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Music Media

Stereo Component for Digital Audio 65

Posted by CmdrTaco from the getting-closer dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The techs over at Tech Radio interviewed Lydstrom, Inc. about their recently announced Songbank MZ3-5000, a digital audio player meant for the home that uses compression technology from Lucent to store up to 5000 songs on one player. Apparently the quality of the output is better than MP3, but the device is also MP3 compatible. They posted the interview on their Archives page. " My guess is that a huge number of us have hacked together stereo components to do this already (I use xmms & the IRMan plugin for mine- although I wish it had better handling of large numbers of playlists). Interesting tho.
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Stereo Component for Digital Audio More

Stereo Component for Digital Audio

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  • Try Ampapod + Winamp (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    _IFF_ you use windows, the combination of Ampapod [v.nu] and Winamp work very well. The playlist problem is solved by Winamp quite nicely, and Ampapod lets you type song numbers on the remote. New hardware support for Ampapod should be available soon, but right now it only lets you use the X10 MouseREMOTE. If you've got video on the box, there's even an On-Screen display.

  • Re:Is this ... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's an article in an old Wired mag (3.08) about Ken Thompson's development of this system. It makes amusing reading when you think about the mp3 revolution which has occurred since the article was written (Aug 1995). His compression method also appears to have a much higher sound quality than mp3, if the listening experiments in the article are to be believed. Unlike mp3, his method of lossy compression is almost impossible to distinguish from a CD.

  • Re:xmms + irman (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IRMan is a piece of hardware that allows you to use standard remote controls to control your PC. There's software available that works under both Linux and Windows. The webpage is http://www.evation.com/irman/ [evation.com]

  • Re:MP3 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Even with techo you can really hear a difference with the crappy sound cards in most computers these days. A cheap card in a noisy PC environment simply cannot compete with a quality DAC in an external device like a CD player. The really cheezy amplifiers and attempt at tone control make up the rest of the crappy sound. The best think for listening to MP3's would be something like a SB Live/AWE64 that has an external digital out and then buy a decent external DAC. But if you are listening to music on computer speakers then you are just hosed anyhow :>
  • I too thought MP3 was good enough. Then I heard MPEG4 on the Windows Media player - it is a big improvement.

  • 2-channel (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Ensoniq AudioPCI has 2 DACs onboard and apparently there is a way to route one of them to the "line in" jack for 4-speaker sound (I am not kidding). I don't know whether it's any good for what you want to do, since it might have too much crosstalk between outputs, though.

    Multiple cheap PCI sound cards would be pretty easy and cheap, though, if you can spare 3 slots. Also, USB audio might eventually be good for this, if it weren't for the tendency for manufacturers to always bundle DACs inside speakers, as opposed to separate products.

  • Okay, my problem was this. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    According to the interview, the system's "reccomendations" are essentially push advertising, trying to get you to buy new songs online. I mean, we've all suffered suggestions from these "altavista reccomends" and "ebay reccomends" type things. Do I want to be assulted with advertising while I'm trying to dial up a playlist?

    Second, to do this they have to profile my musical tastes. That's demographic research, and there's little to no reason for them not to turn around and sell it. Privacy paranoids take note.

    Third, as the guy also mentioned, lucent is a big name in the ongoing SDMI debate. The unit's OS is flash ROM updated, so when phase II of SDMI gets implemented, no more MP3 support.

    It's just an embedded system with a propriarity UI and a propriarity codec designed to get people to buy more (music / hardware).

    Thus, I urge people to keep up work on the open source hardware front.

  • We have been conspiring to build these things on the mp3stero [mailto] mailing list for some time now.

    If you're interested in this kind of thing, you should consider subscribing. --Aaron

