[vorbis-dev] compressed audio tutorial - 2nd draft

[Lourens Veen]

On Friday 08 February 2002 03:14, Graham Mitchell wrote:
> Please give it another read, especially those of you with keen eyes.  I'd
> like to get it finalized and up on vorbis.com soon.

I hadn't read it before, but now I did. I have a few remarks:

"Extensive listening tests showed that only a small percentage of sound 
engineers could tell which sound was the original "full-quality" one, and 
which one was the "CD-quality" one"

Right. But this is about listeners, isn't it, not about engineers? Why should 
the opinion of engineers be more important than that of testers with the good 
ears?

"Special-purpose compressors (like flac) do exist, which were designed solely 
for losslessly compressing audio (...)"

I don't really like this construction with do exist and which. But I don't 
really have a better solution for it. "There do exist special-purpose 
compressors (like flac), which were designed (...)" isn't any better. Maybe 
"Special-purpose compressors (like flac) which were designed solely for 
losslessly compressing audio do exist, but even they (...)". English isn't my 
native language though, so feel free to ignore this one.

Thirdly, it took me a little while to realise why the number 
1,411,200 was associated with CD's, while before it was 176,400. Perhaps you 
could change that sentence in "A bit on bitrates" to "Actual, uncompressed, 
CD-quality uses 1,411,200 bits (176,400 * 8) bits to store each second".

I also agree that the first four paragraphs can be done better.

Other than these minor things I think it's a well-written piece that does a 
good job of explaining to people how audio compression works, that mp3 is 
outdated, why using ABR is not as good as VBR, and how to use the quality 
settings of Vorbis to get good quality .oggs. Well done!

Lourens

-- 
GPG public key: http://home.student.utwente.nl/l.e.veen/lourens.key

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