HydrogenAudio

Lossy Audio Compression => MPC => Topic started by: Frank Klemm on 2004-03-27 19:36:34

Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-03-27 19:36:34
Hi Folk,

I started migration of data from the old PC to the new one.
This was a little bit a pain, because the system hard disk is nearly
dead (but after some tries I got all data) and I had some stability
issues (the Iomega ZIP drive was the "guilty"), so the copying
stopped from time to time.

This evening I start to sort the data, most (65%) are Audio data
spreaded over all hard disks, other data are some Video data, Images
and Archive data (downloaded and sorted data from the Internet).
I hope the remaining data is less than 4.7 GByte, so I can make a
DVD-backup before continuing sorting.

But this is all straight forward, because of the plenty of hard disk
space. No "tower of hanoi" game.

E-Mail and Web access will then follow. Most difficult will be
the migration of the "1000 little modifications" of the system.
A small program there and there.


The first Musepack related work will be:
- mppenc 1.2  (1.15r + some small additions + bugfixes)
- mppdec 1.96 (1.95z1 + some small additions + bugfixes)
- replaygain 0.89 (support of different sample frequencies than 44.1 kHz, better API, modified application notes)

It follows the file format SV 7.5. Format freezing. Huffman table freezing.
libmpcdec.lib. New, modular decoder.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: atici on 2004-03-27 19:53:57
Is it also possible to make the sources as much platform independent as possible? This would be useful for building binaries by Intel C compiler and XScale, IA-64, PPC support... Maybe someday I could run a decoder on an XScale based Palm device.

I don't know how much source code optimizations in assembly are involved and how difficult this would be. But this would also ensure that MPC will be available on dominant platforms in the long term.

Thanks Frank.

Edit: By the way, maybe we should move the new improvement plans to another thread and keep this thread for pictures. The PC is built and the thread achieved its mission
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: seanyseansean on 2004-03-27 20:17:23
Frank,

Nice to see you

Anyways, I don't know how much work you want to do, but could you possibly (along with Christian) come up with work for others to do? There's a lot of experience here, and a lot of people who would love to help out, whether that be with testing, porting, or whatever.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: CiTay on 2004-03-27 20:42:13
Quote
By the way, maybe we should move the new improvement plans to another thread and keep this thread for pictures. The PC is built and the thread achieved its mission

Yes, split from Donation for Frank Klemm's new PC (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=18728). Comments about the PC can go there, comments about things to come can now go here.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: robUx4 on 2004-03-27 22:16:41
Quote
Is it also possible to make the sources as much platform independent as possible? This would be useful for building binaries by Intel C compiler and XScale, IA-64, PPC support... Maybe someday I could run a decoder on an XScale based Palm device.

I'm already working on this (ok, very slowly). I already make the decoder work under OS X in CVS. I'll work on the encoder tomorrow. Dibrom has some modified code that works but has not provided me with it yet.
I don't have the other compilers though, no Intel at least. But the targets for me are MSCV6, MSVC7 and GCC3.2+. It should work fine with older GCC too. And I think Frank uses a Watcom compiler ?

edit: missing Dibrom's code
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: caligae on 2004-03-27 23:28:31
Quote
Is it also possible to make the sources as much platform independent as possible? This would be useful for building binaries by Intel C compiler and XScale, IA-64, PPC support... Maybe someday I could run a decoder on an XScale based Palm device.

mppdec works on amd64 with minor modification to Makefile. Don't know about ppc.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: atici on 2004-03-28 03:20:33
Quote
mppdec works on amd64 with minor modification to Makefile. Don't know about ppc.

AMD64 is 64 bit x86 so this is not surprising.

@robUx4: In case you're interested in a PalmOS port, the pocket-tunes (http://www.pocket-tunes.com/) player developers are quite approachable for plug-in support. Check my recent correspondence here (http://www.math.columbia.edu/~atici/pocketmpc.txt).

Although such issues naturally have lower priority on the to-do list, it would bring an end to the "MPC is not/will never be supported on any portable device" argument. If something is not supported it's mostly due to the platform being closed (it's not MPC developers fault).
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: xmixahlx on 2004-03-28 08:41:30
amazing

all the small-step advancements are exciting!

some comments:

darin did some work for 1.15r building on OSX. is there anything he can include here?  patch the 1.15r-current tree perhaps (if he has made modifications, i dunno, he was sorta cryptic about it)

1.95z67 builds as SV 15.15

is the plan to move mppdec+mppenc to: musepack (encoder/decoder frontend) + libmusepack (library) ?

could 16bit/32bit/dither/etc. support be added into musepack as switched parameters instead of static builds?

alsa support?

and what will be the "official" linux compiler/switches/config/buildprocess?

(so the real comment above is that i think the build process should be revamped for gcc3.2/3.3/3.4+automake,etc)


all i can think of atm
later

and welcome back frank
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: caligae on 2004-03-28 09:29:47
Quote
Quote
mppdec works on amd64 with minor modification to Makefile. Don't know about ppc.

