| Alex Butcher 2004-06-25, 6:57 pm |
| On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 10:30:01 +0100, John Stumbles wrote:
> "Alex Butcher" <alex.butcher.news0404@assursys.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:pan.2004.06.21.00.33.55.708388@assursys.co.uk...
[snip]
[color=darkred]
[snip]
[color=darkred]
>
> I'm curious why you say that. A (very) quick dip into the links you give
> above throws up (from http://www.airwindows.com/encoders/index.html) "Ogg
> Vorbis ... at high bit rates [] combines the tonal purity of BladeEnc with
> the transient aggressiveness of Fraunhofer". (They're talking about 256K+).
Creating MP3s that sound good is more involved than just making sure that
the frequency distribution is similar to the original on a graph. Note
that the same review complains of bladeenc's severe pre-echo. I've no idea
which of these reviewers are qualified to accurately judge the performance
of the encoders, the performance of similarly-performing encoders will be
subjective anyway (i.e. everyone will be able to tell a good encoder from
a bad encoder, but different people will probably prefer different /good/
encoders).
Heck, maybe my opinion of BladeEnc is out-of-date. Certainly it was
accurate at one point in its history.
[snip]
> As a matter of interest where does the Real Audio format fit into all of
> this? It seems to produce smaller files than 128K mp3 at reasonable quality
> (as far as I can tell on my grotty PC-attached speakers). I get the
> impression that it's so wrapped up in proprietary patent/license/bollox that
> decoders have to have a 'legit' realplayer's shared libraries, at least,
> installed to work with.
I think RA's priority is "listenable, but small" - appropriately for
streaming media over lines as slow as 14.4kbps.
That said, I believe the format includes a lossless encoding.
> (And a bonus question for another 10 points :-) how does one download .ra
> files on Linux? (I use Xi NetTransport on whinedos.) I did pick up a perl
> script which just used net::Socket (IIRC) to connect to an rtsp server but
> that didn't work on this platform (natch :-) and I don't yet have a
> net-connected *n*x box so haven't been able to try it there.
I've *cough* heard of <http://www.xenoclast.org/vsound/> being used
together with the official RA client for this purpose.
> [I guess we should probably migrate this to a more appropriate ng :-)]
Done. Hopefully some of the regulars in those groups should be better
informed than me. ;-)
Best Regards,
Alex.
--
Alex Butcher Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950 <http://www.assursys.com/>
|