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6
General Audio / Re: The "business model" of hybrid codecs with correction files
Last post by skamp -
Quote from: Nick.C on
The ability to create correction files in parallel during lossyWAV processing was more of an "it's possible" feature than an "it's space and time efficient" feature.

Ah, the things we do just because we can 🙂

Quote from: Porcus on

What about hardlinking? Create a "hardlinked mirror" of the entire collection, and then delete *.wvc from it afterwards.
Caveat: As far as I understand, the end-tags of .wv mean that retagging won't have to create a temporary file (thus breaking the hardlink structure) - but who knows if application X will do so?!

That's a great idea. I totally forgot about hard links. I've been tinkering with your idea since I read your post and I didn't notice any issues with tagging a hard linked lossy .wv file (not with my own APEv2 tagger utility, anyway). No need to delete the correction files, I can just use a script to only hard link lossy files (and cover art JPEGs).

Quote from: Brand on
You can just copy the whole hybrid music collection with all of its folder structure to another device with a filter that excludes *.wvc files, for example. There are file managers, file copying apps and scripts that let you do that easily. That is assuming the target device doesn't have some restrictions in terms of what software can access it.

As much as I've been loving Apple products since my childhood, transferring new music to my iPhone in the foobar2000 (iOS) directory is a pain. The macOS interface only shows root directories of the foobar2000 data on my iPhone (in my case, artist directories) and you can only overwrite them as a whole, as far as I know. Possibly many subdirectories (album directories). The alternative is to transfer a new album directory to the iPhone's internal files storage, then manually moving that directory to the appropriate foobar2000 artist directory, using my iPhone. foobar2000 then takes care of re-scanning the collection.

I also don't know how to tell the macOS "Finder" to filter out certain filetypes while doing that.
9
General Audio / Re: Can higher bitrates sometimes sound worse than lower ones
Last post by Case -
@fred-hy : as john33 said, I just tested it myself.
Generally speaking lossy codecs should always improve quality the more bits you give them. When you increase the bitrate they can more accurately store what they want. Also as you increase the bitrate they can store larger frequency range.

This Opus behavior looks like a serious bug or their modeling of human hearing is badly mistaken. I can't think of any good excuse for the behavior this sample demonstrates.

I'm well aware you don't hear with your eyes but I'll post some spectrograms either way, as in this instance they do demonstrate things quite well.
Original audio:
X

At 48 kbps Opus sounds very watery and thin, and frequency analysis shows that most frequencies have changed by quite a bit:
X

At 64 kbps things have improved, but now there are a couple of weird frequency spikes that make chirping sounds:
X

As bitrate increases those spikes disappear and the lower frequency noise gets fuller spectrum. This is 96 kbps (I don't hear difference in the noise):
X

As nominal bitrate rises to 128 kbps Opus has again introduced a lot of chirping:
X

As bitrate increases the chirping lessens, this at 150 kbps:
X

And by 160 kbps they are all gone:
X

And when bitrate is pushed further up somewhere around 220 kbps Opus once again thinks that introducing the chirping artifacts is a good idea:
X

This time when bitrate is increased the chirping gets worse. At 260 kbps:
X

Until you give Opus enough bits so that it can fill the entire spectrum it wanted to fill without the chirping artifacts. This is at 400 kbps, but 320 kbps spectrum is identical:
X

Here the subjective quality increases as the bitrate rises until encoder bug ruins everything, but as bitrate increases again the glitch will get circumvented eventually. I think it's just bad luck that around 256 kbps seems to have the worst chirping, I think some other sample could produce similar results at different bitrates.
10
foobar2000 mobile / Re: Certain mp3-files break playback
Last post by AlexForFoo -
Most of my tracks are mp3 44.1 kHz, but there are also 48 kHz mp3. So far, I couldn't see a pattern. When I first observed problems, I had the impression that affected files are the ones, which I transcoded from other formats to mp3 (using foobar desktop and lame, 320 kbps cbr), but I'm not sure about that.

Two additional findings from yesterday (preview 2025-05-11):

1) If the stuttering is triggered from one file (say track A) and I skip to the next track (say track B, usually without problems) via the ">>"-control, this next song is also affected and stutters. But if I go back from stuttering "track A" to the playlist and tap on "track B", i.e. navigation instead of skipping, playback is ok.

2) Started playback of a song using smartphone speakers, everything's ok. Then I connected an external speaker via bluetooth while playback was going on. After coupling, playback switched from internal to external speaker and the track stuttered. Tried to reproduce, but couldn't so far.

Still not sure whether only my device is affected.