My adventure with Ubuntu

[xcript]

Originally posted by: Robor
JohnBernstein: It's not cool to come in here as a new member and hijack Nick's thread and trash on a good member like Nothinman.

He's not new. He was spamming his crappy website as HardNut before. :roll:

 

[Markbnj]

I was sort of thinking that JohnBernstein was undergoing self-ownage, but then I saw his incisive and pointed use of bold-face type, and that won me over completely. The only thing better would be all-caps.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Markbnj
I was sort of thinking that JohnBernstein was undergoing self-ownage, but then I saw his incisive and pointed use of bold-face type, and that won me over completely. The only thing better would be all-caps.

Yes.

 

[saabman]

Too bad you'll only be able to fit like 10 of them on an iPod. MP3 is lossless, there's a tradeoff that has to be made and for most people the compression ratio is more than worth it. And there are lossless audio codecs out there if you want, like FLAC, but I don't know if any of the portables support them.

Yes, nothinman, you're right on target. I actually don't use portables at all, probably because I'm over 50 and never got addicted to those ear plugs. I much prefer listening to the room acoustics of Dynaudio speakers singing to me, plunked down in a nice soft easy chair . Binaural (headphones) never really appealed to me at all (I tried to like em, but no go), as the tonal qualities of a room/speakers is much more pleasurable and realistic.

With disk space as cheap as it is lately, I don't see a good reason (for me) to use lossless anything for quality audio. But you do have a good point.

Of course, this is just my opinion.

 

[nweaver]

I'm still wondering how much the MPAA paid for Redhat, and how many kickbacks Nothinman gets from them :rolleyes;

 

[Nothinman]

With disk space as cheap as it is lately, I don't see a good reason (for me) to use lossless anything for quality audio. But you do have a good point.

If you can really hear the difference that's fine, but using uncompressed WAVs isn't too smart when there are lossless codecs like FLAC out there.

 

[drag]

I think there was a mix up of Lossless here.

Lossless is for formats like Flac, SHN, Ape audio, and certain versions of WMA among others. These compress digital audio down to smaller file sizes but do it in a way that is reversable. They retain 100% audio quality. It would be the same as using .wav files. I think Flac is the most common version used nowadays.. Some online music publishers will actually sell flac files for discriminating customers.

Lossy formats are those that acheive very high compression by removing or modifying carefully selected audio data and compressing the rest. Stuff like MP3, Ogg Vorbis, or certain versions of AAC or WMA (they are more commonly used versions). They try to do it scientificly.. like a loud high pitched sound will mask a slightly lower pitched quieter sound in human hearing.. so you can get away with removing the lower/quieter sound without noticable impact.

For instance I have a 2:30 song.. In wav format it's 26MB. In the highest compression setting the flac version is 11MB. There should be no discernable difference between these two. If you compress it into a flac file and uncompress it back to wav the checksums match up, which wouldn't be possible if it wasn't a bit for bit exactly the same.

Now for a lossy format encoded at the quality of '8' for Ogg Vorbis yeilds a variable bitrate of around 212Kb/s (compared to 700-800 for the flac) and a file size of 3.8MB. When decompressed back to wav the best it could possibly sound would be the same as the Ogg Vorbis version, the sound is lost forever. The default quality setting yeilds a 100-128Kb/s and file size of 1.9MB. The lowest quality setting yeilds a file size of just 716KB and a bitrate of 30-34Kb/s.

So you see even for a audiophile the lossless format is great. More music on the same storage with the same quality. Lossy formats should be avoided for highest quality.