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1
Opus / Re: Opus decoding complexity
Last post by Heliologue -
Quote from: Klymins on
Complexity is primarily speed and secondarily required RAM amount for me, and these results are already gave me an idea: Opus is not a hero. By the way, which foobar2000 component gives these results? Thank you.

I guess "hero" is subjective; if you're interested in the simplest possible codec, then no.  If you're looking for an open-source, royalty-free lossy codec that achieves transparency at a relatively low bitrate, then I would argue that it's an excellent choice. It's certainly popular with the crowd here at HA.

"Decoding speed test" is part of foo_ui_std, or at least it is in the 2.x series.  For me it exists under a context menu under "Utilities" (I honestly don't remember if that's default or not).
2
Opus / Re: xHE-AAC : The Death of OPUS?
Last post by Kraeved -
Quote from: shadowking on
Quote from: ktf on
What room for improvement? Just because you think there is any doesn't mean there is, that is called wishful thinking. Also, you can't just fix one "killer sample" in lossy codecs without it having negative consequences somewhere else.
You are correct.

No, I believe what @ktf said is not consistent with practice.

How did they improve LAME codec quality? It's not a secret. Users shared problematic samples, including those that sounded better when encoded in other ways, e.g. via Fraunhofer encoder, then LAME psychoacoustic model was patched accordingly. Its official website has a section with samples that still require attention, other samples are available on the bug tracker. They are not addressed not because it will worsen the sound “somewhere else”, but because the relevant specialists retired or passed away. And there are no signs that someone has come to take over the baton.

Luckily, prolific programmers like @Case are still around to optimize things that don't affect the sound, which made it possible, for example, to revive Helix MP3 encoder — it is amazingly fast and more resistant to problematic samples. Also, LAME's changelog is still growing and its version 3.101b3 was released in December 2023. Recently, I discovered a bug in Vorbis reference encoder, the WAV reader part of it, and a faint pulse on Github gives me hope that it will be fixed. But the underrated Musepack seems to be buried and it is unlikely that anyone will make it possible to encode input with a bit depth greater than 16, which forces to reduce bit depth and use dither when compressing hi-res records.

So there is definitely room for improvement in the lossy niche, both theoretically imaginable and practically necessary. However, the creative juices (or what's left of them) are currently flowing towards battery-draining complexity of Opus, low bitrate USAC (xHE-AAC), repulsive by its name alone due to USA & YOU-SUCK connotations, and outlandish things such as buy-modern-GPU-first TSAC. For audiophiles like me, who are trained in fields other than programming, it remains only to pray that there are fewer aberrations on the path of progress, e.g. I pray that David @bryant improve WavPack hybrid mode, because it is a bridge connecting two worlds.

Yes, I've lived long enough to be able to compare: a bottom up excitement that comes from the challenge of creating something that brings relief and joy to people from all walks of life, as LAME did, has been replaced by a top down imposed dull substitutes, akin to changing the skin color of Ariel's character from The Little Mermaid cartoon, allegedly to promote diversity and inclusion, whereas in fact it caused a backlash and a box office failure, not only in Disney's homeland, but all over the world.

Quote from: Deathcrow on
Quote from: Kraeved on
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.
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. This tiny minority is not relevant enough to be split further into Vorbis, Opus, AAC, Musepack or whatever else.. it's not the year 2000 any more. No one in music sharing cares about lossy formats anymore (and rightfully so).

MP3 is still the dominant format among other lossy ones there, not among audio formats in general. You can easily verify this by entering the format extension in the search bar and comparing the number of releases in each lossy format over at least the last 5 years. As for the demand, today alone, on the site with ~14 million peers (12.5 mln seeds and 1.5 mln leeches) and with a rather long list of requirements when you're about to share something, I see 98 new MP3 releases. Just in case, 63 FLAC.

Living in a cocoon of relative wealth, you tend to make generalizations that are at odds with reality, which for you boils down to choosing from three bicycles that you can ride, and for others, how not to look for a third job. To store lossless, especially hi-res records, you need a lot of space, but the mantra that space is cheap does not apply to the entire planet. Have you ever wondered how many Earths would we need if everyone lived like, say, Americans? At least 5, according to Google. Also, the consumption of audio (music, books, podcasts, etc) does not differ much from the consumption of food — the less energy-intensive click'n'listen (or download'n'listen) strategy turns out to be more in demand than manual file conversion (cooking), which requires knowledge and time — it explains the increase in profits of streaming services such as Spotify (whose main format, by the way, is lossy Vorbis).
3
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by maikmerten -
I reverted my hacky "less printf" workaround on the dev branch, because a) it was implemented poorly and b) clearly wouldn't be effective if -D (displaying no progress update) doesn't alleviate the issue.

