Update:
Gren is helping with the soundsamples & has recoded most of them already & also added new & 'fresh' sounds to the database.
Unfortunately he got the information a little late, that some of those (over 30) are of unknown source & should be replaced completely, but I hope he still finds the motivation to continue on the task of reorganization as imho I feel that he is the right man for our samples & soundfx !
I had a very positive discussion with Destructavator yesterday & I think we finally came to good conclusions how to best do this stuff:
1.) Backups of the original tracks will be made first, so we can always get back to the originals...
2.) Tracks already encoded @ a low or reasonable VBR bitrate will not be recoded...
3.) Destrucatavator will try & test this settings for the rest of the tracks:
OGG VBR: min. Bitrate 32KBit, average Bitrate 128KBit, max. Bitrate 224KBit
This specification should also be the one we should want to get from the music contributors, or we decide to have a (big) place for our original tracks somewhere & do the ogg encoding ourselves, then I would suggest to ask the contributors for files encoded with some lossless codec like flac...
An extensive test on different methods of encoding & their qualities can be found here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=36465Interesting to note is that the free ogg-codec in the latest versions is the best of all modern lossy formats
Here some quotes:
• Vorbis: Vorbis is now –thanks to Aoyumi– an excellent audio format for 180 kbps encodings (and classical music). It has apparently no flaws (lowest note was 3.5) but only minor problems audible from time to time: additional noise, fatness, or softened details. One third of the tested samples are transparent to my ears with aoTuV encodings. My own limits are close to be reached. Vorbis also gets 14 times (on 18) the first place. Those amazing performance can be compared to MPC which is transparent only once and get the first place four times (on 18). Statistically aoTuV is still tied to MPC on those samples. But the ANOVA and the FRIEDMAN pval indicates that aoTuV is the winner with a high probability of 92% (ANOVA) or 93% (friedman). Bootstraped results are nevertheless less favorable (pval=0,264) and seems to indicate that additional samples won’t with certainty increase the gap (correct me if I’m wrong).
Anyway, Vorbis is now excellent.
• Vorbis: Vorbis is now impressive. Last year constant noise boost or coarseness spoiled the performance of this format. I was surprised to hear those problems on –q6,00 setting supposed to be free of them due to lossless coupling. Aoyumi has apparently identifies precisely the cause of this problem and he worked to solve it. Not entirely though: some remaining trails are still audible with few samples but the intensity is now really frail (at least on the tested samples). Other artifacts are also corrected: micro-attacks on Orion_II (sample 09) are now much less dusty (aoTuV performed even better than any other tested format at this bitrate!). Performance are remarkable and the slightly gain in bitrate consumption is the icing on the cake. Just a question: Does aoTuV mean Tuned for Victory? Or Tuned by Visitors? From what planet is Aoyumi coming from?