AMD64 is 64 bit x86 so this is not surprising.

It's not that easy. There's lot of software that fails because programmers assume wrong pointer sizes and so on. Unfortunately you can't say generally that software that runs on 32Bit x86 will also run on 64Bit x86.

Two more findings:
I just tried it on alpha which works flawlessly too.

ppc works basically but has a flaw. The output is big endian. If you treat the output wave as signed be it sounds fine again.

The version I tested is mppdec-1.1 from Klemm's homepage.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: robUx4 on 2004-03-28 10:30:06
Quote
amazing

all the small-step advancements are exciting!

some comments:

darin did some work for 1.15r building on OSX. is there anything he can include here?  patch the 1.15r-current tree perhaps (if he has made modifications, i dunno, he was sorta cryptic about it)

1.95z67 builds as SV 15.15

is the plan to move mppdec+mppenc to: musepack (encoder/decoder frontend) + libmusepack (library) ?

could 16bit/32bit/dither/etc. support be added into musepack as switched parameters instead of static builds?

alsa support?

and what will be the "official" linux compiler/switches/config/buildprocess?

(so the real comment above is that i think the build process should be revamped for gcc3.2/3.3/3.4+automake,etc)

speaking for myself (ie not Frank) I'm not willing to use automake/autoconf. But gcc 3.2+ is probably the one that should be used now. At least for binary distributions.

I don't know when exactly the libmpc will be done (see Frank's post) but that's one of the main goal, so that MPC can be integrated in a wide variety of platform. (Even portable ones )

Should I contact Darin, or he's floating around here ?

If ALSA is also working under OS X (fink) it might be a good move from ESD because now ALSA is in the linux kernel.

For the rest, I don't know.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: seanyseansean on 2004-03-28 10:43:53
Quote
Quote
Is it also possible to make the sources as much platform independent as possible? This would be useful for building binaries by Intel C compiler and XScale, IA-64, PPC support... Maybe someday I could run a decoder on an XScale based Palm device.

mppdec works on amd64 with minor modification to Makefile. Don't know about ppc.

By 'works', do you mean as a 32bit or 64bit compile?
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: caligae on 2004-03-28 10:47:49
Quote
speaking for myself (ie not Frank) I'm not willing to use automake/autoconf. But gcc 3.2+ is probably the one that should be used now. At least for binary distributions.

Autotoolify mppdec shouldn't be too much work. It's only one binary and has two libraries as dependency.

On the other hand there wouldn't be much benefit over not using autotools either.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: caligae on 2004-03-28 10:57:15
Quote
Quote
mppdec works on amd64 with minor modification to Makefile. Don't know about ppc.

By 'works', do you mean as a 32bit or 64bit compile?

I was using a native 64 bit build.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: jtclipper on 2004-03-28 13:08:49
I would like to see one binary ( enc & dec ).
I would also like to see correct support for pipelines.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: robUx4 on 2004-03-28 13:50:38
Quote
I would like to see one binary ( enc & dec ).
I would also like to see correct support for pipelines.

What would be the benefit of one binary only ?
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: rjamorim on 2004-03-28 14:24:25
Quote
Should I contact Darin, or he's floating around here ?

Darin = Dibrom
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: robUx4 on 2004-03-28 16:33:03
OK
Anyway I fixed the endianess problems and now the encoder and decoder in CVS work under MSVC and OS X (should be OK with any GCC under Windows & Linux too).

I'll commit the XCode project too and then maybe the whole binary bunch (encoder and decoder for each OS from the code in CVS).
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: caligae on 2004-03-28 17:23:01
Quote
OK
Anyway I fixed the endianess problems and now the encoder and decoder in CVS work under MSVC and OS X (should be OK with any GCC under Windows & Linux too).

I'll commit the XCode project too and then maybe the whole binary bunch (encoder and decoder for each OS from the code in CVS).

Nice, this fixed the endianess problem here too.

For each os out there? Don't forget that every platform/os combination needs its own binary - have fun!
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: jtclipper on 2004-03-28 17:37:00
Quote
Quote
I would like to see one binary ( enc & dec ).
I would also like to see correct support for pipelines.

What would be the benefit of one binary only ?

For mp3 I use lame.exe for both without having to shuffle around with a lot of executables.
Why did the developers of LAME put them together? , I think it is better to have a single binary and I believe that both the encoder and the decoder use some shared code.
Also lame.exe behaves very nicely with pipelines ( | ) and stdin stdout the great majority of mpc binaries have problems with that.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: ExUser on 2004-03-28 18:56:28
Quote
Also lame.exe behaves very nicely with pipelines ( | ) and stdin stdout the great majority of mpc binaries have problems with that.

mppenc for Windows uses pipes perfectly for encoding. I use it all the time with foobar's CLI encoder.

