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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.
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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?
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3rd Party Plugins - (fb2k) / Re: UPnP: How does the Media Library Tree work?
Last post by SimBun -
@SimBun
Do you know if I can add ratings through the MinimServer android app?  I know that's not something UPnP can do.
MinimServer is the server component of UPnP. It reads ratings and passes them onto the control point but there's no way for the control point to pass an updated rating back and to store it in the file.

The only control point I know that displays the ratings properly from MinimServer (or any UPnP server) is the MediaMonkey Android app. I have requested this feature of BubbleUPnP but it has yet to be developed. Just like foobar's title formatting, MinimServer can append the rating to the track title so it's visible to any app, but it's not as nice as seeing it on the Now Playing screen.

There are ugly workarounds that consist of adding the track to a playlist (1*, 2*, 3*, 4*, 5*) and then exporting those playlists to update the tracks.

Systems like PlexAmp have it, but I don't know if you can get the ratings back out.