[xiph-cvs] r6769 - in websites-ngen: . xiph.org/CSS xiph.org/contribute xiph.org/contribute/betterapps xiph.org/vorbis/faq
comatoast at xiph.org
comatoast at xiph.org
Thu May 27 02:55:11 PDT 2004
Author: comatoast
Date: 2004-05-27 05:55:10 -0400 (Thu, 27 May 2004)
New Revision: 6769
Added:
websites-ngen/xiph.org/contribute/betterapps/
websites-ngen/xiph.org/contribute/betterapps/index.markdown
Modified:
websites-ngen/style.txt
websites-ngen/xiph.org/CSS/all.css
websites-ngen/xiph.org/contribute/index.markdown
websites-ngen/xiph.org/vorbis/faq/index.txt
Log:
* I got sick of looking at Gentium.
* /contribute/* is a lot better (although far from done)
Modified: websites-ngen/style.txt
===================================================================
--- websites-ngen/style.txt 2004-05-27 04:07:25 UTC (rev 6768)
+++ websites-ngen/style.txt 2004-05-27 09:55:10 UTC (rev 6769)
@@ -37,17 +37,28 @@
* Have two blank lines before headings and one blank line after, as in this file.
+* Use all-lowercase Markdown URL identifiers. Markdown URL identifiers are compared
+ case-insensitively, which means that `[foo][]` and `[Foo][]` resolve to the same identifier
+ elsewhere in the page. To avoid getting caught by this snag, use lower case consistently
+ in the part with the actual URL in it (and the optional title attribute).
-Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation
-----------------------------------
+Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation, and Terminology
+-----------------------------------------------
+
* Do not write “CODEC†in all caps.
+
* Prefer “© 2004 Xiph.Org†to both “Copyright © 2004 Xiph.Org†and
“Copyright (c) 2004 Xiph.Orgâ€; the latter two are redundant.
If you can’t type a proper copyright symbol, use its HTML entity, `©` or simply write out
“Copyright 2004 Xiph.Orgâ€.
+* Do not refer to “Ogg†as a project; only refer to it as a container format.
+* Use “Ogg Vorbis†when speaking of on-disk Vorbis-in-Ogg files; use “Vorbis†when referring to
+ Vorbis-specific features such as lossy compression or Vorbis-style comment headers.
+
+
### English-Specific Considerations
* For em dashes, leave no space between the dash and the words—like this.
Modified: websites-ngen/xiph.org/CSS/all.css
===================================================================
--- websites-ngen/xiph.org/CSS/all.css 2004-05-27 04:07:25 UTC (rev 6768)
+++ websites-ngen/xiph.org/CSS/all.css 2004-05-27 09:55:10 UTC (rev 6769)
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
}
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
- font-family: Gentium, Baskerville, Garamond, Georgia, serif;
+ font-family: Baskerville, Garamond, Georgia, serif;
font-weight: normal;
color: #088;
margin: .25em 0 .125em;
Added: websites-ngen/xiph.org/contribute/betterapps/index.markdown
===================================================================
--- websites-ngen/xiph.org/contribute/betterapps/index.markdown 2004-05-27 04:07:25 UTC (rev 6768)
+++ websites-ngen/xiph.org/contribute/betterapps/index.markdown 2004-05-27 09:55:10 UTC (rev 6769)
@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+Making Your App Better
+======================
+
+All of the advice herein assumes that you’re capable of listening to users and are willing to
+do what you can to provide a terriffic user experience. If you’re not convinced that an intuitive
+UI is a necessity, read Eric Raymond’s [The Luxury of Ignorance][ignorance] as well as
+John Gruber’s [Spray-On Usability][spray] to get an idea of what you’ll need to do.
+
+ [ignorance]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
+ [spray]: http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability
+
+Now, after you’ve planned out what you want your app to do, start planning what sort of libraries
+you’ll use. One tool that you might find useful is Scott Wheeler’s [TagLib][], a library that
+makes it easy to access and modify Vorbis-style comments in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files.
+
+
+## Unicode support
+
+Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex all use Vorbis-style comments, which specify that their contents are in
+UTF-8, a Unicode encoding. The snag is that UTF-8 support can’t be taken for granted quite yet;
+you’ll have little hope of actually being able to handle UTF-8 competently unless you’re using a
+library that supports it properly. Windows NT, 2000, and XP are capable of handling Unicode
+(Windows uses UCS-2 internally); if you’re writing something for a free operating system,
+[GTK 2][] is one of the more polished solutions out there as it relies on the [Pango][] library.