I dunno if mppdec is worse, but I've never had a problem with mppenc.

I personally prefer the two separated binaries. Each performs a task well. Throwing them both into a single executable means that everytime you want to decode or encode, there's another switch you have to place on the commandline. It would also mess backwards-compatibility up badly.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Thinky on 2004-03-28 19:17:15
AFAIK, some of the newer mppdec versions (1.9[...]) had a bug that broke pipe support.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-03-29 12:50:41
Quote
AFAIK, some of the newer mppdec versions (1.9[...]) had a bug that broke pipe support.

What *EXACTLY* do not work?

"Maschina nje rabotajet" do not work as error description.

IIRC I've changed some code to support PCM files in mppenc (Encoder!)
to support PCM files between 2 and 4 GByte with tags, but the pipe
code of mppdec should be from very early days.

Please additional respond via board E-Mail system.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: danchr on 2004-03-29 13:42:23
Quote
Is it also possible to make the sources as much platform independent as possible? This would be useful for building binaries by Intel C compiler and XScale, IA-64, PPC support...

MPC is pretty much cross platform. IIRC the changes needed to make it compile on Mac OS X were fairly straight forward, so porting it to another platform or processor shouldn't be too difficult.
Quote
If ALSA is also working under OS X (fink) it might be a good move from ESD because now ALSA is in the linux kernel.

ALSA stands for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (http://www.alsa-project.org/), and is pretty much Linux only. The Mac OS X equivalent would be CoreAudio - which uses an entirely different API. Not even OSS is available for Mac OS X, so it's either ESD or Arts - and Arts doesn't work all that well.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: robUx4 on 2004-03-29 15:21:04
Then I would suggest using PortAudio (http://www.portaudio.com/) instead of all these APIs. It works under Windows, UNIX, Apple, BeOS, etc. The API is very simple and easy to use.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-03-29 15:26:50
Quote
Also lame.exe behaves very nicely with pipelines ( | ) and stdin stdout the great majority of mpc binaries have problems with that.

Still the old question:

What *EXACTLY* do not work?
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Mr_Rabid_Teddybear on 2004-03-29 15:51:09
Quote
What *EXACTLY* do not work?

Don't know if this help (I'm not very technically savvy), but I posted here (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=14167&view=findpost&p=184525) about my findings of problems with pipe mppdec 1.95e to lame, solved by excanging mppdec 1.95e with 1.93j... (Problem occured in the form that the process of transcoding just stops.)
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: CiTay on 2004-03-29 16:22:49
I asked Case what's broken with pipe support, and he said: "decoder thinks it can seek and tries to write fixed wav header, this produces nasty pop".
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-03-29 16:51:46
I have two serious problems copying my data to the new
system. May be some one of you can help.

OS is Linux.
Data from old partitions is copied to new computer as files between 0.1 and 60 GByte. File system types are: ext2, vfat and reiserfs(3.5).

Problem 1:
File names with characters above 127 on vfat are wrongly interpreted.

"o => -:
"a => ?
~n => +-
"u => ?
"O => ?
´i => ?

It looks like the file names are stored using the MS-DOS
character set, but now interpreted as ISO8859-1 characters.

Mounting using 

mount -t vfat -o loop,codepage=437 /media/y/hdf1.image /old/mnt/f

do not change anything. I also tried some other code pages
and iocharsets, nothing changed, still exactly the same
misinterpretation.

FS was created under SuSE 6.4 under the kernel 2.2.15.


Problem 2:
Copying data from the old reiserFS 3.5 crashs the system
and corrupts data. Frequency is around 1 crash per hour.
Under 2.2.15...19 this file system was stable for years.

FS was created under SuSE 6.4 under the kernel 2.2.15.
Images were file system checked again before mounting.

Error messages:

Message from syslogd@elster at Mon Mar 29 02:37:52 2004 ...
elster kernel: vs-13065: update_stat_data: key [895627 896357 0x0 SD], found
item *3.5*[895627 896368 0x1 DIRECT], item_len 275, item_location 2290,
free_space(entry_count) 65535kernel BUG at prints.c:334!

Message from syslogd@elster at Mon Mar 29 03:32:51 2004 ...
elster kernel: vs-13065: update_stat_data: key [895627 896357 0x0 SD], found
item *3.5*[895627 896368 0x1 DIRECT], item_len 275, item_location 2290,
free_space(entry_count) 65535kernel BUG at prints.c:334!

Message from syslogd@elster at Mon Mar 29 04:39:59 2004 ...
elster kernel: vs-13065: update_stat_data: key [925724 942575 0x0 SD], found
item *3.5*[925724 942574 0x1 IND], item_len 8, item_location 2993,
free_space(entry_count) 2219kernel BUG at prints.c:334!


