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Recent Posts
1
Lossless / Other Codecs / Re: HALAC (High Availability Lossless Audio Compression)
Last post by Kraeved -
@mudlord, Hakan understood me perfectly, but you didn’t, alas. Okay, I can elaborate.

HALAC is designed for people. It is constantly compared with other tools that people use in order to highlight its superiority. It was never limited to the author’s fun, internal use, or, say, participation in the Informatics Olympiad.

When you make a project for people, then people inevitably provide feedback. It ranges from admiration to frustration, and in between there are questions and suggestions. Thanks to this feedback, projects develop further. If this is not obvious to you, then look at issue trackers and forums of the well-known apps. For example, Peter added OGG chapters support to Foobar2000 because I asked about it and then he recompiled Foobar2000 because other users complained about a crash while calculating ReplayGain values on systems without AVX. If you are not ready to process feedback or even do not need it, then make it clear in the first place. For example, disable the issue tracker on Github. It's that simple.

Hakan and I talked about priorities: a) SSE2/3 version enables more users to benefit from the tool and b) users need not only to encode, but also to listen to the material, otherwise the benefits of the tool are more visible on the charts than in real life. The author agreed that there was a reasonable grain in this appeal.
3
General Audio / Can ALAC/m4a detect file corruption?
Last post by shitdarling -
I have found amount of article, and know that flac/ape/tak can check audio integrity with inner crc info and outter md5.
ALAC/m4a is also open. But its format is so complicated (so many "box" type with different meta info), and I try to find crc or md5
in the format  structure detail description, and cant find them.

I have tried use an hex editor directly change some random bytes in middle of the alac file.
First time I change 2 position, [foobar 2000 - verify integrity] says it's ok. So the check tool cant detect this change.
Second time I change 2 more position, and this time the tool report :
"Reported length is inaccurate : 4:25.653333 vs 4:25.560454 decoded
Error: Decoding error: Unsupported format or corrupted file, frame: 2112 of 2861".

May there anyone know much about ALAC/m4a structure could tell me :
Can ALAC/m4a detect file corruption? (with inner metadata like crc/md5?or other mechanism?) O:)
6
Lossless / Other Codecs / Re: HALAC (High Availability Lossless Audio Compression)
Last post by mudlord -
Quote from: Kraeved on
Or the results were removed because HALAC is still the intellectual fun of its creator, and not a solution for the masses.

Again I will post: Does it even matter if that is the case? There is plenty of cases I have programmed something that is 100% not intended for general public use under a FOSS license, because I truly believe nothing of value will be gained from it being open source, which from time and time again, is exactly the case for me. Zero value is gained from code being FOSS, at all, zero people even used said code, but only the binary form. And even then its sketchy at best.

Hakan has 100% right to do whatever they want, including using AVX and co: its their project, not yours.
8
3rd Party Plugins - (fb2k) / Re: JScript Panel script discussion/help
Last post by marc2k3 -
Not really sure what you're asking??

You can obviously put variables in your own .js files and import them as documented here...

https://jscript-panel.github.io/docs/preprocessors/

If you want an updated variable in one panel sent to another, use window.NotifyOthers and on_notify_data callback.

https://jscript-panel.github.io/docs/namespaces/window/#windownotifyothersname-info
https://jscript-panel.github.io/docs/callbacks/component/#on_notify_dataname-info
9
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).
10
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 still grows 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 (lossy and lossless).

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 still dominates among other lossy formats 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) that has a rather long list of requirements when you're about to share, I see 98 new MP3 and 63 FLAC releases.

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 one of three bicycles to ride, and for others, how not to look for a third job. To keep lossless audio, 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 conversion of lossless audio files (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).