4 ms·

Was really blown away by [0], a description of the Fourier transform. And also [1] is a good read. [0] http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-

Was really blown away by [0], a description of the Fourier transform. And also [1] is a good read. [0] http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-homer-simpsons-face http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-h... [1] http://ww.w.mpgedit.org/mpgedit/mp3.pdf http://ww.w.mpgedit.org/mpgedit/mp3.pdf

poizan42 9y ago
It's second nature to anyone with knowledge of signal processing. Sure Fourier transforms are very useful, but let's not be led to think that there was anything novel in the design of the MP3 format.
- auxym 9y ago
  Let's also not forget that the orignal Frauhofer encoder was not exactly impressive in it's results. Anyone remember downloading 128k CBR files off napster, the warbled mess that was? A lot of the advances came from the psycho-acoustic modeling and VBR algorithms from the LAME devs.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    I remember having to download LAME binaries from South America, as recently as last month, and as long ago as 1999. And I also remember when it was just a patch to Fraunhofer's reference implementation, under a suspiciously shaky interpretation of the law. I remember doing a comparison test way back in the late 90s between an officially licensed MP3 encoder and LAME on the same set of music WAV files, and was simply blown away when I could actually hear a difference in the results. Being the sort of anti-audiophile that I am, I then reduced the bitrate of the LAME encoding until I could just barely tell that it was too low, so that I could cram more music onto my hard drive, make playlists, and record them at 1x speed through the line-out port to an audio cassette tape, for my car stereo. At the time, LAME made the smallest file sizes for the crap music quality that I tolerate. Nowadays, I encode at minimum of 96k/sec (sometimes better) just to annoy other people around me less, and to cut down on the suggestions that I get some real speakers for my phone. It ain't the speaker, folks; that's pretty much the best quality I can discern with my own ears. When it comes to music, I think people pay far too much attention to audiophile opinions, and perhaps not enough to those who have physiological limitations on their enjoyment of music and/or recognition of speech-frequency sounds. But yeah, even I could tell when someone used a crappy encoder on their MP3 files. That's why I always ripped my own CDs, or specifically sought out lossless-encoded files, so that I could then use LAME to get an acceptable and consistent level of crappiness. Even now, I only download FLAC, and transcode my own MP3s for portable devices.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

poizan42 9y ago

It's second nature to anyone with knowledge of signal processing. Sure Fourier transforms are very useful, but let's not be led to think that there was anything novel in the design of the MP3 format.

auxym 9y ago
Let's also not forget that the orignal Frauhofer encoder was not exactly impressive in it's results. Anyone remember downloading 128k CBR files off napster, the warbled mess that was? A lot of the advances came from the psycho-acoustic modeling and VBR algorithms from the LAME devs.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  I remember having to download LAME binaries from South America, as recently as last month, and as long ago as 1999. And I also remember when it was just a patch to Fraunhofer's reference implementation, under a suspiciously shaky interpretation of the law. I remember doing a comparison test way back in the late 90s between an officially licensed MP3 encoder and LAME on the same set of music WAV files, and was simply blown away when I could actually hear a difference in the results. Being the sort of anti-audiophile that I am, I then reduced the bitrate of the LAME encoding until I could just barely tell that it was too low, so that I could cram more music onto my hard drive, make playlists, and record them at 1x speed through the line-out port to an audio cassette tape, for my car stereo. At the time, LAME made the smallest file sizes for the crap music quality that I tolerate. Nowadays, I encode at minimum of 96k/sec (sometimes better) just to annoy other people around me less, and to cut down on the suggestions that I get some real speakers for my phone. It ain't the speaker, folks; that's pretty much the best quality I can discern with my own ears. When it comes to music, I think people pay far too much attention to audiophile opinions, and perhaps not enough to those who have physiological limitations on their enjoyment of music and/or recognition of speech-frequency sounds. But yeah, even I could tell when someone used a crappy encoder on their MP3 files. That's why I always ripped my own CDs, or specifically sought out lossless-encoded files, so that I could then use LAME to get an acceptable and consistent level of crappiness. Even now, I only download FLAC, and transcode my own MP3s for portable devices.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]