I probably just got handed it in a batch and forgot, but this is a lot funnier.

[egypturnash]

"What the hell? I have music in iTunes I don't remember ever hearing. Who the hell is 'Dead Man Ray'?"

"It's probably the work of Scandinavian hackers who've hacked into your machine and are _promoting their friend's band._"

"...It's an OGG. I think you're right."

Comments

[luoto.livejournal.com]

We Scandinavians are not guilty (I hope...)They seem to be Belgians
Found this link on Google:
http://houbi.com/belpop/groups/deadmanray.htm
Never heard them myself.
B.t.w; Your journal looks very strange at this moment.
(Some experiment going on?)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a moment's googling after that conversation turned that up. I think we were kind of going on some crazy stereotype of Scandinavians, and all those icy Northern countries, based mostly on watching lots and lots of demos, when Nick said "Scandinavians".

I'm in the process of switching my journal over to a new look, to correspond with my website redesign. Unfortunately, from what little testing I've done, it seems to be completely broken in IE. And the comments pages still have some work to do in any browser...

[luoto.livejournal.com]

You sure got that icy Northern countries right! At the moment there is minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degree Fahrenheit?) outside...
Good luck with the new look!

[kitsunenine.livejournal.com]

What do you have against OGG files, exactly? They seem quite useful to me.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

They're just sort of a format I never run into except in the context of free software evangelism.

[kitsunenine.livejournal.com]

Wow, this theme is hard to read any responses on. :-/

By evangelism, are we talking 'file sharing good, m'kay', or 'Damnit I so badly need to use ICEWeasel' here? 'Cus I know I've encoded things to OGG before, but I've laughed in the face of Debian too, so...

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Seems in this context it's likely she's referring to the pushy types who try to tell you it's evil to use MP3 and that you should encode all of your music in ogg-vorbis (to distinguish from the other formats in the Xiph family) or The World Might End And You May Die, et cetera. At least, that's the impression I get from a lot of FOSS proponents.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

Eh, for me it just sounds better and takes up less space on the drive... but then, I could shove it into one of those 4 gb Microdrives.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'd love to use vorbis myself, but I have this self-perpetuating problem where I can't do much with it unless more programs support it. Maybe if I can decrypt my iTunes purchases sometime I'll install that experimental operating system on my iPod and then I can vorbis it up all I like. I think that the iPod is what's really holding me back. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Ironically enough, the hardcore music geeks I know have told me that the Freeness of ogg is in doubt; it may be just as patent-encumbered (and, thus, Evil™) as mp3, aac, wma, etc.

[protocat.livejournal.com]

(Pedantic mode: It's not called OGG. OGG is the container, Vorbis is the actual encoded audio stream. Other things can theoretically be in OGG containers, but in practice aren't. Most FOSS folks miss that, too.)

Theoretically, yeah. Same threat loomed over Musepack. Vorbis has found its niche, though and they haven't really been smashed to bits over it.

The future of Vorbis really has nothing to do with music so much as it does in computer software and games. Already it's slowly making inroads there as something (theoretically) free that you can slap in without having to pay a license. This became very important after things like the Tremor decoder arrived that let it be decoded on all sorts of unusual platforms.

Besides Vorbis' niche in gaming, the only other arena still to really be battled is streaming audio -- which AAC and Vorbis are battling it out so far as objective testing is concerned, but likely will also go to AAC.

Ever since the AoTuV fork showed up, it actually became rather competitive as a format, however. Prior to Xiph's 1.1 release (which incorporated changes from AoTuV), the main Xiph branch was pretty goddamn crappy and the evangelism was unwarranted -- I think we had this conversation years ago.

At this point, however, Vorbis has finally pretty much replaced Musepack as the 'alternative format of choice' in my mind. The only thing that bests it in low-bitrate (i.e. streaming) conditions is AAC, and even then -- it's really close. Both are transparent at around 160~180 Kbps VBR, for the most part. But I see AAC getting more use of the two for music ultimately, especially with things like Nero's free encoder, ignoring the fact a lot of people have iPods and iTunes as well.

