. Open Source dogma aside, money *does* fuel innovation, and while a truly new and original application is working out the Right Way to do something for the first time, there's money to be made there... and while these software vendors are small and hungry, money does help the work get done faster.
With DAWs, Paul himself has said 'everyone has converged on the same feature set', an indication that all the innovation is more or less over, all the Big Problems mostly solved, and that this niche is about to commoditize. At that point the margins erode, the previously small fast hungry companies are now big, comfortable slow companies trying to hold onto what they've got and you see nothing really new appear--- although those big slow companies are desperately trying to cram new (mostly useless) 'features' into endless 'upgrades' to get people to keep spending money, be it on their software or their hardware.
Although OSS has driven and does drive innovation, don't overlook that one of its great roles is provide and maintain quality software in all those niches where Corporate America no longer feels like spending a great deal of its attention. Microsoft won the browser war, and hasn't released a new IE in years. Without Mozilla, we'd not have had a new browser in coming up on six years.
So accusing Ardour, or many other OSS workalikes of being clones isn't fair. They wouldn't exist if there was no need.
Monty
I don't actually object to that development model in any way; there's nothing unreasonable about it, and I've strongly considered it myself.
;-)
I was complaining about one and only one thing: For the life of me, I can't figure out how to make it do *anything*. The number of buttons has nothing to do with this; most of my physical control surfaces have even more physical buttons than six copies of Ardour.
If I knew it would give me something my current tools don't, great! I'd happily buy the manual and figure out how to use it. But given that my needs are fufilled (as far as I know anyway; I'm always looking for better), and I can't make heads or tails of Ardour, I'm instead happily not going to be buying the manual. For now anyway.
So... How *do* you use it to do anything with audio you already have on disk? I notice you didn't answer that question
Monty
I'll offer this comment about Ardour; I'm the author of Postfish, Ogg and a regular contributor to Audacity. I've been hearing good thigns about Ardour for more than a year and have thus tried repeatedly to try it out.
a) No manual. No usable manual anyway. I know no one who uses it, so I have no 'live' manual to get me going either. Lots of apps don't have good manuals, but this goes along with b...
b) 'Angry fruit salad' user interface. Lots of functionality [apparently] brilliantly obfuscated by a million buttons in every imaginable color grouped randomly with no real UI intuitiveness to make up for the missing manual. I'm no newbie to pro audio; recording and mastering soundtrack CDs for local theatre groups is one of my pasttimes. But I cannot figure out how to even get started. I spend about an hour on step one every couple of months and have never succeeded in getting it to do anything with the 400G of raw digital audio sitting on my box.
The end result is that I've been unable to figure out how to find the most rudimentary starting-out functions. I already have all my audio; Ardour is too heavy to run on my portable recording boxes-- I have beaverphonic already doing my HD recording for the past several years-- so how do I do anything using Ardour with audio I already have? The manual's tutorials all begin with 'press the record button...' The FAQ says I can use it with my recordings, but the UI and manual conspire to convince me none of that functionality actually exists.
All this *is* a flame-- Ardour is supposedly good software but all it's done is waste my time and for that reason I'm annoyed-- but it's also a genuine request of the Ardour authors to help out all us poor folks that aren't Ardour hackers to get started. I'd love to see what this package can do and give it a fair shake.
Monty
Sorry, the HydrogenAudio board is redirecting that click-through to the front page. This link should work.
...might as well toss my plug in too. This is prerelease, but I've already mixed-down/mastered a live CD with it.
t op ic=22051&
http://209.152.181.168/~hydrogen/index.php?show
Monty
I'll probably get to it eventually actually; ATAPI finally added packet commands for dealing with cache management on ATAPI drives, just like SCSI always had (but most drives just ignored). ..Or you can increase the cache thrashing constant and rebuild. These days computers have more than 8 meg, it's probably worth doing ;-)
Monty
The speed of CDparanoia is not limited by the cdparanoia code. Regardless of future improvements, speed gain would never be one of them. If anything, additional error correction would only ever make it slower. Your limit is Linux forcing programmed I/O because the IDE subsystem doesn't know how to use DMA on non-multiple-of-512-byte sector sizes. CDDA is 2532 bytes per sector. Linux 2.6 partially fixes this.