Any hints or ideas?
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Sunhillow on 2004-03-29 16:56:13
Problem1 (vfat --> reiserfs):
try an ftp transfer. this should translate different codepages
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-03-29 17:28:05
Quote
I asked Case what's broken with pipe support, and he said: "decoder thinks it can seek and tries to write fixed wav header, this produces nasty pop".

It's a bug of the Microsoft API.

Current code works like:

unsigned long  total = 0;
int            samples;
float          buffer [ 1152 * 2 ];

write_header ( sample_freq, channels, 0xFFFFFFFF );

while ( ( samples = decode (buffer)) >= 0 ) {
  total += samples ;
  writesamples ( buffer, samples );
}

if ( seek (0L) == NO_ERROR )
    write_header ( sample_freq, channels, total );

The problem is that M$ seek() also return NO_ERROR even when seek fails.
A new FileIO module which must be programmed for every OS should remove
this problem.

class FileIO {
protected:
  ...
public:
  IsReadable ();
  IsWritable ();
  IsSeekable ();
  Read ( void*, size_t);
  Write ( const void*, size_t);
  Seek ( int64_t offset, enum whence);
} ;

I want to remove ALL this nasty things from the encoder and decoder.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: jtclipper on 2004-03-29 18:41:06
Nice to hear that this will be fixed.

I would like to provide to you some more examples.
Using the binaries found at rarewaves I run into troubles.

------------------------------------------------
Encoder
Version 1.14 with following command line produces a 36 kb mpc file ( basically an empty file )

Code: [Select]
lame --decode 1.mp3 - | mppenc - 1.mpc


Version 1.15r with the same syntax works just fine.
------------------------------------------------
Decoder

Both version 1.95e and 1.95z6 produce this result.

Code: [Select]
C:\Temp>mppdec 1.mpc - | lame.exe - 2.mp3
MPC Decoder  SV7  1.95e  3DNow/SSE   (C) 1999-2003 Buschmann/Klemm/Piecha/Wolf

decoding of file '1.mpc'
        to <stdout>

 171.9 kbLAME version 3.93 MMX  (http://www.mp3dev.org/)
CPU features: i387p, MMX (ASM used)s, SIMD,, SIMD2
 Using polyphase lowpass  filter, transition band: 15115 Hz - 15648 Hz
3Encoding <stdin> to 2.mp3
Encoding as 44.1 kHz 128 kbps j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III (11x) qval=2
:51.94, SV 7.0, Profile Unstable/Experimental (--Alpha-- 1.15)

    0:00.02/    3:51.94 decoded ( 0.0%)
mppdec: write error: Broken pipe, repeat once more...
mppdec: write error: Invalid argument, repeat once more...


Version 1.1 works just fine

Code: [Select]
C:\Temp>mppdec 1.mpc - | lame.exe - 2.mp3
MPC Decoder  SV7  1.1  3DNow/SSE   (C) 1999-2002 Buschmann/Klemm/Piecha/Wolf

decoding of file '1.mpc'
        to <stdout>

 171.9 kbps,    3:51.94, SV 7.0, Profile Unstable/Experimental (--Alpha-- 1.15)

    0:00.01/    3:51.94 decoded ( 0.0%)LAME version 3.93 MMX  (http://www.mp3dev.org/)
CPU features: i387, MMX (ASM used), SIMD, SIMD2
Using polyphase lowpass  filter, transition band: 15115 Hz - 15648 Hz
Encoding <stdin> to 2.mp3
Encoding as 44.1 kHz 128 kbps j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III (11x) qval=2
    1:40.14/    3:51.94 decoded (43.2%)


---------------------------------------------
I use lame.exe extensively and I never run into problems using pipes it might be a nice ides to look at the code that lame uses.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: robUx4 on 2004-03-29 19:12:26
Quote
class FileIO {
protected:
   ...
public:
  IsReadable ();
  IsWritable ();
  IsSeekable ();
  Read ( void*, size_t);
  Write ( const void*, size_t);
  Seek ( int64_t offset, enum whence);
} ;

Frank, does it mean you want to use C++ as well ?
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: CiTay on 2004-04-08 13:16:21
Frank's first problem seems to be caused by the old Linux kernel on his old PC. Files with Umlauts were not saved correctly, and later, this bug was silently fixed and no compatibility switch was introduced. So Kernels 2.0.xx through 2.2.xx don't go along too well with Kernel 2.4.xx and above, concerning certain filenames.

About MPC, Frank is away for easter, he will be back home in 1 1/2 weeks and that's when he starts coding.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: AgentMil on 2004-04-09 11:39:27
That is some nice news on the MusePack front... thanks for the heads up CiTay.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-04-19 18:10:40
Quote
That is some nice news on the MusePack front... thanks for the heads up CiTay.