But it's also worth noting: MP3 has come a very long way. The latest LAME builds are hitting a very mature, very good quality level that is very hard to spot issues with when using the normal 200~220 Kbps VBR presets. Given that MP3 is so prolific and that storage is increasing all the time -- I don't know if we'll ever be free of it for general music use unless multichannel audio becomes all the rage, which I find unlikely even though Vorbis and others are all in a good position for this.

MP3's only real threat is when lossy compression ultimately doesn't matter. FLAC and Wavpack are already making serious inroads and I know in Japan, they have so much bandwidth that their P2P services tend to trade BIN/CUE and .ISO images of CDs a well as .wav files, sans any compression at all.

But leave it to Japan to be progressive and eccentric like that.

[euphoriel.livejournal.com]

I am very much into FLAC, and wish so much that more portable players supported it. They finally have the storage space but so few support anything other than MP3 and WMA. I've never especially gotten into OGG anything, preferring MKV for video/audio containers (or even AVI for simple things) and MP3 for my lossless audio tasks.

Ramble, ramble, ramble.

[protocat.livejournal.com]

I currently rip entire images of albums using EAC to calculate and preserve pre-gap information. This is then compressed with WavPack with an embedded cuesheet to create a single file with a .log of the rip that I can archive discs with.

I use this to then strike lossy copies from, both for my general listening (Vorbis Q6 works in most cases) and for my iPod (AAC 160Kbps VBR). The reason being is, after doing double-blind listening tests to measure each encoder at a given preset, I found each to be generally transparent at those settings in most of my test cases. I can still, if seriously focusing, pick out issues in some cases -- but in general playback, it's transparent from source. Given I currently use an E-Mu 1820M sondcard (soon to be replaced with an RME Fireface 800 for various reasons) and a pair of Sennheiser HD-600s for monitoring, that's generally far above what the average person is using for testing. I can also hear to 18.5Khz in a sine sweep. I'm fairly confident of my results -- besides, which, most artifacts you're gonna hear you can hear on far less equipment once you know what to listen for.

Especially given on portables, where you're in a noisy environment generally and you don't wish to use lossless -- the disk seek accesses will kill your battery dead. I consider lossless in those scenarios to be a total waste, not to mention, the output on even the holy iPod is just 'above average' for your portable listening device. S'why using 160 VBR AAC with a decent AAC encoder (Nero or iTunes) works just as well as 192 for most situations, plus it saves battery.

Re: Ramble, ramble, ramble.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I found 160k AAC to be the sweet spot, as well - lower than that, I could hear horrid artifacts on my torture test tracks (Bjork singing nicely over raw, overdriven glitches); higher than that, it was just wasting disc space. This was just with the sound hardware packaged in my old G4 tower and a pair of pretty-nice-for-forty-bucks speakers with a subwoofer; I can feel my audio engineer father turning over in his grave every time I admit to how shitty my audio gear has been most of my life. sigh.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I haven't properly styled the comments pages yet, and there's some cross-browser issues with the bottom marging, too.

More the latter. The kind of people who insist that anyone and everyone really should be using Linux, and look puzzled when people balk at all the work involved.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Linux is ridiculous. Ironically, I've found that one of the most difficult to set up distributions also happens to be the only one I've ever been able to use for more than a month without suddenly being overwhelmed by binary incompatibilities and dependency hell.

Welcome to Gentoo. I hate it so, and yet I love it. And I most certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. :D

re: OGG files

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

One of the things that I disliked about iTunes was its incompatibility with Ogg. Have they changed that ? If not, what's the solution ?

Re: OGG files

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Well, I have a Quicktime plugin that does ogg. iTunes used to not properly show/edit tags on files it pulls in via Quicktime plugins, but now it seems to do this.

Of course, this is on the Mac, where you add new file formats by dropping a codec into a system directory, and it pretty much Just Works; I don't think anyone really makes codec plugins for the Windows QT, and I dunno what kind of codec abstraction Windows provides to apps, nor if iTunes uses said abstraction on Windows, if it exists...

Re: OGG files

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when OS X is good, it's good.

Re: OGG files

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

I have the QuickTime component too, and there is a Windows version. Here they are if you want it (http://xiph.org/quicktime/download.html)—hope it works for you.

You can shower me with money if you want to show your appreciation, of course. ;)

Re: OGG files

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

I am shamed - my google-fu is weak. Thanks very much!

Re: OGG files

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

No problem. I rather like helping people. :D