more from the 'Ian Molton school' of uk.rec.audio-ism:


Yes, Im a die-hard linux user ;-)


A die-hard linux user not using ogg as their main format?

I wonder... how high a bitrate would an (stereo) ogg vorbis file need
before it surpassed CD quality? Obv you would have to be encoding not from
a CD to start with, but I think the point would be well below CD bitrate,
assuming humans can actually distinguish better-than-CD audio.

If ogg takes off there's a very interesting technology - bitrate peeling;
for a given hosted file with bitrate X you could download a copy with any
quality upto X without re-encoding. This would allow the musicians to
encode at very high bitrates, but still make the music avaliable to 56k
users. I believe there is a BitTorrent plugin in development to do this
transparently.

If you really must have 1:1 audio, there's always the lossless codecs -
FLAC, BONC etc. Although audiophiles seem to be unnecessarily wary of data
compression - AFIK SACD/DVD-A formats don't even employ lossless data
compression.

--
Jim H jh
@333
.org