Case, do you feel that your patch is the way to proceed?

6
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by KevinB52379 -
Quote from: Case on
Thanks for the link. I installed ZoomText inside a virtualized Windows 11 and tried triggering the machine freeze, but I don't see any difference in behavior with different hmp3 compiles. Putting a conversion job running for my entire FLAC library keeps the machine fully usable and I can abort the task without issues. I tested both GCC and clang compiles for a few minutes.

@Chase - I appreciate you taking a look.  Honestly, I have no idea. 

The only builds that works are the clang versions and VS2022 helix builds from @JoshuaChang.

I also find it odd that I can encode with LAME, Vorbis, FAAC, FDKAAC, Opus, Musepack and speeds stay consistent with no system hang...it's just so weird to me.

If I want to use Helix, I guess I'm going to have to use @JoshuaChang versions if he would be willing to provide future builds.

I just love the speed and quality of Helix, but I could also use LAME in the future as well.

@Chase - Quick question, are there quality differences between the original Helix and the current 5.2.3 version?  I know LAME tags have been implemented, and gapless playback, right?  But was just curious if there are any quality/speed improvements?

Thank you again for trying to troubleshoot with Zoomtext, I am very appreciative of the time you took to try and help!
7
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by Case -
Thanks for the link. I installed ZoomText inside a virtualized Windows 11 and tried triggering the machine freeze, but I don't see any difference in behavior with different hmp3 compiles. Putting a conversion job running for my entire FLAC library keeps the machine fully usable and I can abort the task without issues. I tested both GCC and clang compiles for a few minutes.
8
3rd Party Plugins - (fb2k) / Re: OpenMPT Module Decoder
Last post by Case -
That repository is mentioned in the link I posted. Those are the Java player sources. Only other source is the original undocumented assembler code for the tracker, from the same guy. I hope you understand that re-creating the player from the assembler code would require insane amount of work.

Your Youtube video explains and shows the guy running the original tracker in Amiga emulator.

I'm not stopping you from creating a bug report, just warning that getting correct stereo playback may not be so simple.
9
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by KevinB52379 -
Quote from: Case on
Thanks for the update and happy to hear you got it solved. ZoomText sounds very invasive if it can cause the system to slow down. Would be fun to figure out what the problem is, but the software seems to be expensive and I don't even see demo option.

@Case  - I mentioned before that I am legally blind, so Zoomtext is a vital piece of software for me to have in order to use the computer. 

You are correct, Zoomtext is expensive.  I purchase a Home license, which is a subscription based plan.  So I buy 5 years at a time for $500.  For me, it's wroth it.

You can download a trial version of Zoomtext, but the caveat is that it doesn't expire in a certain amount of days, but instead, it can only run 40 minutes at a time, and then the system must restart to reset the activation timer.

I am not quite sure why this is happening with Zoomtext.  To be honest, I've had other issues with other things and Zoomtext, and I'm usually told I'm the only one who reports such issues, or that the program I'm having issues with (in this case Helix) is NOT officially supported by the Zoomtext software.

I do know that Zoomtext mirrors the screen and obviously enlarges it.  So I believe there may be some type of mirroring driver installed so it interfaces with windows and the screen.  I know for a fact there are services running in the background.

My guess to as to why exiting Zoomtext didn't work, is because it isn't completely unloading everything in the background, so services, etc are still running.

Anyway, if you're interested in trying Zoomtext, it can be downloaded here:
https://software.vfo.digital/ZoomText/2024/2024.2402.66.400/5082DF51-83F9-4DC5-BE8B-545B0CCC1345/ZT2024.2402.66.400-Offline-x64.exe
10
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by Case -
Thanks for the update and happy to hear you got it solved. ZoomText sounds very invasive if it can cause the system to slow down. Would be fun to figure out what the problem is, but the software seems to be expensive and I don't even see demo option.