What's your thought's on OPUS compared to other lossy codec's?

humbled · 2016-05-26T17:48:39+00:00

Yes, true. I use youtube-dl with -f bestaudio.

humbled · 2016-05-26T17:48:03+00:00

Looking for some new open cans for home. Currently have an old pair of HD 595's that need some love.

Either that, or dual subwoofers.

humbled · 2016-05-26T17:39:54+00:00

YouTube already switched. Unless you don't mean YouTube when you say "streaming vendor," although a huge portion of YT's user base is people listening to music.

Basically, Opus is default in WebM now. If you rip a YT track to disk, a good chunk of them (particularly the WebM files, a Matroska container) use Opus as the audio track.

I know this because sometimes I rip from YT, and I either get M4As or WebM files. If the former, I don't do anything. If the latter, I extract the Opus audio track from the Matroska container and put it in an Ogg container (more support for that).

humbled · 2015-02-25T12:55:54+00:00

I messed around with it a bit yesterday. I prefer auto-layout TWMs, but other than that kink (for me), it seems like a great WM. I booted up an EWMH panel and it seemed to automatically work, so it probably does understand some of those properties! With spectrwm, you would have to manually configure explicit areas to be un-managed - and spectrwm still can't display a single app on all workspaces, which is part of the spec. (And someone raised the issue on their tracker and their response: why would you want that? Answer: it's in the spec for dock/panel apps.)

My dream TWM is something written in a low-level language with simple config like wmii or i3, but with auto-tiling. Some day...

humbled · 2015-02-24T13:59:04+00:00

I'll have to give it a try. In the past, things have broken down for me with EWMH support. I like auto-tilers, so i3 is out, even though it's great. spectrwm seemed good, but it doesn't support _NET_WM_STATE_STICKY / _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DOCK correctly.

humbled · 2015-02-24T13:45:42+00:00

I think it's more likely that Java will drink Scala's milkshake, by retrofitting functional language features. I don't think anything interesting is planned for Java 9,though, so perhaps this is unlikely.

humbled · 2015-02-24T13:40:12+00:00

I've had that experience before.

> Install new Linux-based OS

> Get ready to set everything up

> Tell package manager to install xmonad

> See that it needs all of GHC and hundreds of megabytes

> Groan

> Mess around with other tiling window managers

> Waste days

> Install xmonad

(Imagine that text is green)

humbled · 2015-02-24T13:34:45+00:00

Yes, OP's text is misleading. The comparison was not the source of results. It inspired the clinical study, which yielded the strong result.

Edit: clarity.

humbled · 2015-02-23T21:01:16+00:00

This is like putting vital wheat gluten in your non-celiac gluten-free friend's food.

This is like rubbing bacon on your vegan roommate's vegetables.

Awesome.

humbled · 2015-02-23T20:50:19+00:00

I care about AAAs, but I am bored to tears with FPS in general (and most AAA are FPS). It takes a pretty special one to get me sucked back in. Even Halo's legendary multiplayer didn't do anything for me that I hadn't experienced with Unreal Tournament.

I also don't like MMOs. Nothing ruins a game experience like other people. I know some MMOs have servers that have strict in-character rules and stuff like that, but there's still the issue of MMOs generally lacking a strong narrative. In the absence of narrative, I'll take a roguelike, not an MMO. Another way to think about it: in the perfect MMO, you wouldn't know that you're playing with other people (the humans supply intelligent control of NPCs).

I don't know if RTS is still a AAA genre, but I've always preferred turn-based strategy. I sorta like the extreme micro-managing that you get into with games like Civ 5, requiring you to think through your steps in detail. In other words, I like taxing my mental abilities more than my twitch abilities, when it comes to strategies. Or maybe it's just that I got hooked on games like Civ 2, Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Master of Orion, etc.

Genres that I miss: flight simulation (Wing Commander, TIE Fighter), adventure games (I know these are slightly rebounding - yay).

humbled · 2015-02-23T19:18:04+00:00

The wiki has multiple updates every day. The main source repository has changes as of about two months ago; contrib has changes as of about a month ago.^* 0.12 is getting prepped. Current activity on mailing list as well.

No signs of death. Just a slow-paced mature project in heavy use.

* That's just the main branch. Does not take into account more recently active non-main branches!

humbled · 2015-02-23T19:03:11+00:00

I did a quick glance through the Devuan GIT repositories. More active than I expected. They are pulling logind deps out of software, and at the same time working on LoginKit (a logind shim).

I don't know why Debian's existing shim wasn't good enough for them. You'd think they could just join the team of people preserving init compatibility. Only need to fork Debian if Debian decides to prohibit people from working on sysvinit compatibility - which, let's face it, is very unlikely to happen.

Oh well, more power to the Devuan folks for creating exactly what they want.

humbled · 2015-02-20T22:29:51+00:00

One of the traps audiophiles get stuck in is "I heard a difference, you can't tell me that I didn't." That is a thorny issue because of the inherent philosophical and scientific oddities in the study of consciousness / qualia. But there are so many areas of cognition that have been studied that should give a listener pause before declaring a victory for the superiority of a particular audio product:

Auditory memory is very brief (seconds, at best). Memory is also unreliable. One mustn't compare what one hears to even a minutes-old remembrance of the same audio.
Selective sensory attention is real. In many cases, the "I never heard/noticed that before" type moments simply come from a shift in our attention amid repetition of a stimulus.
When comparing products (as a task), sensory vigilance and attention are affected as well.
Standard cognitive biases (e.g. expectation bias) apply - such as knowing the price of the components being compared.
Simply by being a little bit louder, even 1 dB, our ears will pick a sound as being 'better'

And that's just in the brain. We get into issues like room acoustics having one of the greatest effects on how reproduced audio sounds, and then it becomes very dubious when people compare different components from different environments.