Some short information:

Windows works rock solid on the new computer, but I still have
serious trouble with Linux SuSE 9.0 . The most serious are
data losses on FAT32 partitions. When writing data to a FAT32
partition often the directory entry is not updated at the end.
This results in zero sized files and lost chains of clusters.

FAT32 is the only file system type usable for Windows XP and
Linux.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: xmixahlx on 2004-04-19 18:27:20
frank -

you can use captive-ntfs in linux (which uses Windows XP's ntfs drivers to access all ntfs drivers)

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/ (http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/)

(and i've never had any problems writing to fat16/32)


later
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-04-19 20:10:09
Quote
frank -

you can use captive-ntfs in linux (which uses Windows XP's ntfs drivers to access all ntfs drivers)

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/ (http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/)

(and i've never had any problems writing to fat16/32)


later

See

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/154761 (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/154761)
http://mailman.linuxtag.org/pipermail/debi...ber/004162.html (http://mailman.linuxtag.org/pipermail/debian-knoppix/2003-November/004162.html)

This serious bug is fixed in 2.4.25 (search for "128 M").
"FAT: Support large partition (> 128GB)" is a nice circumscription of
"FAT32: Drops files from time to time on >128 GB partitions".

As far as I know captive-ntfs is a part of 2.6.x, but all tries to install 2.6.5
didn't worked. I don't want to spend months of time to built a stable Linux
system. There are several other problems and bugs. This list is currently longer
than 40 entries. 20 of them have the status "don't have any idea what's wrong
or how to solve".

Work for this evening: Try to install standard kernel 2.4.26.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: xmixahlx on 2004-04-19 21:02:04
fat32
------
hmm... the fat32 bug needs an overloaded fat32 partition (i.e. > 85% full) and a deprecated linux 2.4.x kernel, so i'd call this problem solved at this point

captive-ntfs:
------
captive-ntfs isn't part of 2.6.5 that i know of (?)

2.6.x includes a rewritten ntfs driver that is more secure and can write to the ntfs partition in  a limited fashion (i.e can't write a file bigger than what is on the disk currently)

debian rant:
------
well, for starters, i wouldn't have used a *NIX OS that lacks ability to do actual work on.

perhaps try debian or debian based (libranet, mepis, knoppix) or gentoo/lfs/etc.
http://debian.org (http://debian.org)

debian unstable (and, if you wish, +experimental +unofficial) = excellent development and user environment with real package management/upgrade/etc. with full support for kernel 2.6 and alsa and all the necessities

it doesn't take a month, it takes a few hours to download and install a complete system...

perhaps if you provide the list of things that don't work for you others can offer solutions?


later
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Jack Comics on 2004-04-19 21:23:10
Perhaps it's just me, but if Linux is giving Frank a headache, and Windows is working fine... why not just use Windows entirely?  Is there any particular reason *why* Linux must be used?  Windows can be secured (i.e., turn off all unnecessary services, don't use Internet Explorer and Outlook/Outlook Express, and install and use a good anti-virus program and firewall), and there are free development environments on Windows, such as Cygwin and GCC, and now the free command-line C/C++ compiler that Microsoft released over the weekend.

Hopefully I don't offend anyone or something, just felt I needed to post what seems to be the easiest solution to me...
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: rjamorim on 2004-04-20 07:08:58
Quote
Why has this thread degenerated into a "which OS to choose" ?

Because Klemm started talking about his OS problems. What did you expect?

Quote
About the partitions issue, i would keep my hands off any ntfs writing solution as it's just calling for more trouble. ntfs reading is ok though.


Captive NTFS uses the WindowsNT/2k/XP ntfs.sys read/write routines. It would only go wrong if the Microsoft driver is wrong.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: eltoder on 2004-04-20 09:04:06
Quote
Captive NTFS uses the WindowsNT/2k/XP ntfs.sys read/write routines. It would only go wrong if the Microsoft driver is wrong.

Or if something is emulated in a wrong way. I have a big experience of using ntfs4win98 and was not always that great.

-Eugene
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: rjamorim on 2004-04-20 09:20:51
Quote
Or if something is emulated in a wrong way. I have a big experience of using ntfs4win98 and was not always that great.

I never had any problem using Winternals' NTFS98, in both Win98 and WinMe.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-04-20 10:26:24
Quote
Perhaps it's just me, but if Linux is giving Frank a headache, and Windows is working fine... why not just use Windows entirely?  Is there any particular reason *why* Linux must be used?  Windows can be secured (i.e., turn off all unnecessary services, don't use Internet Explorer and Outlook/Outlook Express, and install and use a good anti-virus program and firewall), and there are free development environments on Windows, such as Cygwin and GCC, and now the free command-line C/C++ compiler that Microsoft released over the weekend.

Hopefully I don't offend anyone or something, just felt I needed to post what seems to be the easiest solution to me...

Some Remarks:

- I also thought about dropping Linux support. At least this eases System 
  administration.

