Dial-Up Audio Public Listening Test Opened 124
CaptainCheese writes "Hydrogenaudio.org's Roberto Amorim just announced the opening of their 32kps multi-format listening test, intended to test the current 'dial-up' quality codecs.
From the Announcement: "The formats featured are Nero Digital Audio (HE-AAC+PS), Ogg Vorbis, WMA9 Std., MP3pro, Real Audio and QDesign Music Codec.
Lame MP3 is being used as low anchor, and a lowpass at 7kHz is being used as high anchor." These codec tests are unusual in that they adhere to ITU-R BS.1116-1. The test is open until July 11th and all are invited to participate. There's more info in the original test discussion, which indicates the originator is interested in 'testing formats working on dial-up streaming bitrates' - the test page notes: 'The real arena where codecs are competing, and most development is going, is at low bitrates.'"
Get the news out to portable music player (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this a double-blind test? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Results may be flawed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Get the news out to portable music player (Score:2, Insightful)
The less the world is tied to Microsoft standards, the better off we'll all be, I think.
Re:Is this a double-blind test? (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the most acclaimed methods of comparing codec quality is by performing so-called "Double Blind Listening Tests". In this sort of test, the participant compares various encoded samples against each other and against an uncompressed reference sample. The blind part means that the participant doesn't know which sample was encoded by which encoder. That guarantees there'll be no psychological bias towards his/her favorite codec, or against the codec he/she dislikes.
Slashdot Low Bitrate Ethnocentrism (Score:4, Insightful)
Get over yourselves please.
By the way, did you ever notice the lack of multimedia even on this site? Why might that be? Hmmm...
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Get the news out to portable music player (Score:2, Insightful)
I can use [a trial] of WMA Workshop [litexmedia.com] to compress music files to as low as 2kbs. That's nothing special within itself, however, what is impressive (no matter how its done, IMO), is the fact that you can hear (and pretty clearly too) both the music AND words to the vast majority of songs. Which makes it perfect for sending my friends ultra-small previews (normally around 200kb in size) of full songs, so they know what they sound like - no doubt we've all told somebody to downl.. *cough* buy a song, but they hesitate because they think it will sound crap.
Note to members of the RIAA: The above statement is purely fictional. I have never and would never even consider the illegal distribution of music.
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn, this is the kind of crap that gets modded-up these days...
Codecs continue to get better and better. Vorbis is pretty good even at 48K (artifacts are subtle). And even if this was 1997, and 32K sounded like crap with current codecs, you're statement is just like the famed "640K is enough for anybody", and "there is a world market for maybe a dozen computers". It's absolutely guaranteed to be proven wrong with time.
Re:Is this a double-blind test? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Results may be flawed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Why bother? (Score:1, Insightful)
- streaming video + sound
- voice chat while playing a game that is already sucking up a good portion of your bandwidth
- running a voice-chat server (ex: TeamSpeak), because (a) you're streaming out to multiple people, and (b) your upstream bandwidth is usually the limiting factor since most cable and dsl have shitty upstreams.
There are probably a lot of other uses but those two just stuck out in my mind.