+If you’re still not sure what all this Unicode stuff is, Joel Spolsky
+[explains the rudiments of Unicode][joel] quite well.
+
+Also, don’t think that this is just an issue for non-English speakers—you may have an album by
+μ-Ziq or Tool’s Ænima that you’d like to see displayed properly.
+
+ [gtk 2]: http://www.gtk.org/
+ [pango]: http://www.pango.org/
+ [joel]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
+
+
+## VorbisGain
+
+If you’re writing an audio player, you might want to consider adding [VorbisGain][] support to it.
+VorbisGain writes a few Vorbis-style comments into the headers of your music files; these comments
+say how much to quiet or amplify each song so they all have roughly the same loudness. This will
+let you do more productive things than fiddle with the volume knob every three to five minutes
+when you’re listening to a shuffled playlist.
+
+ [taglib]: http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html
+ [vorbisgain]: http://sjeng.org/vorbisgain.html
Modified: websites-ngen/xiph.org/contribute/index.markdown
===================================================================
--- websites-ngen/xiph.org/contribute/index.markdown 2004-05-27 04:07:25 UTC (rev 6768)
+++ websites-ngen/xiph.org/contribute/index.markdown 2004-05-27 09:55:10 UTC (rev 6769)
@@ -1,40 +1,70 @@
Contribute to Xiph.Org
======================
-You want to help Xiph.Org out on its mission to bring high-quality multimedia compression to
-the world? Great! Here are a few ideas on how you might help us out…
+<!--
+* Improve our codecs.
+* Document our codecs.
-* Before You Start
- * Use high-quality, modern libraries and toolkits to ensure that comments can be handled
- with a minimum of fuss.
- * Plan your UI first.
+* Improve our tools.
+* Document our tools.
+* Use our codecs in your app.
+* Make sure that all our features are supported in your app.
+ * Have decent Unicode support.
+ * Support multiline Vorbis-style comments.
+
+-->
+
+If you want to help Xiph.Org ensure that the foundations of Internet multimedia remain free,
+there are three main ways to help:
+
+* Improve our codecs, libraries, or tools.
+* Improve others’ tools and libraries that use our codecs and tools.
+* Write a new tool that uses our codecs, libraries, and tools.
+
+If you want to improve our stuff, here are some suggestions:
+
+* Improve our codecs so they sound better and/or use less bandwidth.
+* Write a BSD-licensed wrapper for our libraries in Managed C++ to make Ogg, Vorbis, and FLAC
+ available to users of the .NET Framework.
+* Help improve our documentation.
+
+However, it’s not enough to have multimedia codecs; their success is dependent on the quality
+and availability of the tools that use them. As such, if you want to help further our mission,
+you may want to consider improving a music or video player rather than working on our libraries
+and tools directly. For example, you may want to work on the UI or plugins of a CD ripper so
+people who want to reencode their music collection in Ogg Vorbis or FLAC can do so with a
+minimum of fuss. If you are writing or improving an application, have a look at [our suggestions
+on how you can improve your application][betterapps].
+
+ [betterapps]: ./betterapps/
+
+<i>(I stopped writing here)</i>
+
* Enhance a preexisting audio player to take advantage of the features of Vorbis and FLAC.
-* Make your software easy to use.
+* Use the features of our formats and tools to their fullest.
* Make sure that our formats are well-supported on all popular platforms.
-* Use the features of our formats and tools to their fullest.
* If you’re writing something using our formats, stay involved with what we’re doing.
-## Make sure that it’s easy for relative novices to listen to media files in our formats.
-Try to ensure that your
+## Help Windows Media Player support more of our formats
-## Improve Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex support in Windows Media Player.
-## Improve Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex support in iTunes.
+Help work on [illiminable’s Ogg DirectShow Filters][illi] so Windows Media Player will be able
+to play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg FLAC, and Ogg Theora files.
+
+ [illi]: http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/
+
+
+## Improve Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex support in iTunes
+
iTunes is _the_ audio player for OS X; in order to be usable on that platform by novices, we
need to be at least somewhat usable on that platform.
Translated: Make sure that people can play Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex on Windows Media player on
Windows and on iTunes on OS X.
-_(links to directshow and qt filters)_
+## Implement our codecs in your application
-
-## Improve the quality of Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex support on free audio players.
-
-
-### Add codec support for our codecs in your application
-
One of the ways you can help us out is to make sure our codecs work on as many players as
possible—preferably the most common players.