- The problem is not prefering Windows or Linux, but I like to support both.
  Some (better: a lot of) tools are existing only under Windows, other only
  under Linux.

- There are often questions about Mac-OS, there I can't help. I don't want
  drop Linux to the same state.

- Win32/Cygwin ist a third plattform, it can't substitute Linux/GCC.
  Plattforms I tested in past:
  - Linux/GCC
  - Linux/ICC (but licence server is not running anymore)
  - Windows/MS C++
  - Windows/Cygwin (not tested for a longer time)
  - Solaris/CC (not tested for a long time)
  - AIX/CC (not tested for a long time)

- The problem is not that I'm unable to administrate Windows or Linux.
  But I'm not able to fix bugs in Linux, because I'm not a wizzard.
  And my impression is that there are more bugs in Linux than Bill Gates
  can imagine ...

- There is no systematic system test in Linux. A 128 Gbyte HD bug was fixed
  in the last month, although these disks exist for more than 18 months.
  With a standard motherboards and RAID (3x 60 GB) for more than 4 years.
  Shame on you Mr. Torvald!
   
- Kernel bugs are not a question of Debian, Redhat or SuSE. It's very unlikely
  that they unintentionally fix such bugs.

- There is intentionally reserved space for a second Win and a second Linux
  installation (ask Citay). But the current distributions are all with "128 Gbyte
  bug inside".

- When I read the Changelog files of Linux, they sound like helloween
  documents. A lot of serious errors on critical places very fixed (FS layer).
  How many douzens are remaining???

- Any idea when Knoppix 3.4 is released (3.3 has also the 128 GB bug)???
  It is Debian based and I use it on some computers. See www.knopper.net

- In the past compiling under Linux AND Windows was a good idea. This
  avoid such ugly extremely Windows-specific (MAC) or extremely 
  Debian 2003-specific (-censored-) source code. BTW it makes often
  a lot of problems to port source from one to another Linux distribution.
  SuSE-2000 to Debian-2003 or even SuSE-2000 to SuSE-2003.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-04-20 10:36:08
Quote
Quote
Why has this thread degenerated into a "which OS to choose" ?

Because Klemm started talking about his OS problems. What did you expect?

Quote
About the partitions issue, i would keep my hands off any ntfs writing solution as it's just calling for more trouble. ntfs reading is ok though.


Captive NTFS uses the WindowsNT/2k/XP ntfs.sys read/write routines. It would only go wrong if the Microsoft driver is wrong.

1. I don't want to start a OS discussion. I only thought dropping a note about my current work is a good idea.

2. Thanks for the information what Captive NTFS is. Using ntfs.sys sounds
more serious and more reliable than just another Linux NTFS hack.

3. I never had problems with NTFS under Windows. Stability on stable hardware
is great. BTW NT 4.0 without SP drives a 128 Gbyte NTFS partition without any
problems. Congratulations! Also congratulations for Dell. A 1997 built Computer
have no problems with a 128 GByte disk (OS is within the first 8 GB).
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: userXYZ on 2004-04-20 10:51:01
Quote
Any idea when Knoppix 3.4 is released (3.3 has also the 128 GB bug)???
It is Debian based and I use it on some computers. See www.knopper.net


In one of the last c't Magazines there was a Knoppix 3.4 c't Edition. I think it was Magazine 4/2004, maybe you can get one.

EDIT: I regret, this is not an option. As you said that 128 GB Bug was fixed last month, so this version of Knoppix 3.4 won't have a kernel with that fix. Or if Linux 2.6 doesn't have that bug you could try that, the c't Edition has a boot option for a 2.6 series kernel.

Regards, David
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: NumLOCK on 2004-04-20 11:42:01
NTFS is a very reliable filesystem, its main problem is write performance. So to gain time during writes, it makes use of any small space that is currently under the HDD's head, without any other consideration. After a while this produces heavy fragmentation and read performance lowers a lot.  But this performance is suitable for benchmarks (since they measure short-term filesystem usage only). On any production server, the daily defragmentation process (Diskeeper etc) will constitute about 1/3 of the overall disk accesses !.

I don't think there are any stability issues with filesystems such as Reiserfs. I have a 2TB server in software RAID5 which runs day and night, pushing 250-300MB/s all the time. It operates on millions of very small files, and I've yet to experience a single corruption. Plus the files almost never fragment..

Also Reiserfs 3 is in "maintenance mode" (ie: no patches), and the author says he hasn't received a single bug report for years.

Frank, about Linux support I think it's more important than ever. Sincerely, I agree no OS is perfect and there can be surprising and/or unacceptable bugs, but they are there under Windows too (just hidden). I think more and more people (including myself) have switched or are switching to linux because they're fed up. I agree Microsoft does make some good stuff too, but in general it's a nice cover for something dirty.

