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Topic: Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1 (Read 33462 times) previous topic - next topic
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Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #25 –
On my slow computer, Monkey's Audio has decent seeking with -c1000, 2000 & 3000. By decent, I mean near-immediate. It's fast, but not as fast as mp4 container, flac or WavPack. But -c4000 (extra high) and -c5000 (insane) are terribly slow. Not really seeking but the start-up: gapless playback is impossible, there's a 3-4 second gaps between two files! This behaviour was introduced with 3.99 or 3.98. With previous version, -c4000 was fine.
Wavpack Hybrid: one encoder, one encoding for all scenarios
WavPack -c4.5hx6 (44100Hz & 48000Hz) ≈ 390 kbps + correction file
WavPack -c4hx6 (96000Hz) ≈ 768 kbps + correction file
WavPack -h (SACD & DSD) ≈ 2400 kbps at 2.8224 MHz

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #26 –
Quote
On my slow computer, Monkey's Audio has decent seeking with -c1000, 2000 & 3000. By decent, I mean near-immediate. It's fast, but not as fast as mp4 container, flac or WavPack. But -c4000 (extra high) and -c5000 (insane) are terribly slow. Not really seeking but the start-up: gapless playback is impossible, there's a 3-4 second gaps between two files! This behaviour was introduced with 3.99 or 3.98. With previous version, -c4000 was fine.[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=359185"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I think Extra High and Insane are too slow in everything. Normal produces already decent file sizes. High is only a bit smaller and a bit slower too, but usable. I used previously Normal but when I got a faster PC High started to be fast enough and when the 300 GB HDs start to fill up every GB counts.

I changed from 3.97 to 3.99 just because the latter was newer. I have not seen much difference between the versions. At least not any new problems, otherwise I would still use 3.97 or some different lossless format.

I don't know if separate track files would make some difference. Most of my MA archives are in disc image format and I have not experienced gapless playback problems with foobar.

J. River Media Center caches always a few seconds of the following track before the track change, so it is even less likely to produce gapless playback problems. Though, I suppose foobar must have a similar buffer because starting a new file can never be exactly instant with any format, but perhaps the decoding system is different. Matt may have somehow optimized Monkey's Audio playback in Media Center.

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #27 –
Quote
Quote
On my slow computer, Monkey's Audio has decent seeking with -c1000, 2000 & 3000. By decent, I mean near-immediate. It's fast, but not as fast as mp4 container, flac or WavPack. But -c4000 (extra high) and -c5000 (insane) are terribly slow. Not really seeking but the start-up: gapless playback is impossible, there's a 3-4 second gaps between two files! This behaviour was introduced with 3.99 or 3.98. With previous version, -c4000 was fine.[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=359185"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


I think Extra High and Insane are too slow in everything. Normal produces already decent file sizes. High is only a bit smaller and a bit slower too, but usable. I used previously Normal but when I got a faster PC High started to be fast enough and when the 300 GB HDs start to fill up every GB counts.


[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=359188"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


i guess it just depends on how much music you actually have.. 'extra high' still starts playback immediately here (2800+ barton), while insane doesn't.. but the difference between the two are <500kb for every 30MB of file, so really negligible, while the difference between normal and extra high is still quite noticeable on a (current) store of about 160GB..
i'm not sure how big the difference between c3000 and c4000 is, but since the latter still plays instantly, it doesn't seem like a bad tradeoff

regardless, 'extra high' isn't 'too slow in everything', it's just slow on your pc, and while insane is, too, the extra space gain compared to the difference between high>extra high is negligible

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #28 –
Quote
Playback starts fast and the momentary CPU usage is ~5 %. On playback it is only about 0-1 %. Seeking anywhere in the file uses no more than 6-10 %. I would consider these values normal or actually quite low.

I have a P4 2.8 GHz/1 GB RAM, Hyperthreading enabled on XP. The file is on a 300 GB/16 MB cache Maxtor SATA drive (NTFS), which is almost full (< 1 GB of free space).[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=359184"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


While the seeking issues indeed play little importance on fast machines like yours, it is yeat another reason that could halt adoption of Monkey's on devices with limited processing power, like PDAs and DAPs. That's why I believe seeking, too, should be fixed.

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #29 –
forgive me for being blunt, but i doubt any lossless format will ever be supported by DAPs, other than perhaps ALAC (but i'm sure you can guess the problem with that one)..
The only 'Players' big enough for it to make sure it'll be 'universally' adopted are are (imho?) Creative and Apple..
The latter already has a format (which i would guess to be drm-able), and loves it when you transcode everything you own to their wonderful AAC format 'for increased compatibility', let alone lossless converting, with ALAC's compression ratios being utter crap on a stick.. (and controls 50~75% of the market in the part of the world where it counts)
With Creative being far too stubborn to do anything the customer asks for, just what they think they want, and Rio leaving the DAP market, that leaves noone but the 'Clone' DAP makers, who by definition won't do anything new..

i'm afraid the battle is somewhat lost there..