;-)
Also, cdparanoia (III) was finished long ago. It has not bitrotted. As new kernels came out, we+others kept it up to date. The distribution maintainers have added whatever fixes have been necessary for their distros. Nothing that worked in 1999 is broken today.
In summary... paranoia does 100% of what *I* need it to. I write software that I need. I don't have to keep releasing 'improved' versions of software that already works as an ego-trip or to placate a marketing department desperate to sell you the same thing in a new box every six months.
Others have expressed interest in doing new things with paranoia, but no one has followed through... at least not yet. Paranoia isn't all that complicated to use or hack. That speaks to a pretty damned low demand for new versions.
The website: yah, OK, I'm lousy at writing HTML updates. My diary hasn't been updated in three years. There is certainly a website attention span problem
Theora: I'm not one of the primary coders today, I only did the initial code import. Also, the Helix project has required relatively little time; Real has done nearly all the heavy lifting on integration there.But, if 'Theora is dead', why does CIA show 500 commits in the past two months?
DirectShow issues can be summed up as 'ugh, what an awful system'. But we'll make it work. The discussion about mux was proposed changes to spec. Voluminous discussion reveals what we have now is still the best option, as designed five years ago.
Monty
It's odd to keep hearing this code referred to as a 'fork'. Yes, it's based on our reference code while doing further tuning just like all the free MP3 encoders are based off of the original dist8 or dist10.
Fork seems to imply that they're trying to make something incompatible or doing it without our blessing. Neither is true! We never wanted to have *the* only encoder. Nor did we want to be the only people trying to improve Vorbis's encoding.
AoTuV is a 100% real Vorbis encoder and the results of the test speak for themselves. Aoyumi and crew deserve kudos, and I'm glad to see them working on improving Vorbis encoding.
Monty
And for that matter, to be fair to Real, the the Helix server/player/tools are also Open/Free (both Speech and Beer).
That doesn't really address the 'free Real player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night' comment... Real's own employees have bitched about that for years, God knows the rest of us have. Hopefully that gives the Open movement within Real (the Helix Community) a little more leverage in selling their case to the more hardline business folk still trying to figure out why their user base is evaporating.
OTOH, I'm a bit pissed off... I have a free Real player (with all the source) that works great. Thanks Click and Clack, I can't listen to your program anymore. That 'free' windows player comes with a $200 Windows tax attached.
Nothing like a damned fool 'statement' that flies in the face of common sense.
Monty
Subject sez it all. Although I must admit the build system on PPC requires a minor bit of chainsawing, and there's some trouble with gcc 3.3 due to gcc de-supporting varargs....
Monty
You should probably describe more the setup and the situation under which this is happening; networks are finicky beasts and if this is passing over a cablemodem link or DSL or WAN routing, burst loss or bandwidth assymetry or ARP warring could certainly cause it. Or the clock on your PC may be way too slow/fast. It's unlikely WinAmp or XMMS, but there's easy ways to figure that out too.
Slashdot is the wrong place to debug this further, but if this is causing you headaches (it seems it is) and you want to figure it out, drop by #icecast on irc.freenode.net and we'll get it sorted. It might take a few appearances in the channel to be there at a time when there are the right folks to help you out, but you'll definitely catch us without too much effort.
Monty
It always worked properly; you misunderstand how the timing has to work.
When a connection is momentarily interrupted, the streaming server doesn't just stall the timing on the connection; it's still tracking how much data had to go out in a given period of time. The total output at any time will always be up to date. Thus, if the network connection is interrupted momentarily, the data will indeed burst forward to the correct point when connectivity resumes. It's like squeezing off a very stretchy hose for a short time.
