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WMA support status?

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CSMR:

--- Quote from: soap on March 23, 2007, 01:50:15 PM ---I love the idea of Vorbis, but unfortunately developement is essentially dead.  (At least for the time being.)
The aotuv tunings are just that, tunings.  LAME, on the other hand, routinely bores and strokes the engine of MP3, proving that active, consistent, development of a more mature encoder can make lemonaid out of lemons.
--- End quote ---
Yes that is unfortunate but will LAME it ever become better than what is currently available with aotuv vorbis?

--- Quote ---AAC might not be nearly as warm and cuddly as Vorbis, but Nero is showing, much as the LAME project does, that working and reworking an encoder can produce significant improvements in output quality, even while the specification remains unchanged.  AAC is, most likely, the successor to MP3.  Cell phones support it almost universally now, iPods support (a subset) of it out of the box, and the quality at low-bitrates is improving quickly.  The transparency battle has already been fought, and it was a stalemate, with favor going to the one with most penetration (MP3).  The low bitrate war is already in full-swing, and unless Vorbis awakes from its multi-year coma, it doesn't have a chance.  (MP3 isn't even showing up to this fight.)

Superior technology is rarely enough of a mega-weapon to win a war*, and superior specifications even less so.  Marketshare and mindshare almost always rule the day, and Vorbis offers no compelling reason to those other than ideological converts.

But that's just my opinion, I might be wrong.

*Not to mention that Vorbis, as it stands today, is not superior to AAC in terms of features.
--- End quote ---
Oh yes I've heard AAC is now pretty good. I don't think that popularity wars are won over the issue of transparency at all. Just interesting to some people in some situations. I've looked at this stuff over the last few days because my H140 has run out of space with lossless music. AAC I heard doesn't work completely in rockbox (?) and aotuv vorbis looked better than the others. Nothing idological! And the vorbis stuff will sit peacefully on my H140; no venturing out to wage any format wars!

saratoga:

--- Quote from: CSMR on March 23, 2007, 02:03:40 PM ---
Yes lame does look pretty good in that test and is not behind the others (significantly).

--- End quote ---

Its not behind at all.  (Read the link I posted, its all in there)


--- Quote from: CSMR on March 23, 2007, 02:03:40 PM ---The best the test could do is not disprove transparency. I don't know the rules of that test.

--- End quote ---

Why not read them then before you come to conclusions?


--- Quote from: CSMR on March 23, 2007, 02:03:40 PM ---Would the original wav have got 5 exactly?

--- End quote ---

No.


--- Quote from: CSMR on March 23, 2007, 02:03:40 PM ---Here is a test including the same LAME and vorbis encoder which doesn't get transparency for any codec at 180kbs:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=36465
Average equipment but probably good ears and experience. LAME is significantly (statistically) inferior to aotuv vorbis. And everything abxable from wav.

--- End quote ---

One person, older version of LAME.  

Also, picking arguably the most experienced expert in digital audio compression listening tests and claiming his hearing is indicative of people as a whole is not particularly fair.  guruboolez is part of the reason MP3 and Vorbis are as good as they are today, but I wouldn't use him as the standard of transparency.  With enough training, essentially no codecs are transparent.


--- Quote from: CSMR on March 23, 2007, 02:03:40 PM ---I think this shows that those codecs are not transparent at 180kbs, so also presumably not at 128kbs.
"Transparent to some" no doubt, but not to all, so... not transparent.

--- End quote ---

Provided you have not updated your codecs in 2 years and are guruboolez, this is a valid conclusion.

Lear:

--- Quote from: CSMR on March 23, 2007, 02:17:31 PM ---AAC I heard doesn't work completely in rockbox (?) and aotuv vorbis looked better than the others.

--- End quote ---

AAC works, but there are some limitations:


* Only LC-AAC (i.e., what the iPod supports) play real-time.
* Very long files don't work (1.5+ hours or something).
* The files must be "streamable" (the metadata is located before the audio data).
Other than that, files encoded by iTunes, Winamp or Nero should work fine.

CSMR:

--- Quote from: saratoga on March 23, 2007, 02:57:06 PM ---Its not behind at all.  (Read the link I posted, its all in there)
--- End quote ---
I read it and that is why I said it is not significantly behind. Looking at the bars on the chart, it is a little behind but not significantly. I didn't say it was behind though then, only now. Very marginal.

--- Quote ---Why not read them then before you come to conclusions?
--- End quote ---
No explanation or link on the web page that I can find. I haven't made any conclusions based on what I don't know.

--- Quote ---One person, older version of LAME.
--- End quote ---
3.97 in both cases. Only a few moths difference between the tests.

--- Quote ---Also, picking arguably the most experienced expert in digital audio compression listening tests and claiming his hearing is indicative of people as a whole is not particularly fair.  guruboolez is part of the reason MP3 and Vorbis are as good as they are today, but I wouldn't use him as the standard of transparency.  With enough training, essentially no codecs are transparent.

Provided you have not updated your codecs in 2 years and are guruboolez, this is a valid conclusion.

--- End quote ---
Yes I am sure newer codecs are better and many people would not to be able to distinguish sound as well as guruboolez.

scorche:
(My opinion on everything of course):

Arguing about what bitrate is transparent is completely useless.  It depends much too heavily on the equipment, the type of music/sound, and the person.  It also depends on if you have something accurate (such as an actual performance) to base your findings off of.  With my $20 pair of headphones, about 160-192kbps was transparent to me.  However, with my rig now (lineout, amp, nice headphones), I have found that not even APX or 320kbps MP3s are transparent to me anymore (I have abx tested this, but the 320 was a real interesting bugger to try and detect).

So really... why argue this when there are way too many factors to account for which make saying "this bitrate is transparent" impossible?

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