johnm at wdi.disney.com wrote:

> At 4:22 PM -0800 4/1/99, Craig Latta wrote:
> >       Hmm. I think MP3 at 128kbps or higher sounds very much better than RealAudio. The "no loss of quality" claim isn't completely silly (only mostly)... If the source has already been severely compressed spectrally (or just doesn't have any very low or high frequencies) then it compresses very well. :)
>
> Has anyone listened to the Voxware music (MetaSound) codecs? To my
> ears, the quality of their 96kps stereo codec is better than the
> 128kps MP3,

> [ ... ]

> But the truely stunning codec I've heard is the QSound one.

As per usual, John is right; there are a number of codecs that sound better than MP3 (or sound comparable at lower bit rates). Please also be certain that I never meant (in my earlier negative comments) to say that building better codecs into Squeak was a bad idea. I was merely firmly contradicting the
marketing hype that says that MP3 is artifact-free at a 12:1 compression ratio.

With respect to John's call for PD codec sources, the problem is that so much of the good recent work has been at companies who want to license the technology as their business, so it's unlikely that they'd post a reference implementation to the web (or even publish a paper describing their techniques that
would make it easy for anyone else to make an external implementation).

--
stp

Stephen Travis Pope | stp at create.ucsb.edu | http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~stp