The connection is dropped only if connectivity disappears for longer than a certain threshold. Oh, and naturally, if you're trying to listen to a broadband bitstream over a 28.8 modem, you're going to get kicked pretty quickly. The hose only stretches so far, and if it bursts your connection gets dropped. That's not a bug.
Also, a client that falls behind on its own will eventually burst the hose. That's a bug in the client; you won't fall further and further behind unless a) your playback rate is way off or b) your buffering is pooched. It's the client's responsibility to accept data at the rate the streaming server sends it. The streaming server's timing is correct; if something happens to mess with the client timing, the client has to deal with that.
As for 'flooding data at the beginning of a connection', that doesn't really make sense in a system where every client has a configurable, different sized prebuffer.
Monty
... but the AAC+SBR you need to get low bitrate performance with Darwin is not.
(He said Ogg, not Icecast, as Icecast is not a codec and neither is the Darwin Streaming Server)
Monty
Apologies; an ill-timed cron job strangled the disk throughput on the web server.
But really, who the Hell reads Slashdot before noon? Jeez people, go sleep. CVS will still be there come dusk...
Monty
There's not much about it on the main MTG page because it's a past show, but two good reviews appeared in the Cambridge Chronicle and the Boston Phoenix.
[It was worth nearly all the work just to hear C3PO (Nori Pritchard) get into a rant and call R2D2 an "upstaging little bitch". That wasn't onstage, sadly, 'twas a 'family friendly' show, like the original movie]
Monty
Ogg Theora exists, but is not in full release. I reserve 'vaporware' for products that are more glossy brochure than code. Theora is substantially in the form it will take for final release; it's waiting on Ogg infrastructure, not codec hacking. ...and Vorbis is currently well ahead of MPEG4 audio. AAC+SBR is purely catch-up (as practically the entire world is ahead of AAC at the moment). Run a few tests for yourself if you don't believe me.
By the time AAC+SBR is finalized, I hope to be on to Vorbis II. But that truly is vaporware at the moment.
Monty
Heh. Good to be funny. Better to be funny with a point. But ouch, a palpable hit. Touche' :-)
Monty
I'm not going to flame here because it sounds like the author means well, OTOH, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. This one frankly belongs on the same list as UFO coverups and Flouride Conspiracies. He doesn't indicate any in-depth knowledge of what he's writing about, just the kind of layman-level understanding psychosomatics get when they scare themselves silly reading anatomy texts.
:-) Volume can certainly damage.
Perhaps our author really is state-of-the-art, but I see nothing in his article to indicate that. Everything cited can be found in beginner's texts on the subject. Nor is anything cited particularly relevant to his conclusions.
Let's not forget that the CD itself is a 'data reduced' sampling of a real world signal, at best an approximation of the original. And so was vinyl. I don't see many claims that the harsh approximations of the 33 1/3 LP are damaging ears by the very nature of their artifical reproduction... Unless, of course, you play them too loud
Living in a modern city, it's nearly impossible to not end up with some level of permanent tinnitus, and it worsens with age. However, there's an interesting paradox here: Background noise is required for the auditory system to function properly. Perfect dead silence, for prolonged periods, will also damage the auditory system-- through atrophy due to lack of stimulus (an unexpected discovery from a few fascinating experiments)
Monty
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
"Put down that uninformed pontificating before you poke out an eye"
You'll need to license over a hundred actively defended patents to play in the MP4 kiddie pool.
The standard is well and publicly specced, and this is indeed a much better thing than it being secret. But you're required to pay money even for the right to build your own from scratch.
Monty
Yeah, me too! I'm SICK to DEATH of Slashdot posters just COMPLAINING! I mean these losers have nothing better to do but bitch and moan about other people's nasal, annoying posts and... oops, damn!
Monty
"Tee-Hee!"