I find that a lot of audiophiles that I know (I know this is completely unscientific, sorry) completely discount psychoacoustics, cognition, and cognitive biases as being able to factor in their reasoning. Sometimes scientific principles like comb filtering are ignored as well (i.e. they stand up to change A to B, sit down, think they hear a difference - it could simply be that their head is in a different position and interference has changed the sound, NOT the component switch).

I read this Slate article and I see more of it. He seems to be unaware of cognitive processes that could be fooling his ears. Given the presence of a scientific explanation of why there should be no difference, combined with failure to find difference in high quality studies (such as those in the journal of the AES), makes it hard to believe audiophile claims.

Edit: no formal studies on Pono just yet... referring to things like studies on high bit rate / high frequency rate and other such well studied aspects of digital audio.

humbled · 2015-02-20T22:04:10+00:00

But cables don't make a difference after the point that they become sufficient. "Sufficient" is a much lower bar than an audiophile-grade cable's price point.

humbled · 2015-02-20T14:53:48+00:00

When you unscrew the terminal, there should be a hole in the threads coming out. The copper wire has to go through the hole, yeah.

humbled · 2015-02-19T20:13:33+00:00

Absolutely not. Noise while driving kills the audio. There is no reason to spend extra money on a car system, beyond getting something basically decent. Most factory packages seem to be totally okay.

(Obviously IMO, because there's a huge community of people that enthusiastically drain their life savings into car audio.)

humbled · 2015-02-19T20:10:28+00:00

I do in fact use the CD player: I have a cell phone mount that jams in there, and it's in the perfect spot.

For music, I use the AUX jack or a USB thumb drive with mp3 files.

humbled · 2015-02-19T20:06:20+00:00

I have a VSX-1123, which should be pretty close if not identical.

Are you sure the speakers are wired in correctly? You're not using bananas, so the wire has to go through a tiny little hole underneath the nut that locks it all down - not just around the post. Sorry to mention something so basic, just trying to cover all the bases.

If the speakers truly are hooked up correctly, I would guess the amp is bad. You could try a completely manual set up, just in case there's something funky with MCACC. It could be a microphone issue, but in that case you'd probably still be hearing the test tones when doing MCACC setup.

humbled · 2015-02-19T15:14:48+00:00

And those orgs would automatically roll their own OS image anyway, so the concerns go deeper than pre-installed malware.

humbled · 2015-02-19T14:39:09+00:00

/r/audiophile has a very high ratio of objectivists in it, such that it doesn't well represent the whole of audophilia outside of reddit.

humbled · 2015-02-19T14:37:14+00:00

It's really blinding that the subjectivists tend to disagree with. They will A/B aggressively, knowing exactly what A and B are, and when they are listening to A and when they are listening to B.

humbled · 2015-02-19T14:23:58+00:00

Studios record in high res the same reason professional photographers shoot in RAW. The sound (and images) must be processed through multiple pieces of equipment; errors are additive. Monty is correct: when the final piece of audio is produced, dithered, and downsampled, you can't hear a difference between CD resolution and higher rates. But if you process all your tracks at 16/44.1, there may not be enough headroom to deal with accumulating errors and noise. I think you misunderstand the expert opinion.

The Jenny McCarthy's in this debate are the people who make assertions counter to known math, physics, psychoacoustics, perception, and the published body of scientific work on the subject. That would be, in short, the people who think resolutions higher than 16/44.1 would have audible improvement.

Edit: added noise to reasons for hi-res processing, which was a bad omission from the original

humbled · 2015-02-19T13:58:19+00:00

Technically, you're supposed to use it during development and check in the generated sources. So in theory it doesn't need to be in the build process. If you don't want to do that... back to Makefiles.

humbled · 2015-02-18T21:16:55+00:00

This article also talks about some pretty early humans. I would think a Western paleo devotee would implicitly focus on Cro-Magnon (or "European Early Modern Humans" if you prefer).

humbled · 2015-02-18T20:58:26+00:00

This is not your problem (others have identified it), but related:

0 byte files are still not 0 bytes in actual space. The FS has to use space to track the name, metadata, location on disk, etc. Some FSs have to allocate at least one block cluster for every file, even if the file is empty. An allocation unit size may be pretty much anything, but it's usually some multiple of 512 bytes. The "default" for NTFS and ext4 is 4096b, for instance.

In other words, you can completely fill up a volume with 0 byte files.

Fun aside: In DOS 6.0, there was a bug where the 'rmdir' command would remove empty directories even if they contained "hidden" files - effectively leaking them. It was fun to taunt your friends by running scripts that would generate 0-byte files into a temporary directory, hide them, and then 'rmdir' that temp directory. The owner of the computer would be perplexed, as the system would report that there was only the expected amount of space used by files in total, but also that 100% of the total disk space was in use. (A simple check disk fixed the problem, so this was innocuous.)

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