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> 16k lines of obscure C, riddled with pointer magic and arcane memory manipulations? No thanks! I swear I'm not trying to sound like an uppity, badass Real Pr

> 16k lines of obscure C, riddled with pointer magic and arcane memory manipulations? No thanks! I swear I'm not trying to sound like an uppity, badass Real Programmer here, but this seems... not too bad? 16 kloc of C for what is apparently the gold standard in lossy audio encoding is actually less than I would have guessed.

adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
sorry for the pedantry but gold standard lossy audio hasn't been mp3 for a decade. OPUS sounds better at roughly half the bitrate.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > OPUS sounds better at roughly half the bitrate. No, it does not.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    Anyone who's tried to use Discord for voice chat can tell you how bad OPUS is. Honestly hilarious.
    - astrange 3y ago
      Discord is encoding and streaming in realtime on top of a bunch of noise gating filters. Opus is the most efficient audio codec we've got. (For stereo anyway.) At high bitrates there might be better tuned ones, but also at high bitrates it doesn't really matter what you use as long as it's not MP3.
    - HappyDaoDude 3y ago
      I'm not sure if it is the codec at issue there. I have only used Discord voice chat a few times being interviewed for podcasts and the quality at times is astoundingly good. That said, those doing the interviews are using higher end audio gear that most people would so that would go a long way to improving that. Generally when I am grabbing audio off Youtube via NewPipe, I generally use the 50kbs OPUS stream if it is just talking/lectures. I cannot tell the difference. That said I once did a FLAC to 128KBit OPUS test on myself with music convinced I would be able to tell the difference. I could not. I just don't have hearing that is sensitive to codec loss it seems.
- spookie 3y ago
  Not half, but it does sound better with less bitrate. The diff depends on content somewhat.
- zrobotics 3y ago
  Gold standard as far as the library to use, from what I gather. AFAIK LAME is definitely the gold standard for open source mp3 encoding tools, it's what I always seem to find under the hood of any audio library I use. To address the grandparent comment, I kinda tend to agree with the OP here. Yes, 16 KLOC is smaller than I would have expected, but that's definitely large enough to be a project that will take some time to grok. And especially for math-heavy c code, less KLOC tends to mean that there's arcane stuff going on. Definitely not out of the realm of approachable, but not a codebase you'll quickly get what's going on without some serious study. And given that the OP's first attempt to convert it to go was to feed it through GPT one function at a time, it may not be something they are ready to modify. Using ChatGPT one function at a time kinda leads me to believe they aren't super-familiar with c, since pointers alone will definitely not make that approach work. In this case, the OP made the right call by finding a simpler original library to work off of, since production c code isn't necessarily great for learning from. (although I don't like using ChatGPT for a learning tool like this, it adds another layer of abstraction & obfuscation) Edit: rereading this, it comes off as negative to the OP. Not what I intended, the article was well written and I'm all for exploring new things and documenting them. I actually like writeups like these, since documenting approaching new things is a valuable thing to do, otherwise it makes the discovery part of programming dissappear if the only things that are written up are expert articles.
deleted 3y ago
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adgjlsfhk1 3y ago

sorry for the pedantry but gold standard lossy audio hasn't been mp3 for a decade. OPUS sounds better at roughly half the bitrate.

hulitu 3y ago
> OPUS sounds better at roughly half the bitrate. No, it does not.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  Anyone who's tried to use Discord for voice chat can tell you how bad OPUS is. Honestly hilarious.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Discord is encoding and streaming in realtime on top of a bunch of noise gating filters. Opus is the most efficient audio codec we've got. (For stereo anyway.) At high bitrates there might be better tuned ones, but also at high bitrates it doesn't really matter what you use as long as it's not MP3.
  - HappyDaoDude 3y ago
    I'm not sure if it is the codec at issue there. I have only used Discord voice chat a few times being interviewed for podcasts and the quality at times is astoundingly good. That said, those doing the interviews are using higher end audio gear that most people would so that would go a long way to improving that. Generally when I am grabbing audio off Youtube via NewPipe, I generally use the 50kbs OPUS stream if it is just talking/lectures. I cannot tell the difference. That said I once did a FLAC to 128KBit OPUS test on myself with music convinced I would be able to tell the difference. I could not. I just don't have hearing that is sensitive to codec loss it seems.
spookie 3y ago
Not half, but it does sound better with less bitrate. The diff depends on content somewhat.
zrobotics 3y ago
Gold standard as far as the library to use, from what I gather. AFAIK LAME is definitely the gold standard for open source mp3 encoding tools, it's what I always seem to find under the hood of any audio library I use. To address the grandparent comment, I kinda tend to agree with the OP here. Yes, 16 KLOC is smaller than I would have expected, but that's definitely large enough to be a project that will take some time to grok. And especially for math-heavy c code, less KLOC tends to mean that there's arcane stuff going on. Definitely not out of the realm of approachable, but not a codebase you'll quickly get what's going on without some serious study. And given that the OP's first attempt to convert it to go was to feed it through GPT one function at a time, it may not be something they are ready to modify. Using ChatGPT one function at a time kinda leads me to believe they aren't super-familiar with c, since pointers alone will definitely not make that approach work. In this case, the OP made the right call by finding a simpler original library to work off of, since production c code isn't necessarily great for learning from. (although I don't like using ChatGPT for a learning tool like this, it adds another layer of abstraction & obfuscation) Edit: rereading this, it comes off as negative to the OP. Not what I intended, the article was well written and I'm all for exploring new things and documenting them. I actually like writeups like these, since documenting approaching new things is a valuable thing to do, otherwise it makes the discovery part of programming dissappear if the only things that are written up are expert articles.

deleted 3y ago

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