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Music Media Technology

Hydrogenaudio Closes Doors For Now 118

Posted by timothy from the that's-a-shame dept.
verloren writes "The Admins at Hydrogenaudio, the community site discussing audio compression and related issues, have temporarily closed the site. They've posted a notice stating that they're rethinking the standards of the community, and how they're enforced. It seems to have been sparked most recently by a debate over what media players to use, but has been brewing for some time as the objective standards required at the site have been overlooked by many posters. The sister sites Foobar2000 and Rarewares are still available."
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Hydrogenaudio Closes Doors For Now More

Hydrogenaudio Closes Doors For Now

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  • You Fools! (Score:2, Funny)

    by tangent3 ( 449222 )
    New problems, such as the rising cost of reliable high speed hosting...

    I think that has just became an even bigger problem!
  • We regret that we cannot be more specific about some of these points or that we cannot give a necessarily clear idea about how and when they addressed. We do, however, encourage people who are concerned or have something to offer to contact us for discussion.

    This smells fishy to me... almost sounds like the NSA shut them down ;)

    But seriously, can someone shed some light on the whole thing?

    • Re:Forced? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @05:17AM (#7279433)
      There was always one big issue: (unintentional) bias

      When testing audio codecs it's important to do a double blind test. (On HA they would call it "ABX", I think that was because that's the name of the program)
      The easiest way to do it is to give a program the source file and the encoded version.
      (Or two encoded files with diffrent codecs, depending on what you wanted to accomplish.
      For transparency, ie can you tell the diffrence between a MP3 encoded with X options and the source file?, you would give source and encoded.
      For comparison between 64 K Vorbis and WMA youi give two of those files)
      The program would play them 8 times (or so), first one then the other, but you can't know which file is which since it would alternate.
      You listen carefully and give it a score.

      At the end the program tells you which file you preferred.

      With psychoacoustic encoding that's the whole deal: you want to encode the file in such a way that for a human it seems as close to the original as possible.
      Because of bias, a double blind test is THE ONLY way to accurately rate lossy encoders

      But the newbies would come and say:
      Hey this codec is better then that codec.
      How do you know?
      It sounds better
      Have you done a ABX?
      No, but my ears are golden

      Or they would come:
      I compared a graph of the source with the encoded file and this codec produces files that seem the most identical.

      Both of these are totally wrong, and sometimes you would have dudes that would insist that one of these methods are good, no matter how much you try to talk some sense into them.

      And another problem: misinformed audiophiles
      "Oh no the stereo image is holy, joint-stereo is from the devil!"
      Never mind that LAME has an excellent joint-stereo system.
      And they would come with other crazy theories, for example challenging Shannon's theory that to encode a X Hz signal you only need 2X of bandiwdth.

      So that's a part of it

      • Re:Forced? (Score:1, Redundant)

        by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 )
        Thanks for the info :)

        I'm quite familiar with the technology (I make music and have coded some DSP), but I didn't realize what all the fuss was about.
      • And another problem: misinformed audiophiles
        "Oh no the stereo image is holy, joint-stereo is from the devil!"

        Maybe I'm misinformed too, but I thought stereo meant recording seperate numbers for each channel, and joint stereo meant recording a number for one channel and a delta for the other channel(s), and that one could be trivially converted to the other.

        The benefit (as I understood it) of joint stereo was that the delta was usually of smaller magnitude, and thus had a smaller range and more repeats o
        • Yes you are right, that is the benefit of joint-stereo and they are (in theory) equivalent. On some sections (were there , it turns out to not be an advantage, so a smart encoder uses a mix of joint stereo and full L/R frames. This is what Lame does.

          In practice, it also lets you can also quantize channels differently (whether they're left/right or mid/side) to improve compression/quality so in a lossy codec so the two versions aren't guaranteed to be bit-for-bit identical. In a really crappy/bugged enc
      • And they would come with other crazy theories, for example challenging Shannon's theory that to encode a X Hz signal you only need 2X of bandiwdth.


