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21
Lossless / Other Codecs / Re: Lossless music stores (files!) not offering FLAC, but other lossless compressed?
Last post by jarsonic -
Quote from: Porcus on
Honestly, I didn't intend this topic to be read as "this is a bad thing". Actually I am pleased to see that a free and open format has become dominant. I wonder what could have been if a couple of big players had been more successful - one thing is inferior formats, but then it is the scenario that control over the delivery format could make DRM-infestation much easier. Reminder that we still got a bit of intentional crippling in the market (looking at you, scamQA), we could easily have gotten worse.

Sure there are codecs with a multichannel support that FLAC doesn't offer in its own file format, and when 7.1.4 channel 352/24 in WAVE is a full CD-ROM per minute (isn't that closing in on Netflix' HD video?) there could be some savings up for grabs. Technically not too hard to implement, when there are both codecs and containers around.
But with lossless compression having become close-to-synonymous with FLAC except to the apple crowd who might think that "audio" is synonymous to "mp3 or m4a or wav or aif", I have a hunch that a vendor who tried to deliver high-channel files as WavPack would probably regret it after a few days of overworked customer support - even when a self-extracting format was available, just click it then! (Yes SFX was discontinued with WavPack 5, I don't know if anyone has really come to miss it.)

I think that part of it is that FLAC as an open standard is natively decoded by some chipsets, in ways that WavPack isn't.  Only in the past 10 years or so have internet speeds been consistently fast enough for lossless audio to be feasible for the mainstream, and even then only a small percentage of the mainstream that really care or know about it.  Multichannel is an even smaller slice, when you taken into account those that have the equipment to make use of the capability.  It took time for FLAC to become the lossless standard from SHN, due to the obvious benefits; maybe it's just a bit down the road before the same can be said for multitrack audio.
22
Lossless / Other Codecs / Re: FrAD: Fourier Analogue-in-Digital (Analogue Audio Archive Codec)
Last post by ktf -
I fail to see what is analog about this.

So instead of sampling in the time domain (as PCM does) sampling happens in the frequency domain. But those frequencies are still represented by numbers which makes it digital. There is nothing analog about it. Sampling in the time domain also 'preserves analog waveforms' just fine.

The FAQ has an interesting take on what is lossless:
Quote
The loss in 12 and 16 bits can be taken as a significant loss of quality that anyone can hear [...] and that the loss is not actually a serious quality loss as you might fear. [...] Anything above 24-bit is beyond the dynamic range that the human ear can perceive, 0-80 dB SPL, so it's hard for human ears to notice the difference. So even though the PCM itself may not be preserved intact, the human ear will still have the exact same auditory experience, and we can say that it meets the definition of ‘lossless’.
By that definition, many codecs usually regarded as lossy are suddenly lossless too.
Quote
While complete lossless is virtually impossible outside of using PCM as it is, FrAD guarantees that at bit depths of 24 bits and above, the sound quality is indistinguishable from the original PCM to human and animal hearing.
So, seriously, what is the point of this?
25
Other Lossy Codecs / Re: TSAC: Very Low Bitrate Audio Compression
Last post by Kamedo2 -
Quote from: 2012 on
How is the decoding speed when CUDA is utilized. Software decoding is actually slower than encoding on my workstation.

The decoding speed on a default setting, 281,155bytes 300second stereo music, was 13.97x realtime, 21.5 second on a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, 0.661x realtime, 453 second on a CPU AMD Ryzen 7 5700X. So the GPU was 21 times faster on decoding TSAC.

Code: [Select]
Measure-Command { tsac-2024-05-08-win64\tsac.exe --cuda -m tsac-2024-05-08-win64\dac_stereo_q8.bin -M tsac-2024-05-08-win64\tsac_stereo_q8.bin d snippet_7sec40.cuda.tsac snippet_7sec40.cuda.tsac.cuda.wav }
27
3rd Party Plugins - (fb2k) / Re: Georgia-ReBORN - A Clean foobar2000 Theme
Last post by TT -
Hi @fabwolf,

the artist flags will be displayed if you have tagged your music files with %artistcountry% in the lower bar and also use it
in the Biography. If there is no %artistcountry% metadata, no flag will be displayed in the lower bar, but it will use the Wikipedia
metadata ( if available ) in the Biography.

To add additional tags in the "More Tags:" section in the lookup menu of the biography,
open your "foobar2000\profile\cache\biography\biography.cfg" and go to the bottom and find these:
Code: [Select]
"tfAlbumArtist": "$if3($meta(album artist,0),$meta(artist,0),$meta(composer,0),$meta(performer,0))",
"tfArtist": "$if3($meta(artist,0),$meta(album artist,0),$meta(composer,0),$meta(performer,0))",
For example, to add conductor, we appended it like this:
Code: [Select]
"tfAlbumArtist": "$if3($meta(album artist,0),$meta(artist,0),$meta(composer,0),$meta(performer,0),$meta(conductor,0))",
"tfArtist": "$if3($meta(artist,0),$meta(album artist,0),$meta(composer,0),$meta(performer,0),$meta(conductor,0))",

I would advise to not add the instruments in the performer because of compatibility issues with not only foobar but also other
software when doing a query search on this metadata field. As you mentioned, it will not recognize and ignore the parentheses or brackets.
Although this could be done with additional title format pattern throughout library, biography and other parts,
but imo it is not recommended.

-TT
28
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by maikmerten -
Thanks for these fresh builds!

I feel like in the not-too-distant future, I should merge dev to main and tag a new release. The console speed increases, the downsampling fixes and the somewhat reworked help might warrant a new version.

(I've been doing things on on the dev branch to avoid burning through versions numbers too quickly.)
29
General - (fb2k) / Re: Old 1.x versions usage
Last post by zK -
OK. Thank you all very much for your enlightening responses!

EDIT: I made the suggested registry modification and now the portable version effectively opens as many files as I determine.
30
Other Lossy Codecs / Re: Quite OK Audio (QOA)... anyone ?
Last post by Klymins -
@mycroft First answer: This does not change anything, noise shaping still can't push the noise into the inaudible frequencies at these lower sampling rates because they are above the Nyquist limit.

Second answer: 3-bit is pretty easy to ABX, here's an example: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1d40gGr2tG4xwBiNR1TR-PBZhorsT56G2?usp=drive_link . I did another ABX ang got 15/16 again, here's the link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MFflZFOMUDgiFV0bNuLcPGU7BAYOY2o2?usp=drive_link . Looks like QOA is pretty noisy in low sampling rates. Also, according to my ears, it has lower quality than 5-bit Flash ADPCM in most cases.