Re: best sound format and app. for recording voice.

[Benno Senoner <sbenno@gardena.net>]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, Kai Vehmanen wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2000, Benno Senoner wrote:
> 
> > encoder. Anyway I try to avoid proprietary codecs.
> > ( Realnetworks still not able to deliver a decent realplayer for linux,
> > my guess is that if they do not open their protocols , Microsoft will kill
> > them just like they did with Nescape
> 
> It's interesting to see, what RealNetworks is going to do in the 
> near future. IMHO RN should open-source all their players and
> encoders, and for all platforms. And they should do it now. This would 
> have quite an impact. As mp3 suffers from licensing problems, many
> people would prefer a GPL'ed RA-de/encoder. Let's hope this happens.

I wouldn't be a Realnetworks shareholder right now ... :-)
they still think that they can fight M$ but with proprietary models this
will just not work.
Did you notice that they pulled Realaduio support from the latest mediaplayer ?
Why ? , simple: to force users to use MS-Audio.
Because Joe Average is too lazy (or too dumb :-) ) to download the RA Player.
:-)

If Realnetworks doesn't react right now, (opensourcing codecs would give them
a big boost in terms of acceptance).

It could easy happen that Linux will save their a** because the level playing
field of Linux.
But if we wait too much, all streaming sites will only run MS-Audio , and
M$ will be able to control the entire streming arena.
( with the advent of broadband , streaming will be a big $$$ business,
and M$ wants all of the pie) 

> 
> > But as Artur pointed out, GSM isn't that bad at 12kbit/sec,
> [...]
> > or if you want extreme low bit rates use the LPC-10 code , down to 2.4kbit/sec,
> > = 1.1MB/hour  :-)
> [...]
> > But I don't know if the quality high enough for you
> > http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~jaf/lpc/
> 
> Yep, there are plenty of encoders out there, but when distributing
> your music (or some other "popular" activity), ease of use and
> availability are crucial. And RealAudio is easy to use and it is 
> widely spread.

Agreed, but in this case the user wanted only to store his voice recordings 
on his own disk, therefore a special codec would be appropriate.

Benno.