        Isn't that Nyquist's Theorum rather than Shannon's?
      • ABX is called thusly because you are comparing samples A and B to randomly selected sample X, to see if you can really blindly tell the difference between the two.

  • $slackdot-joke (Score:4, Funny)

    by palad1 ( 571416 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @04:59AM (#7279391)
    echo $close($site)+$slashdoting($site->server) +" very effective"

    or am I too late already?

  • some clarification about HA (Score:5, Informative)

    by technology is sexy ( 636179 ) <tobiasboeger@[ ]oo.de ['yah' in gap]> on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @05:13AM (#7279426) Homepage
    Just a couple of things to make some things clear to the slashdot crowd:

    1. HydrogenAudio is/was the No. 1 place on the net regarding the development of audio codecs and other audio related tools. Think of it as "the bugtraq of audio". Several developers of open- and closedsource codecs participated regularly in the discussions and the community helped by providing blind test results (some of them appeared on slashdot even), problem-samples and ideas/general input. It was the center of development of the widely used lame --alt-presets, which brought a new level of quality to MP3 and the foobar2000 audio player.

    2. No legal problems whatsoever are connected to the closing down.

    3. HA is going to come back shortly (= some days).
    • That is all nice and well... however, I don't see how a non-profit community intends to create a new audio standards.

      To my knowledge, we haven't seen an audio format or codec that has reached tier 1 status (RedBook, MP3, WAV, MIDI, etc.) that did not have major corporate involvement in its development. Even with DivX, we often see industry-standard audio codecs used... I don't see a community-based codec group inventing a new codec that gets used for anything more than illegally ripping DVDs and posting
      • HydrogenAudio is not trying to create new standards. It's merely a place to discuss the current formats and help the developers by providing listening tests and input.
        A lot of developers hang out there and discuss their ideas with the users (e.g. Ivan Dimkovic and Menno Baker - Ahead Nero AAC codec; Josh Coalson - FLAC; J.M. Valin - Speex; G. Bouvigne - LAME).

      • Re:some clarification about HA (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @08:20AM (#7280156) Homepage
        I'm rather amazed at how people are misreading the topic.

        The site is closed temporarily to rethink the standards of the community -- of the HydrogenAudio community, not of the music encoding community as a whole. They're not trying to create new audio compression standards while closed -- they're trying to formulate new rules to reduce flamage on the forums (which is pretty much all that HA is). If /. closed down for a week or two and said "we're rethinking the standards of the community" (which, btw, is not what their page says) would you think that they're trying to change OSS/Linux/geek standards, or just doing some serious rethinking of how the posting/moderation/meta-mod system works?

  • Hope it comes back (Score:3)

    by Goo.cc ( 687626 ) * on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @06:09AM (#7279551)
    I have been a member of Hydrogenaudio for a while and I have to say that I have throughly enjoyed it. Even though I didn't post that often, it was an awesome resource.

    I hope that it returns soon.

  • Not surprising (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    HydrogenAudio only did what Slashdot would have done had Slashdot not become a business. If you ran HA (or this site for that matter) and had watched it become a pit of uninformed discussion, social posturing, and pointless debate, wouldn't YOU also think about closing it down?
  • ...even though I'm really sorry to see they're having problems. As somebody who is forced to use a Win box at work, I've found foobar to be the best audio player hands down. It's really small footprint means I can work using three open memory hogging programs at once and still listen to music. If only it did streaming windows media, I'd never use anything else.

    I'm really hoping that this story leads to more attention being paid to foobar, as I think it's a real gem.
    • I'd just like to add some weight to the parent's claim that Foobar is a real gem. I wholeheartedly agree.

      Foobar 2000 [foobar2000.org] is now at a 0.71 release and is by far the most full featured and elegant media player I've seen on Windows. First time users might it a little sparse as the interface is very bland and not skinnable like Winamp or Sonique. However, under the hood is an amazing plugin architecture that is very well designed.

      Some highlights for me:

      • Oggs, Mp3s, MODs, FLACs, AACs, and heaps more are all p

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