Jack M Posted August 22, 2006 Report Share Posted August 22, 2006 sorry jack, but youre mistaken. I've A/B'd on a decent home stereo, and on my studio setup where I spend many many hours and know the sound intimately, and the .ogg format does not sound like crap. Well I don't know what an .ogg is, but the difference between a lossless file and even a 256kbps mp3 is quite obvious to me on my system. And I'm not bragging about my system, it's not <i>that</i> great. (well okay, my Transparent speaker cables are friggin' awesome, probably better than anyone here's except maybe Gilmour's, but only because I got them for 70% off when I worked in a hi-fi store for a summer) and "lossless compression" is an oxymoron. umm, see kjl's posts. Actually much of what goes over the internet is losslessly compressed, especially text. If the html file your browser requests gets corrupted en route even by one <i>bit</i>, your file has to be re-sent. as for home listening...CDs. The ripping is just for portable anyway. Car, riding (well, never have actually) exercise etc. Nice having my entire collection on a 60GB player with TONS of space left over! CDs get scratched, fingerprinted, lost, stolen, bitten, etc., especially by four year old boys named Teddy, and one year old girls name Dory. Also, you can't play a shuffle of your <i>entire collection</i> in your CD player (assuming it's not a jukebox). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Dold Posted August 22, 2006 Report Share Posted August 22, 2006 If the html file your browser requests gets corrupted en route even by one <i>bit</i>, your file has to be re-sent.Not just the packet containing the error? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Gendzwill Posted August 22, 2006 Report Share Posted August 22, 2006 D-Sub is right in that most audio compression schemes in use are lossy, simply because lossless schemes don't provide sufficient compression. For example, the LZF encoding used in zip files provides something like 4:1, depending on data. MP3 compression for a 128 kbps is about 11:1 and most people can't detect the difference between it and CD in typical applications (portable stereo, car audio) but can tell on a home system. At 256, you need a pretty good stereo to hear the difference. But there's better music codecs than MP3 around now. The ones we use for XM have better compression, although I can't tell you details. Lossy audio compression schemes count on certain characteristics of the anticipated data. Some of them use perceptual techniques, in other words they count on known characteristics of the human ear and the way we perceive music to fill in lost information. On the extreme end, something like AMBE can compress about 350:1 compared to the CD standard but it's specialised for the human voice. If you try to pass white noise through AMBE, it comes out sounding like a bunch of mumbling men as the codec tries to make sense out of it. Such codecs can't pass music or pure tones very successfully so that causes some problems in telephony applications. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Derf Posted August 23, 2006 Report Share Posted August 23, 2006 Well I don't know what an .ogg is, but the difference between a lossless file and even a 256kbps mp3 is quite obvious to me on my system. Here is some info on Ogg Vorbis: Wikipedia Vorbis.com And it is an open format, contrary to mp3 that belongs to Fraunhofer. From the double blind test, at equivalent bitrates, ogg came on top over mp3. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr. sandman Posted September 6, 2006 Report Share Posted September 6, 2006 Any one else use Soul Seek? Maybe not the biggest or best, but usually a decent and somewhat eclectic source. Never paid a dime, but my brother-in-law recently tried to use it and said it was prompting him to pay. If I remember, that was an option, not a requirement. Check it out www.soulseek.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted September 6, 2006 Report Share Posted September 6, 2006 Not just the packet containing the error? ahem, you are correct sir. Here's a distantly related question.... Is there any difference between a regular blank writable CD and one that says "music" or "audio" on it somewhere? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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