@@ -44,25 +74,18 @@
[Vorbis-style comment headers][vcomment]. In particular…
* Does the app ensure that only UTF-8 enters the comment header?
-
* Does the app allow multiline comment values?
-
* Does the app handle streams that have more than one comment with the same name?
For example, what would your app do if you had two `%artist%` comments—one set to
“Duke Ellington†and the other to “Count Basie� If your app has a way to select tracks by
artist, would the track show up in both Count Basie’s and Duke Ellington’s lists?
-
* Concatenate two Ogg-encapsulated audio files together. Does the user lose any functionality
compared to if they were not concatenated?
-## Add VorbisGain support
-[VorbisGain][] is a not-quite-widely-supported, nondestructive way to normalize your audio
-collection so you don’t have to fiddle with the volume knob while listening to a shuffled playlist.
-If you’re writing a music player that supports Vorbis, FLAC, or Speex, adding VorbisGain support
-can make long listening sessions with your player a little _less_ interactive. In a good way.
## Make sure that your player can play Vorbis and FLAC files gaplessly
+
This is a very nice feature for classical music albums (where one symphony may span many tracks)
and for continuous mixes.
@@ -71,30 +94,19 @@
how much noise to remove from the decoded output. Second, you need to avoid closing and reopening
the audio stream in between tracks.
-_(please fill this in a bit more.)_
+<i>(please fill this in a bit more.)</i>
Costless software is nice; [free software][] is better. OS X has a number of abandonware audio
programs to handle Vorbis and FLAC files, but any one of them might break irreparably in the
next OS upgrade. By writing software and releasing the source to it, you help ensure that your
work outlives you.
+
## Give money to us
If all else fails, you could [give us money][donate]. Your funds help keep Monty hacking.
[free]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html "Free as in freedom, mind you"
[free software]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html "Free as in freedom, mind you"
- [VorbisGain]: http://sjeng.org/vorbisgain.html
+ [vorbisgain]: http://sjeng.org/vorbisgain.html
[donate]: /donate/
-
-(the following was simply removed out of another file)
-
-Enhancing For Xiph
-------------------
-
-Assuming your audio player already supports Vorbis and FLAC, what can you do to enhance it
-further? Here are a number of corner cases that you could try…
-
-## Ensure that your application supports UTF-8 comments properly.
-Many older tagging standards did not specify an encoding; Vorbis-style comment headers do.
-Your ability to handle UTF-8 may be dependent on the libraries at your disposal
Modified: websites-ngen/xiph.org/vorbis/faq/index.txt
===================================================================
--- websites-ngen/xiph.org/vorbis/faq/index.txt 2004-05-27 04:07:25 UTC (rev 6768)
+++ websites-ngen/xiph.org/vorbis/faq/index.txt 2004-05-27 09:55:10 UTC (rev 6769)
@@ -1,4 +1,36 @@
Ogg Vorbis FAQ
==============
-This is the FAQ.
+<h2 id='toc'>Contents</h2>
+
+* [What is Ogg Vorbis?](#what)
+* [What is the MIME type for an Ogg Vorbis stream?](#mime)
+* [How can I convert my music collection to Ogg Vorbis?](#convertCollection)
+
+
+* [What is the license of the Ogg Vorbis format?](#formatLicense)
+* [What is the license of Xiph.Org’s Ogg Vorbis tools?](#formatTools)
+* [We make commercial, closed-source software. Can we use Ogg Vorbis at all?](#commercial)
+* [Are there license fees for distributing or streaming things in Ogg Vorbis?](#distributionFees)
+
+
+<h2 id='what'>What is Ogg Vorbis?</h2>
+
+<dfn>Ogg vorbis</dfn> is a [lossy][] audio compression format.
+
+
+<h2 id='mime'>What is the MIME type for an Ogg Vorbis stream?</h2>
+
+<tt>application/ogg</tt>.
+
+
+<h2 id='convertCollection'>How can I convert my music collection to Ogg Vorbis?</h2>
+
+Re-rip from CD or another lossless source such as [FLAC][].
+
+This may be significantly more difficult and time-consuming than transcoding to Ogg Vorbis
+from another format, but [transcoding will only make your music sound worse](#transcode).
+
+
+
+ [flac]: http://flac.sourceforge.net/ 'Free Lossless Audio Codec'
--- >8 ----
List archives: http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'cvs-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body. No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.
More information about the commits
mailing list