It's a pleasure to install software in Gentoo Linux (on my laptop). Everything is snappy, and works great. World's best software is available with a single command. Now it's really starting to be a pleasure to use :-)

I don't think there's any 137GB issue with current kernels - as I said, I use 1.9TB partitions on a Redhat 8 (recently upgraded to Redhat 9) server.

For me the only annoying limitation in Linux was the 2GB issue, and in 2.4 and 2.6 kernels it's a thing of the past :-)

Almost every single thing that can be done under Windows can now be done under linux, plus plenty more, and (very important !!) it can be automated, which is (imho) something crucial to have on a computer  .  On Win32 everything looks cool, but batch files suck, the console uses obsolete DOS 2.0 codepage, etc..  The regular user doesn't care about it in the short run (because GUI is there), but isn't Musepack more about experienced users and long-term stuff? 

By the way, I'd be glad to help for a linux version if necessary.

Cheers !

Edit:  As an exemple of a horrible win32 bug, just think about the one which can destroy partitions during a kernel core dump..  It's been there for five years ! Isn't that serious?
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: tigre on 2004-04-20 15:18:08
OS-preference related discussion split to separate thread (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=20921&)
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: p0wder on 2004-04-22 01:43:53
Can the clipping problem be addressed in SV 7.5 instead of SV 8?
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Frank Klemm on 2004-04-26 20:02:18
Quote
Can the clipping problem be addressed in SV 7.5 instead of SV 8?

Transcoded from SV7.0/7.1 are still clipped, the information is lost.
Native SV7.5 encoder: Problem is solved.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Artemis3 on 2004-04-27 08:38:00
Quote
Plattforms I tested in past:
  - Linux/GCC
  - Linux/ICC (but licence server is not running anymore)
  - Windows/MS C++
  - Windows/Cygwin (not tested for a longer time)
  - Solaris/CC (not tested for a long time)
  - AIX/CC (not tested for a long time)

- The problem is not that I'm unable to administrate Windows or Linux.
  But I'm not able to fix bugs in Linux, because I'm not a wizzard.

How about the *BSDs? FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org/) is very good, stable, well documented and organized IMO.

You can use bsd's cc, gcc and others too, even many versions can coexist peacefully without any troubles (example: just call gcc32 instead of gcc31, etc).
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: ChristianHJW on 2004-04-28 06:55:51
Quote
Quote
Can the clipping problem be addressed in SV 7.5 instead of SV 8?

Transcoded from SV7.0/7.1 are still clipped, the information is lost.
Native SV7.5 encoder: Problem is solved.

Jesus Frank, where is this new SV 7.5 encoder ?

Have you released it some place i dont know of ? If so, please send it to robux4 so he can upload it to CVS .....
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: xmixahlx on 2004-04-28 08:24:03
christian,

i'm assuming frank meant its still a WIP

even at sv7.15/1.95z67 the clipping problem is addressed, but the SV is incomplete

and he's just explaining that the tool to convert sv7.x to sv7.5/8.0 won't do miracles to the data, just wrap it correctly (or, in the fashion of sv7.5/8.0)


later
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: caligae on 2004-04-28 08:24:51
I think I could help out a little bit with portability since I have shell access to a couple of platforms.

At the moment the code seems to be pretty good in terms of portability. After robUx4 fixed the endianess problem, it works for me on every platform I tested.

It just needed some minor corrections in the Makefile. Maybe you should get rid of some stuff like Makefile.bsd. At least FreeBSD has no problem with the standard Makefile. Don't know for the other BSDs.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: xmixahlx on 2004-04-28 08:38:03
Quote
It just needed some minor corrections in the Makefile

are you talking about the gcc3.x changes? like:

-falign-jumps=5 -falign-loops=0 -falign-functions=5

or something different? (btw, the makefile is horrendous)


later
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: caligae on 2004-04-28 11:47:34
Quote
Quote
It just needed some minor corrections in the Makefile

are you talking about the gcc3.x changes? like:

-falign-jumps=5 -falign-loops=0 -falign-functions=5

or something different? (btw, the makefile is horrendous)

That's just part of the problem. First of all it uses asm objects and gcc options that are not available on all platforms by default which makes it fail on non x86.

Then the config.h target doesn't work because it doesn't list config as dependency but tries to build it within the target which fails here.

Also I needed to replace <machine/soundcard.h> with <sys/soundcard.h> in mppdec.h in order to get it work under FreeBSD.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: xmixahlx on 2004-05-12 20:15:01
(bump)

any further information on the subject?

frank - are you still with us? care to bait us with an update?

...just wonderin'


later
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Madman2003 on 2004-05-14 16:35:02
Does anyone know the (approx) release date of sv7.5?

