Music Quality, .flac Vs. .mp3 On Pandora

[Tom`]

I may be wrong, but i thought that the claimed 100 hours battery time playing mp3s was possible because of hardware decoding, but maybe (hopefully) it was using the dsp.

This is how to do it:

This is sort of the idea I had in mind when suggesting to Craig we could get 100 hours of battery life just playing music.

What I thought would be ideal is to suspend Linux to SDRAM and then put the external memory to sleep. Then, using the internal scratch pad RAM, and maybe using the DSP core and its RAM, a low power, low speed music player could be run to just play music and use the shoulder buttons to change tracks. It would be pretty basic, but most of the time, I don't even look at the display when playing music. I just put the player on random shuffle so this seems like a great idea for when you don't need any of the Pandora's other capabilities.

The alternative is to see just how little power we can use with the screen off, unnecessary features powered down, the clock speed reduced way down to whatever minimum keeps required external interfaces working, and still running Linux (since it has so many codecs supported already). This will take a while to master because I don't think current OMAP3 kernels even turn Smart Reflex features on yet.

There is not actually any hardware MP3 decoder (among other reasons, that would have to be expensively licensed).

 

[cobaltage]

There is not actually any hardware MP3 decoder (among other reasons, that would have to be expensively licensed).

Thanks for finding that information.

I think the mp3 decoder hardware is a common part of chipsets for DAPs but not used much otherwise.

 

[Svartalf]

I think the mp3 decoder hardware is a common part of chipsets for DAPs but not used much otherwise.

In many cases, they don't even use a specific chip. They code up a codec for a fixed point DSP and use that. You could, in theory, make the same sort of codec- but nobody directly involved with the firmware can use anything other than the Vorbis, FLAC, or similar codecs.

 

[Micket]

When it comes to down to a situation of high quality sound, where flac is even considered, why do i see MP3 pop up in every other reply?
I dont think i've seen a modern listening test where MP3 has been one of the top players.

Some technical issues (which i unfortunally had to come across when working on OldPlay for the GP2X) makes me furiously HATE the mp3 format. VBR is just a ugly ugly hack (and not really standardized). Seeking is a pain with libmad, In fact, everything is a pain in the ass with libmad. There are patent issues as well.
So it's expectable to have bugs and incompabilities in software that plays MP3's (i know several music players for the GP2X had issues, Oldplay had at least 6-7 bugs regarding MP3/MP2, from crashes to things with stereo/samplerate issues).

On the other hand, the vorbis library Tremor is VERY convenient and easy to work with, it has everything you can ask of it.
If you already have the flac files, clearly you should go for Vorbis/aoTuV, or at least a format that has some technical superiority.

So from a developer (although i wont be writing for the pandora); Please let MP3 dieeee! We can only kill it if we all help out!

 

[atomicthumbs]

When it comes to down to a situation of high quality sound, where flac is even considered, why do i see MP3 pop up in every other reply?
I dont think i've seen a modern listening test where MP3 has been one of the top players.

Some technical issues (which i unfortunally had to come across when working on OldPlay for the GP2X) makes me furiously HATE the mp3 format. VBR is just a ugly ugly hack (and not really standardized). Seeking is a pain with libmad, In fact, everything is a pain in the ass with libmad. There are patent issues as well.
So it's expectable to have bugs and incompabilities in software that plays MP3's (i know several music players for the GP2X had issues, Oldplay had at least 6-7 bugs regarding MP3/MP2, from crashes to things with stereo/samplerate issues).

On the other hand, the vorbis library Tremor is VERY convenient and easy to work with, it has everything you can ask of it.
If you already have the flac files, clearly you should go for Vorbis/aoTuV, or at least a format that has some technical superiority.

So from a developer (although i wont be writing for the pandora); Please let MP3 dieeee! We can only kill it if we all help out!

I'd like to kill it and use Vorbis for everything, but a few notable things (iTunes, Windows Media Player, iPods) cannot play Vorbis files.

 

[lulzfish]

but a few notable things (iTunes, Windows Media Player, iPods) cannot play Vorbis files.

iTunes: Actually, there's a Quicktime extension that lets you play Vorbis. Or you could just use software that's actually worth its weight in hard disk space like Rhythmbox or Amarok [I totally think there's an Amarok for Windows / Mac, somebody correct me if I'm wrong]

Windows Media Player: Heh, Windows Media Player. VLC is a pretty good replacement for pretty much anything I've ever needed from WMP.

iPods: Well, yeah. But the Pandora will replace that soon enough.

 

[valhalla]

I'd like to kill it and use Vorbis for everything, but a few notable things (iTunes, Windows Media Player, iPods) cannot play Vorbis files.

Older iPods and a few other players can play vorbis files as well, by using an alternative firmware like rockbox ( http://www.rockbox.org/ ), and of course you may just use your pandora to play them; by using it I've managed to kill mp3

I've ripped all of my CDs to a single flac file + cuesheet; this way you can get everything that you could get from the original CD, including identification for CDDB and the like. I'm currently keeping them on DVDs, but I plan to move them to an USB HD, so that if I'm at (somebody's) home I can just plug the HD in pandora, connect the pandora to a proper stereo equipment and play high quality music. I hope that at least one flac player on pandora will support the embedded cluesheet for skipping tracks, but since I usually listen to full albums it's not a big issue.

When I'm on the go, however, I just can't feel any difference between good lossy and lossless, so I will load my pandora with vorbis files generated with
CODE
abcde -d $FILE -p -o ogg:"-q 8"

where abcde is a nice command line frontend to grabbers and encoders and $FILE is one of the flac files above. I usually check manually the results of the CDDB query, but it can be made to work in batch mode with no human intervention.
The same would work with mp3, musepack or aac files, all supported by abcde , but then you loose the nice fuzzy feeling of using free unencoumbered formats

 

[hessiess]

The main problem with most MP3's is that they are encoded at a much too low bitrate. I have all my music in FLAC so as not to degrade the quality if I encode it to something else, but it is just so much more convenient being able to play FLAC directilly without messing around with re-encoding, even if I cannot tell the difference and it uses more storage space.

Though I often can tell the difference, especially in music with high pitched notes or the 'ringing' of cimbles, which sound distorted with MP3 compression, this is much less noticeable with OGG.

 

[sindbad]

[I totally think there's an Amarok for Windows / Mac, somebody correct me if I'm wrong]
Yeah, it works great. Not the best packaging and some features are missing, but works and looks great.

I usually try to encode stuff in FLAC if I can afford the space or Ogg otherwise. I don't really have any device that's incapable of playing at least Ogg.

 

[atomicthumbs]

Older iPods and a few other players can play vorbis files as well, by using an alternative firmware like rockbox ( http://www.rockbox.org/ ),

Which I am using on my old 1G iPod Nano.

 

[Svartalf]

On the other hand, the vorbis library Tremor is VERY convenient and easy to work with, it has everything you can ask of it.
If you already have the flac files, clearly you should go for Vorbis/aoTuV, or at least a format that has some technical superiority.

Tremor's a front-runner for framing in an ideal OGG DSP codec for us that doesn't need licensing. I've MP3's only because .OGGs aren't supported on my car stereo (sigh...) and I can't add codecs to it (deeper sigh...), but if I could get more devices supporting it, I'd quit using MP3's. MP3 as a format is only useful in that you can get commercial music from places like payplay.fm, etc. without DRM, etc. in that format and so many devices use it.