Listen Now: Luc's Heated Talk From X@FOSDEM

[bugmenot]

Michael, there's two things:

- you're using stereo audio, thus doubling your filesize bandwidth use for no reason, since your microphone was mono (and stereo wouldn't add anything to a talk);
- 22050Hz is more than enough for voice (you could easily drop lower than that, but 22050Hz means you're sure you're not loosing any quality).

Using Audacity, the resulting OGG audio file (Mono, 22050Hz, q=2) is 13Mo from the 73Mo the MP3 file was using.

I can provide you with a quick howto including screenshots for Audacity (or CLI if you prefer), else I could convert any files you want anytime (but with a delay involved in checking my inbox ) as thanks for your site and your efforts. I've spend quite some time on audio/video recording, editing and encoding for both work and personal interest so if it can be put to good use you'd be welcome

Nice work, Miles.

Hopefully if Michael takes you up on that offer he'll provide the audio in a lossless format so that you won't have to transcode directly from mp3 to vorbis. I'm sure that you know transcoding from a lossy format to another lossy format won't yield the best results.

[Michael]

Michael, the site you're using for Luc's talk audio file allows using OGG instead of MP3. Would you mind if I tried and reuploaded your file as an OGG file to see if it would work?

Sure thing.

[miles]

Sure thing.

It's here: http://www.toofiles.com/en/oip/audios/ogg/luc.html

The site doesn't provide streaming for OGG, but downloading (or playing in the browser, but no seeking) still works.

[miles]

Hopefully if Michael takes you up on that offer he'll provide the audio in a lossless format so that you won't have to transcode directly from mp3 to vorbis. I'm sure that you know transcoding from a lossy format to another lossy format won't yield the best results.

In this case, like with all audio Phoronix provides, it wouldn't matter. The MP3's bitrate is so high compared to the audio quality (voice, instead of studio recorded music) that there's no point starting from the raw file (which was probably that same MP3 anyway). The day Phoronics provides high quality classical concerts recording, fine, but till then starting from that kind of MP3 will provide the same results as starting from any FLAC file (which would be pointless). Remember, 73Mo>13Mo, nobody's shooting for Hi-Fi

[miles]

(Couldn't edit after 1 min...)

By the way, do you know of any streaming site that would stream OGG (and even allows embedding in Phoronics articles, like Youtube or Dailymotion does for video)? That would probably be useful for Michael, since readers would stay on Phoronics for the listening

Couldn't the link to the audio be embedded in an <audio> html tag? I don't know HTML, but maybe someone who does could try basic code and see if it would work in Gecko/Webkit using a link to the toofiles.com file in the tag?

[MartjeB]

I don't understand why it isn't possible to share to video:

1. Use torrents
2. Use http://www.2shared.com/ (unlimited file size, if I'm not mistaking)
3. Newsgroups
4. Dropbox?

[KDesk]

Please, use and open format like ogg vorbis/speex.

And using the HTML 5 <audio> tag would also be good. With HTML 5 you can do awesome things, for example with audio you can do this http://moztw.org/demo/audioplayer/

The only big browser that doesn't support <audio> is IE (Opera will support soon in 10.5), but do many IE users read Phoronix? If they do, there could be a message saying that IE is insecure, slow, etc. and offering the user to download Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, etc.

You can also host the videos in blip.tv or any other media web page.

P.D thanks you miles for the ogg file!

[bugmenot]

Please, use and open format like ogg vorbis/speex.

And using the HTML 5 <audio> tag would also be good. With HTML 5 you can do awesome things, for example with audio you can do this http://moztw.org/demo/audioplayer/

The only big browser that doesn't support <audio> is IE (Opera will support soon in 10.5), but do many IE users read Phoronix? If they do, there could be a message saying that IE is insecure, slow, etc. and offering the user to download Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, etc.

You can also host the videos in blip.tv or any other media web page.

P.D thanks you miles for the ogg file!

KDesk,

Thanks for posting the link to that very slick audio demo!! It's great to see a 100% conformant html5 page that illustrates what can be done without the need for bloated plug-ins like Flash.