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#205699 - 08/06/01 12:40 PM
Re: Media Players : WHICH is your FAVORITE (for Streaming Audio)?
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Member
Registered: 01/20/01
Posts: 189
Loc: Hoogeveen, Drenthe, The Nether...
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To say it simple: I HATE Real Audio.. Full of banners and I find it a B-class program although the name is very well-known. It is that we have to vote, but then I prefer Windows Media Player. WMP is trying to act like WinAmp(especially with their last version that came out), but it still isn't that good. WinAmp is also a good option. You can upload a very-low quality (for those people with a low bandwidth connection, someone like me)MP3 onto the server and you can connect to the MP3 file on the server using your WinAmp. So here are they listed: 1. WinAmp Very compatible, almost everyone has it, no banners and other junk, ease of use and very compact (on screen and size) 2. Windows Media Player Wrong screensize, even the small one. 'Stupid' visualizations, they can't beat WinAmp visualization studio which is far more better. I just don't like the interface and the 'trying-to-be' policy. 3. Real Lots of banners, updates a lot which will cause more datatransfer, very ugly interface, too much junk. Just NO option for me  . Well.. some opinions are hard and maybe someone doesn't agree with some of them, but it's just my detailed vote. Regards, Sander The Netherlands [This message has been edited by Sander (edited 08-06-2001).]
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#205703 - 08/07/01 12:14 AM
Re: Media Players : WHICH is your FAVORITE (for Streaming Audio)?
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Member
Registered: 12/28/99
Posts: 86
Loc: Shreveport, LA, USA
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Actually, I prefer Apple’s QuickTime over either Windows Media Player or RealMedia. The reasons are pretty technical and get into the sheer power for multimedia in the various platforms, and QuickTime is just by far the most powerful. But I realize that the main point of interest to this Topic is in the quality of the audio codecs. In this regard, Windows Media 7 (and the forthcoming 8) are in fact quite good, better than Real 8 for the most part. But they’re both up against Q-Design’s Q-Music codec, which has been included in various versions in QuickTime since version 3 (now, QuickTime 5 includes Q-Music 3, the latest and greatest version of this codec). The older Version 4.2 of the Windows Media Encoder (released around the same time as Windows Media Player 6.3/6.4) included some codecs that Windows Media 7 and 8 have dropped, and I found them the best of all: VoxWare’s music and speech codecs. I used their music codec, via Windows Media Encoder 4.2, to produce the .ASF version of the demo I did for the “Search for the Ultimate Sax” Topic in this Forum last week. Of all the codecs I had tried for encoding a short VL trombone sample I had made as a demo of Digital Ear’s outstanding audio-to-MIDI technology, only VoxWare had a high-quality monophonic codec (both the Windows and Real codecs seemed to assume that one would only want high quality if one also wanted stereo, and since I was doing a monophonic sample, why should I waste half my bandwidth on two channels when I only needed one?), and only VoxWare would let me get to a reasonably low sampling rate (as it turns out, about 64k/sec for 16-bit mono) without having a weird “wind chimes” type distortion artifacting show up on the breathy attacks of the VL trombone sound. I had to go to at least 96k/sec. to get rid of that using any other codec, or else could not get rid of it at all, including with my previous favorite, Yamaha’s own SoundVQ (a licensed version of TwinVQ, the first of these “super-codecs” that are at least twice as good as .MP3 in compression at the same quality, or quality at the same compression — TwinVQ pre-dates Real G2, Windows Media 6, VoxWare, etc. by several years at least!). I later learned that the “wind chimes” artifacting was partly caused by too high sound levels in my source audio — such codecs need extra “headroom” with which to work their magic effectively, so one should not do the usual practice of normalizing the gain to 100% on audio intended to be compressed with modern codecs. Normalize to about 90% instead. Sometime I will have to compare them again using the same source clip but normalized to 90% to eliminate that cause of artifacting, and see which codec wins out. I do like how even Version 6.4 of Windows Media Player will automatically download the codecs needed to play a clip encoded in Windows Media 7 or even 8 (so no need to settle for an older codec to avoid locking out users with older players, nor do you need to download the latest and greatest player just to be sure you can play all the newest content). Real also has a similar ability now. I like Windows Media Player 7’s SRS Wow! (a sort of stereo-wide) and TruBass (a Bass enhancer that fools the ear into thinking it’s hearing better bass than the speakers are physically capable of reproducing [merely upping the bass gain, like typical Loudness or Bass Boost systems do, just results in distortion when the bass capacity of the speakers is exceeded], using psychoacoustics) technologies, which make just about anything sound better. It’s important to remember here that not all media that comes over the Web is “streaming.” That term is only used for media that you can listen to or view as it comes across, rather than having to wait for some or all of it to download first. My .ASF file above is not streaming, though it has the “.asf” extension that Microsoft now reserves for streaming media (non-streaming clips get either .WMA for Windows Media Audio, or .WMV for Windows Media Video). To be streaming, the file needs to have a special structure (especially if you want to support multiple bitrates in a single file [this, by the way, is a major weakness of Windows Media: both QuickTime and RealMedia allow this for audio, but Windows Media can only do it for video — each Windows Media streaming file can only have one audio track / stream, no matter how many video tracks / streams it may have]), and be served by special server software running at the hosting service (Windows Media Server, RealServer, QuickTime Streaming Server, etc.) that supports real-time Internet protocols such as MMS: (Microsoft Multimedia Streaming), RTSP: (RealTime Streaming Protocol), UDP, MultiCast, etc. The HTTP protocol used by Web sites is suitable for downloading (as is FTP and other TCP-based protocols), but not for real-time work. TCP is intended more for reliability than speed, and will re-transmit any packets that get garbled or lost in transit to guarantee that the data gets to its destination intact. This sort of thing is highly desirable for Web pages, downloads, online data transaction processing, etc., but not for anything real-time such as games, conferencing, or streaming media. If a packet gets lost or garbled, better to accept the loss and move on (which might show up as a bit of static or maybe a short break in the audio, or some weird “snow” or pixelation in the video) rather than put everything on hold while generating and/or waiting for a retry (which would mean a solid stop in the reception and playback while the player re-buffers). UDP does this moving-on instead of retrying thing, as do the other, more specialized streaming protocols I mentioned. All this said, downloaded audio can and usually does actually sound better than streaming, since you’re not limited to the bandwidth of the user’s connection. PerfectPlay-type delayed playback start features (which all major players now support, including SoundVQ) goes a long way towards alleviating the painful delay one has when having to download all of a huge file before getting to experience any of it.
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