Madman2003.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: CiTay on 2004-05-18 00:45:38
Frank mailed me last week, he said he wanted to install another distro this weekend, after he apparently found over 100 bugs in SuSE 9.0 (i'm not sure if he really found that many bugs or if it's black humor again). I hope the situation is better in other distros though..
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: xmixahlx on 2004-05-18 03:29:13
right, rpm sucks...
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=article-rpm (http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=article-rpm)

non-shitty management: debian/bsd's/portage/source/tarball
http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=packagemanagement (http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=packagemanagement)

i'd be happy to help him setup something remotely
(i.e. requires him to install a base system, e.g. debian net-install)

...i'm assuming he could talk to someone in a Linux User Group around germany if he needs more help than that


later
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: xmixahlx on 2004-07-16 20:51:03
bumpety bump
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: ddrawley on 2004-07-16 21:56:08
Cough cough, Debian, cough
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: ChristianHJW on 2004-07-17 11:59:09
Quote
...i'm assuming he could talk to someone in a Linux User Group around germany if he needs more help than that
... i'd prefer him coding SV 7.5 instead of fighting Linux bugs, to be honest  .... but i also respect his decision to release everything for MPC ready for both platforms, although IMO this is exactly the kind of support the community could give to him easily, and he could concentrate on the main stuff  .....
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: xmixahlx on 2004-07-17 23:01:45
Quote
... i'd prefer him coding SV 7.5 instead of fighting Linux bugs, to be honest  ....


not sure why your quoting something i said in May...

anyways, i would prefer him to prepare sv7.5 also - which is why i offered to administer his box from the other side of the atlantic

...frank's a smart guy, but i think he needs to weed out the distractions


later
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: NumLOCK on 2004-09-16 09:17:46
About Linux:
I second the suggestion for Debian (stable). The RPM-based distros are quick to set up, but will become a big annoyance after a while. They rely on outdated package tools, with mostly outdated packages, which offer little upgrade possibilities in practice (that the main reason why we see new RH / Fedora / SuSE releases often).

On the other hand, Gentoo Linux requires some care to install, but is upgradable forever.

A good compromise might be Debian imho.

About Andree:
Agreed 
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: bugmenot on 2004-10-22 02:40:21
The debian based desktop distro Ubuntu would also be an option. It is much more user friendly than debian. Even though this is its first ever release, there has been quite a few good reviews about it. (However, to get multimedia working, you will need to uninstall totem and rhythmbox due to the present buggy state of gstreamer and install something more reliable such as totem-xine or mplayer)

Here is the website: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ (http://www.ubuntulinux.org/)
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Lev on 2004-10-22 10:17:55
I hate anything to do with Linux, or whatever it is that is being talked about.

Be that an audio codec or the fact that you are trying to watch a film round a mates house, but the sound doesnt work... on every level, Linux encourages BORING conversation about rubbish that is usually many layers removed from the actual task in hand.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Triza on 2004-10-22 12:22:50
Lev, I think we all should keep these sort of comments to ourselves, because it does not add much to the thread. And yes I am using Linux.

I also agree that  Debian or even better Gentoo (which is what I use) distro would be much better then binary based distros like RH or Fedora.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Digga on 2004-10-22 15:19:27
any news from a person closer to Frank regarding MPC development related news on his work and his doings / problems?
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Seed on 2004-10-22 18:16:59
From CiTay's mouth (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=1927&view=findpost&p=247709)
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Digisurfer on 2004-10-22 18:49:32
I'm a bit afraid for the future of MPC at the moment. For one, it tends to suffer from obscurity. Most people don't even know about it, nevermind how great it is. The second seems to be licensing issues according to the posts I've read on different forums, which seems to be preventing official hardware support from ever coming about. Now devolpment seems to be seriously faltering. So you can see why it's all a bit worrisome to me. Hopefully it won't stay this way, limited to the small few who actually care about this kind of stuff. I know real life has to come first of course, but I really don't want to see something with such huge potential go down the drain. Hopefully things will look brighter in the near future. Until then, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: Xenion on 2006-04-06 02:10:19
hi guys,
i'm not too much into mpc anymore so let me ask one question: did anything happen after the pc donation ? (i'm just interessted)
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: shadowking on 2006-04-06 02:37:42
His job is main priority and he apparently has no time for programming.
Title: After the PC donation...
Post by: CiTay on 2006-04-06 02:58:49
hi guys,
i'm not too much into mpc anymore so let me ask one question: did anything happen after the pc donation ? (i'm just interessted)


Well, Frank helped here and there, pointing the team into the right direction on the denormals problem and several other issues, but there were no groundbreaking developments, i think his normal job is just too time-consuming. Still, the Musepack.net (http://www.musepack.net/) team managed to put out four newer encoder versions in the meantime:

mppenc 1.15s (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=29604)
mppenc 1.15t (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=31055)
mppenc 1.15u (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=31851)
mppenc 1.15v (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=35191)

Knowing how irregularly he appears and works on his projects etc., i don't know if and what will happen next. He might pop up here again or not. Maybe i'll write him and ask what he's up to. Yeah, i'll do that.