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Recent Posts
11
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by Kraeved -
Do you bother to check the github before you make these comments? Nothing has changed quality-wise.


What is it? @john33, are you ready to put your reputation on the line and walk out the window if this change does affect the quality to speak about it so confidently? Or will we let the author of the edit have his say? Helix's legacy is already fraught with obscure code and mysterious options such as -TX and -SBT, so it is not surprising there is increased attention to changes, especially unannounced.
12
Listening Tests / Re: Great killer sample, easy to ABX on most codecs
Last post by bryant -
> In this case ,32 khz makes it worse as the noise has nowhere to go but down the spectrum.  In contrast, 48khz works better.

Do you mean, it subjectively sounds better at the same bitrate? (I don't think it *has* to always be worse in similar cases. All of the noise has to go to the audible range indeed, but the noise floor can be lower because there are more bits per sample available. It's probably very difficult to truly predict how it'll go in general.)

> When this was converted back to 16-bit most of that noise should have been filtered out.

Why/how? I don't think this is how it works. Converting an integer from less bits to more bits is lossless (perfectly reversible). Do you mean there is some extra step that you'd expect to always happen in tandem with that?
There are two different scenarios to consider. The first is that we want to preserve this pathological audio, and the other is we want to salvage it.

Since the vast majority of the energy in the sample is at frequencies that some people can hear and some can’t, this is going to sound very different to different people. But if the goal is to preserve that loud hiss, say for some nostalgia, then it’s sort of hit or miss as to what a lossy codec is going to do (as we’ve seen) because there’s all kind of ways that could fail, either in analysis or processing.

The recommendation is generally to not transcode from one lossy format to another (and converting to 8-bit PCM is a very lossy operation), so my advice would be to play it safe and accept the great lossless compression that you can get (because of the 8 bits). Keep in mind that the pathological amounts of hiss may very well create other distortions in your playback system, from resampling engines to DACs to transducers, but I assume that’s all acceptable and that any ABX testing you do is suspect.

On the other hand, we know what the artist intended this to sound like (from YouTube and Spotify) and it does not have pathological hiss. That was an artifact of converting to 8-bit PCM (for a game audio perhaps?) and so it seems reasonable to me to try to remove that to make everything more palatable for lossy encoders, and that’s very easy to do. The useful audio here goes up to about 14 kHz, so I used my ART program with a gentle 48-tap sinc lowpass at 15 kHz and got the attached file. You can see the lowpass profile here:



That still has some audible hiss (like maybe from a cassette or FM recording), but should be an easy encode because it looks like real audio.

There also seems to be a misconception here. Resampling audio from 44.1 kHz to 32 kHz does not require the noise “to go somewhere else”. Proper downsampling involves an anti-aliasing lowpass filter that removes frequencies that are no longer valid at the new sampling rate (i.e., >= Fs/2), so when I use my tool again to convert this (using default settings) to 32 kHz it’s fine and the crazy hiss is gone and it should be easy to encode. If some other program is doing something else and making this worse to encode, it’s not being used as intended or buggy.

And I’m not suggesting that increasing the bitdepth of integer samples requires any filtering because it is, as you say, lossless. But in this particular case there is a lot of dither noise that is there only because of the reduced bitdepth, so it makes sense to remove it if you can do so without removing too much useful audio information.

And, by the way, if all this wasn't true then DSD wouldn't work because it's completely based on downsampling 1-bit audio and removing the dither noise.
13
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by Wombat -
That's what I was afraid of. As soon as the changes began to be committed to Github, enthusiasts started publishing all sorts of binaries daily without explaining what's new. Dig that out of the nerdy depths of the repository yourself. @Case's approach was more user-oriented: he described changes, attached binaries and processed the feedback here.
Nobody forces you to download. Besides that above i mentioned the changes to makefile.
15
MP3 - General / Re: Resurrecting/Preserving the Helix MP3 encoder
Last post by Kraeved -
Current git x64 generic.

That's what I was afraid of. As soon as the changes began to be committed to Github, enthusiasts started publishing all sorts of binaries daily without explaining what's new. Like dig that out of the nerdy depths of the repository yourself. @Case's approach was more user-oriented: he attached own binaries here, describing the changes they contained, then processed the feedback. Nothing remained shrouded in darkness, and now the darkness is thickening again.
17
3rd Party Plugins - (fb2k) / Re: foo_vis_spectrum_analyzer
Last post by MG240 -
Thanks a lot for the new update.

[v0.7.5.0-beta1, 2024-03-27]
Regression: a white flash appears when toggling full-screen mode.
Huh? Nothing was changed to that part of the code. DUI or CUI?

DUI - foobar2000-x64_v2.2_preview_2024-03-21 - Windows 11 22H2.

This doesn't happen with v0.7.5.0-alpha2. I've attached a video of the issue.
18
3rd Party Plugins - (fb2k) / Re: [fb2k v2] SQLite Utilities (foo_sqlite)
Last post by fbuser -
there doesn't seem to be any official documentation for the component.
There is: select "SQLite utitilies" from the help menu.

However, you won't be able to achieve this
I would like to create some statistical tags, e.g. the last time an artist was played or the average play count.
with the SQLite tags.
20
Vinyl / Re: Article: Vinyl records outsell CDs for the second year running
Last post by cid42 -
Non-vinyl audiophiles are still buying music, just mostly online. Non-audiophiles just listen to whatever wherever as usual. There's no network barrier as the files are pretty small.

More interesting in the physical vs digital purchasing stats are films and games, where the highest quality film or a standard AAA game can approach and exceed 100GB. Studios that release a 150GB game as a digital download really need to start making 4k uncompressed textures modular so that people with subpar internet aren't locked out. Modular should be a standard, 4k textures should be presented as a free "expansion pack" or whatever.