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #30 –
Quote
forgive me for being blunt, but i doubt any lossless format will ever be supported by DAPs, other than perhaps ALAC (but i'm sure you can guess the problem with that one)..
The only 'Players' big enough for it to make sure it'll be 'universally' adopted are are (imho?) Creative and Apple..
The latter already has a format (which i would guess to be drm-able), and loves it when you transcode everything you own to their wonderful AAC format 'for increased compatibility', let alone lossless converting, with ALAC's compression ratios being utter crap on a stick.. (and controls 50~75% of the market in the part of the world where it counts)
With Creative being far too stubborn to do anything the customer asks for, just what they think they want, and Rio leaving the DAP market, that leaves noone but the 'Clone' DAP makers, who by definition won't do anything new..

i'm afraid the battle is somewhat lost there..
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=362114"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Ahum, many Cowon iAudio players already support FLAC lossless audio...

Edit:
I won't comment any further on market shares of DAP manufacturers or using lossless audio in portable players, not willing to take this thread even further off topic  .

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #31 –
Quote
Quote
forgive me for being blunt, but i doubt any lossless format will ever be supported by DAPs, other than perhaps ALAC (but i'm sure you can guess the problem with that one)..
The only 'Players' big enough for it to make sure it'll be 'universally' adopted are are (imho?) Creative and Apple..
The latter already has a format (which i would guess to be drm-able), and loves it when you transcode everything you own to their wonderful AAC format 'for increased compatibility', let alone lossless converting, with ALAC's compression ratios being utter crap on a stick.. (and controls 50~75% of the market in the part of the world where it counts)
With Creative being far too stubborn to do anything the customer asks for, just what they think they want, and Rio leaving the DAP market, that leaves noone but the 'Clone' DAP makers, who by definition won't do anything new..

i'm afraid the battle is somewhat lost there..
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=362114"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Ahum, many Cowon iAudio players already support FLAC lossless audio...
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=362119"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]



forgive me, but do they even have a 1% market share?..
i'm sure there are thousands out there, but that still amounts to nothing on a public consisting of tens of millions.
further there's the question of how many of those people actually use the flac support..

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #32 –
Besides Cowon iAudio, iRiver's HDD players support FLAC and iPods with RockBox firmware support FLAC.
Ogg Vorbis for music and speech [q-2.0 - q6.0]
FLAC for recordings to be edited
Speex for speech

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #33 –
Quote
forgive me, but do they even have a 1% market share?..
i'm sure there are thousands out there, but that still amounts to nothing on a public consisting of tens of millions.
further there's the question of how many of those people actually use the flac support..

what does that have to do with anything?  probably less than 1% of the players by market share have 6 or more vowels in the name too.  so what's your point?

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #34 –
Quote
Quote
forgive me, but do they even have a 1% market share?..
i'm sure there are thousands out there, but that still amounts to nothing on a public consisting of tens of millions.
further there's the question of how many of those people actually use the flac support..

what does that have to do with anything?  probably less than 1% of the players by market share have 6 or more vowels in the name too.  so what's your point?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=362341"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


my point is that if there is no market demand for something companies won't care about implementing it either.. nor will they penetrate the market selling only a few 1000s of a product and make it a hype that way..

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #35 –
that's obvious.  but market share is irrelevant to choice.  if you want lossless on a portable you have several fine choices now.

the problem with monkey's audio is not just demand, it's technological, being difficult to implement on low-powered devices.

Josh

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #36 –
Monkey's Audio 4.01 beta2 is now available 

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/

Quote
cooledit (audition) is crushed using new cooledit filter.


cooledit filter don't work yet 

EDIT: typo
<name>madoka</name>

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #37 –
It's too bad that there still are problems both with the codec and licencing of Monkey's Audio. What's even worse is that even though monkey's is at a kind of stand-still, it still provides the best ratio at any given speed of all the formats to date (maybe except some insane optimfrog setting though). Are the algorithms used in monkey's really that much more superior to flac/wavpack?

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #38 –
Quote
It's too bad that there still are problems both with the codec and licencing of Monkey's Audio. What's even worse is that even though monkey's is at a kind of stand-still, it still provides the best ratio at any given speed of all the formats to date (maybe except some insane optimfrog setting though). Are the algorithms used in monkey's really that much more superior to flac/wavpack?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=375430"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Monkey's Audio certainly uses a very efficient algorithm, but I believe that the reason it performs so well in the compression vs. speed test is because it has some hand-optimized MMX functions doing the core of the decorrelation. In fact, I suspect that some details of the algorithm were actually designed with the MMX instruction set in mind, and for this reason it may be basically unbeatable on the x86 platform.

I have heard anecdotally that Monkey's Audio does not perform well on non-x86 platforms (like the MAC), but I have never seen a rigorous comparison. I imagine that if it was not able to take advantage of its MMX optimizations it would perform pretty much like the rest of the  lossless compressors.
 

Monkey's Audio 4.01 BETA 1

Reply #39 –
>still are problems both with the codec

Ellaborate on these problems please.