Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Recent Posts
1
Opus / Re: xHE-AAC : The Death of OPUS?
Last post by Deathcrow -
I still see the dominance of this lossy format on the well-known, little-known and private sharing sites. The only thing that has changed is that FLAC is posted next to it.
This seems pretty disingenuous to me. I happen to be on quite a few of those sites and MP3 hardly is 'dominant'. It is provided as a legacy option for compatibility purposes or for people with very low bandwidth, but no one cares about it. Everything is FLAC and the amount traffic MP3 gets is at least a whole order of magnitude smaller, no one needs this tiny irrelevancy split further into Vorbis, Opus, AAC, Wavpack or whatever else..

No one in music sharing cares about lossy formats anymore (and rightfully so). I download FLACs and encode them to my favorite bleeding edge lossy format of choice to save space. And if I were OCD obsessed with archival, I'd just keep my whole library as FLAC because lossy is called lossy for a reason.
4
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by ha7pro -
Hello, everyone
My English is not good and my expression may not be accurate enough, please forgive me.
Longer audio (for example, more than 3 or 4 hours) encoded by hmp3 will have a high probability of playback failure. The audio file can display the correct duration in mediainfo, but in players such as foobar2000 and mpc, the audio Only the first part of the duration can be recognized and played normally, and the extra long part cannot be recognized and played by the player. This problem exists in multiple versions up to the latest, please check it out.
9
Other Lossy Codecs / Re: TSAC: Very Low Bitrate Audio Compression
Last post by Kraeved -
It's a pity to realize that TSAC needs a lot of computing power. Why? Because there are still plenty of places on Earth where people either can barely afford access to electricity (e.g. in Madagascar, 600 000 households out of 5.8 million) or it becomes expensive and requires to tighten the belts (e.g. in Europe, prices of electricity and gas have surged as much as 15-fold since 2021). As you know, power-hungry operations drain the battery of portable devices much faster, requiring frequent recharging, thereby shortening the lifespan and forcing to break the piggy bank again. And what for? For an audio-book to take up a little less space than, say, 22 kHz 32 kbit/s or 24 kHz 40 kbits/s fast and battery-friendly MP3 (encoded not by LAME, but by the resurrected Helix)? A dubious trade-off. Thus, TSAC, at least until its intended scope is officially announced, appears to be an academic study on sound compression using a GPU, which at first may stun with the grandeur, but in practical terms there is a sore temptation to take it as another exhibition of exotic animals.

The need to hear is so dire on our planet that the compression that makes it difficult to access the myriads of stories conveyed via sound vibrations is doomed either to niche status or to oblivion. A few decades ago in the US, people of color were forced to ride in a different part of the bus, and today it is not uncommon to meet a programmer (not you, dear @fab7) who is one step away from forcing users to be content with the sound of rain and wind if they are not in a hurry to buy the latest Silicon Valley stuff. What is it if not the resurgence of segregation, albeit in the digital domain? Think of a Cuban barista, a Palestinian builder, and a Tibetan teacher, not to mention the frugal residents of former Western colonies and millions of families who lost their savings due to tragedies such as earthquakes and floods, bank failures and wars — they are lucky to get second-hand vintage hardware, rent it or receive as a gift. Can we treat them as brothers and consider their cases when developing apps solutions? Or will our vision remain clouded by an intellectual feast divorced from empathy, with arguments about the elusive difference between 44.1 and 192 kHz?