21–30 of 72 posts
https://forceincmilleplateaux.bandcamp.com/album/most-beauti...
Does anyone have a full list of the recordings they used for these listening tests?
Wow this is really fascinating. I’ve seen a lot of support for FLAC but I’ve never been able to get an iPhone or iPod to read them. I wonder why flac and other high end lossless file formats are not supported.
Lossless is only useful as an archival or intermediary format during production/recording where you can't tolerate lossy encoding. For listening purposes lossy codecs are all capable of being perceptually lossless for trained or untrained listeners, including MP3. MP3 gets a bad rap because low bitrate mp3 does sound awful. 320kbps or higher is sufficient for 99% of listeners, including audiophiles. Most listeners ca…
It's also the case that MP3 encoders got better over time, and if you're considering the sound of a 128kbps (or 96kbps) MP3 encoded by the Fraunhofer encoder you got from IRC in the late 90s; it's just not going to be good.
There's a music album, Most Beautiful Design by Bienoise (cited in the PHD of the author of the site as a great example of how to work with MP3 compression artifacts and glitches) that is made of heavily compressed mp3s so that it sounds great while still fitting in a standard 1.44mb floppy. https://forceincmilleplateaux.bandcamp.com/album/most-beauti...
Wow this is really fascinating. I’ve seen a lot of support for FLAC but I’ve never been able to get an iPhone or iPod to read them. I wonder why flac and other high end lossless file formats are not supported.
Lossless is only useful as an archival or intermediary format during production/recording where you can't tolerate lossy encoding. For listening purposes lossy codecs are all capable of being perceptually lossless for trained or untrained listeners, including MP3. MP3 gets a bad rap because low bitrate mp3 does sound awful. 320kbps or higher is sufficient for 99% of listeners, including audiophiles. Most listeners ca…
Also, if you want music that was recorded in 5.1 surround sound, sometimes the surround version is only available from lossless sources, while lossy sources sell only the stereo downmix.
The author posts clips like "Example 1. White, Pink, and Brown Noise - Uncompressed", but the audio files are hosted on SoundCloud. My experience on SoundCloud is that no matter what format you upload as, they always stream it down to you as a 128 kb/s MP3 or something like that. I think the author is better off self-hosting the WAV files? > Listening tests, primarily designed by and for western-european men, and usi…
The ways in which biases can be encoded in an algorithm are not trivial. The author takes pains to describe how the lossiness of MP3 encoding is audible. The codec's authors made aesthetic decisions, shaped by their own taste, to determine what sounds could be acceptably removed from the audio. That should be a significant point in almost any discussion of MP3. The author of this piece does not, however, challenge th…
Of course mp3 is limited by the people who made it, everything is. It certainly wasn't done with any bad intentions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lossless is only useful as an archival or intermediary format during production/recording where you can't tolerate lossy encoding. For listening purposes lossy codecs are all capable of being perceptually lossless for trained or untrained listeners, including MP3. MP3 gets a bad rap because low bitrate mp3 does sound awful. 320kbps or higher is sufficient for 99% of listeners, including audiophiles. Most listeners ca…
There are reasons to prefer seeking out lossless, though, even if you could just as well convert them to lossy once you have downloaded them. First of all, sometimes the lossy versions of downloads have "loudness wars" compressed dynamics, since the label assumes that anyone listening to it will be using earbuds in some loud public space. The same recording sold in lossless from an audiophile-focused source, however,…
> sometimes the lossy versions of downloads have "loudness wars" compressed dynamics
The loudness war has been over for years, and it was precisely due to lossless CD audio that it existed in the first place.
Wow this is really fascinating. I’ve seen a lot of support for FLAC but I’ve never been able to get an iPhone or iPod to read them. I wonder why flac and other high end lossless file formats are not supported.
I'd be surprised if they don't support ALAC, Apple's lossless codec. Can't say I have any iPods or iPhones to try it out myself though. Apple generally has a very strong case of NIH.
A few years ago I did a much more detailed comparison of lossy audio codecs: https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/objectively_comparing_au... TLDR: If you need to go lossy, use Opus. At higher bitrates, it's the only lossy codec that has a flat frequency response.
The closest thing to an objective analysis tool is PEAQ which is also pretty terrible, but its universally terrible so that makes it useful as a benchmark.
The author posts clips like "Example 1. White, Pink, and Brown Noise - Uncompressed", but the audio files are hosted on SoundCloud. My experience on SoundCloud is that no matter what format you upload as, they always stream it down to you as a 128 kb/s MP3 or something like that. I think the author is better off self-hosting the WAV files? > Listening tests, primarily designed by and for western-european men, and usi…
Never mind that the Chinese still have not completely made up their minds about exactly how to represent their language in digital form. It is ludicrous to think that in the 1960s they could have somehow anticipated how Chinese people wanted to communicate in digital form, and just have support for that. Essentially invent Unicode first.
Of course the authors don't understand any of that, they just saw that there were limits of how Chinese characters could be represented digitally (this was in 2012) and they took an ignorant and antagonistic tone, and threw out accusations of a racist conspiracy by ISO and ASCII. And this paper was part of a curriculum at a major university.
Accusations like this are almost always wrong, and actually damaging. In today's climate, it is especially damaging to throw out accusations of racism.
I can not imagine how the designers of MP3 could have satisfied this person. The had to start somewhere. They had to start with what they knew, and work their way out, which they did.
Text started out being only upper case only, and then lowercase and extended western characters, and then more complexity was added over the years. Photo codecs started out calibrated for Lenna[1], so that they would have a common reference, and worked from there. Were they supposed to be able to perfectly capture every skin tone, all at once, the first time? Should they have started with a picture of a non-white person first? What ethnicity then?
This kind of antagonistic critical mentality is toxic, and should just be dismissed without consideration. At this point, if someone says that some technology is racist, I assume they are a grifter and ignore them.