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1
MP3 - Tech / Re: Current status of MP3 encoders
Last post by Kamedo2 -
Quote from: btc on
Look at JPEG, modern encoders of old format as Guetzli squeezes extra 10-20% of quality using more advanced and complex psychovisual model.
If you look at JPEG, jpegli is even better; Without the Guetzli's more than 1000x slowness, and unlike Mozjpeg, jpegli is tuned for all ranges of quality, including high quality settings. You can test at
jxl-x64-windows-static.zip, cjpegli.exe.

Quote from: btc on
Does anybody know if there is active development of any MP3 encoder?  There were some changes for Helix encoder this year but it's related to usability not quality. LAME 3.99 is faster than 3.98  but  pretty the same in terms of quality. And LAME 3.100/3.101 didn't bring any quality improvements.

As far as I know, there is no active development of MP3 encoders in 2024, outside of Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder.
4
3rd Party Plugins - (fb2k) / Re: foo_enhanced_spectrum_analyzer
Last post by TF3RDL -
Quote from: Kronzky on
It seem TF3RDL has scared off the original developer so much that we'll have to look elsewhere now...
Hence, the reason why I've made a separate thread dedicated for feature requests for this component

I hope @Crossover doing well without any adverse mental health effects coming from my doings (e.g. a fanon wiki page about a supposed future version of this) that supposedly "scared" him off
6
Audio Hardware / Re: Isthere any new 5.1 channel amplifier with Dolby and dts without speakers.
Last post by Apesbrain -
Those "square" plugs at the end of your speaker wires are Sony proprietary and meant to make it easy to plug them into the main unit. If you remove the plastic plugs, the bare wires can connect to any standard amplifier.

YouTube video: https://youtu.be/-ddnqr3o3kM

As for the "round holes", you need to look up "5-way binding posts" and understand how they work.  They will accept any bare wire.

I don't think your LG DVD player has any use with this Sony.
8
MP3 - Tech / Re: Current status of MP3 encoders
Last post by a.ok.in -
AFAIK, currently there's nothing serious to do with MP3. I think it could be even better to work in Musepack or Opus instead.
(but actually no idea of nothing :D)

Okay no. But I'm not sure of how far we can go. There's Vorbis and AAC. Different settings and encoders give different results, but actually there isn't one that provides an incredible increase of quality.
10
MP3 - Tech / Current status of MP3 encoders
Last post by btc -
  Hi.

I found the results of this public test interesting. https://listening-tests.hydrogenaud.io/sebastian/mp3-128-1/results.htm
The test is dated but MP3 encoders haven't changed much since then.

Different MP3 encoders perform better on different type of music, different type of signals:
Helix is good at electronic music, sharp transients and good portion of instrumentals.
LAME 3.97 is good on rock and metal (where Helix doesn't perform well)
Fraunhofer is good at voice & singing parts.

These encoders keep high quality while not jumping  that much in bitrate, so it's not just bumping bitrate over all samples, but being smart on VBR algorithms and increasing bitrates where it is only required  ;)

It's a good indicator that there is still room to improve MP3. How much?  I would estimated it as equivalent to 15% of bitrate gain at 130-145 kbps, V5-V4 settings, looking at performance of different encoders from that public test.  It's been a long time and developers now have more tools to make a better encoders ( like better metrics to measure audio quality, faster hardware etc.)
Look at JPEG, modern encoders of old format as Guetzli squeezes extra 10-20% of quality using more advanced and complex psychovisual model.

Does anybody know if there is active development of any MP3 encoder?  There were some changes for Helix encoder this year but it's related to usability not quality. LAME 3.99 is faster than 3.98  but  pretty the same in terms of quality. And LAME 3.100/3.101 didn't bring any quality improvements.