  • About that mute button: the reason why its not
    part of the plugin is that I have my prologic
    receiver connected to my computer and I'm using
    that remote with IRman. The first version of the
    plugin didn't even have volume control! :) Mute
    was just one of those things I overlooked, it will
    be in the next update along with a few more
    features to keep Rob a bit more happy.
  • While I cant comment on ampaPOD as I've never
    heard of it before, I can tell you that I've
    been quite happy with my IRman and the people
    responsible for creating it. I asked them to
    create an x11amp (before the name change) plugin,
    and they said that they didn't have the time to
    do it but would support anyone who did. So I took
    that offer up and they shipped me a free IRman
    for creating the plugin. If there's any features
    you'd like to see in the next update please dont
    hesitate to ask. Already planned: mute, 100's
    (or 1000's) of playlists, next/prev playlist
    option to beep on button presses, option for
    tv-like display on button presses, and maybe lirc
    support.
  • Get a good pair of headphones, and then encode some nine inch nails music. The mp3 lossy compression really messes up nine inch nails, especially stuff from The Downward Spiral. Stuff like white/grey noise, fuzzy synthesizers, harmonics, and large volume changes all get messed up with mp3 at 128kbps. 192kbps sounds pretty good, however. I've noticed similar problems with a lot of other industrial music, but even with normal rock music I can tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps with a good pair of headphones.
  • Sounds like a problem with either Netscape or your particular setup. A browser should not crash under any circumstances, no matter how badly formed the HTML is.
  • Yeah, but the problem is that vinyl doesn't keep its sound quality. My 15-year-old CD, as long as I don't scratch it, will sound the same as a new CD. A 15-year-old vinyl will not. My parents' 35-year-old vinyls sound absolutely terrible (warped surfaces from heat changes and deepened needle grooves from excessive play).
  • Xing's encoder discards everything above 16 kHz, which is great for speed but TERRIBLE for sound quality! blade enc is great for > 128kbit encoding, and the Fraunhofer codec is cool for 128kbit... you can get the original source distribution for free in many places, and somebody wrote a patch for it to make it work without a time limit. I'd say there are plenty of quality mp3 encoders for linux out there.
  • I built an mp3 player myself out of a motherboard with built in audio and video, a hard drive, a small power supply, and a packard bell IR serial remote. Total investment: about $200, and a few hours of my time to code up a front end to xaudio using perl. It doesn't have a display currently, but I can select from 100 different playlists (arbitrary, could be 10,000 but I don't think i'll need more than 100 for now), and eventually support a CD-ROM changer attached to the machine.

    Check it out:

    http://www.veedub.nu/mp3player/
  • Check out the lirc project... i think i put a link to it under my software section. Basically I open a pipe from one of the utilities that comes with lirc and prints a line whenever a key is hit. I'm going to post the perl script I wrote, as soon as I plug the player back in and get it off the drive in it... check back on the web page in a bit, or just e-mail me.
  • I use multiple (3) Esoniq 1371 AudioPCI cards with the ALSA drivers for 'em. They were the "quietest" cheap cards I could get my hands on for this exact purpose.

    I'm intending on building a simple fibre optic distribution system from my MP3 machine to rooms of my house. basically sawtooth waveform at some unbelievably high frequency (10MHz?) with a comparator to turn each channel into PWM and then send it through the fibre (I am using digital transmitters and receivers) At the other end I can smooth it out and (hopefully) recover the audio.

    I'm still trying to think of a way to simply get both channels into one fibre with one transmitter... if anyone has any ideas, please email me.

    Andrew
  • Depends on your music. Simple stuff like techno
    and normally "noisy" stuff like alternapoprock
    tends to sound about the same. But if you listen
    to something clean and complex (jazz, stuff with
    a lot of horns or strings, clear vocals) you can
    definitely hear the difference.


    I've kicked the bitrate up to 256 and gotten
    pretty good results, but 256 kinda sucks as far
    as space goes.
  • software should not crash just because the inputs are malformed.
  • that thing Ken Thompson was talking about when he was bashing linux and mp3?

    What good is it if it isn't Free (an open standard)? After the shit people have tried to pull with gif, I don't think anyone is willing to go with a proprietary "standard" anymore.
  • This is hard, anyone got any thoughts?

    IRman works with linux, but ampapod and the X11 remote can do cool stuff like web surfing, and I guess I could always just pop VMware into linux and use ampapod after all.

    But then again, I've heard that X11 makes poor quality stuff, and Rob uses IRMan, which looks high quality but doesn't have the same flexibility, tho it looks higher quality.

    But the X11 remote costs less.

    But its supported by a company and the IRman looks only loosly supported by a comany (not exactly a global corporation, looks like a buncha students).

    Geez, someone got some thoughts on this? I gotta get one of these, like NOW!

  • I use the xmms and irman like Rob, and it works great for me. I also have a couple X-10 units and use the X-10 remote with the irman. Only thing that doesn't make sense to me, there is no mute for the xmms plugin, wierd. I don't have anything to do with the irman, but best 40 bucks I spent. Your milage may vary.

  • Details from the site (Score:3)

    by Squiggle ( 8721 ) on Sunday July 18, 1999 @10:29AM (#1796482)
    All I can say is this thing is sweet! Here are the details from the site, for those too lazy:

    o approx 250 hours of songs
    o IEEE-1394 connector for extra storage units
    o auto detect song title, artist, etc (if stored on CD)
    o smooth fade between songs and beat matching for DJ-like transitions between songs
    o "CustomDJ": "...an intelligent agent that watches how you listen to music. As it learns about your listening habits, it will automatically play the songs you like at the right time and day of the week."
    o touchscreen remote
    o 3 stereo (analog) outs - play different selections in different rooms at the same time!

    Plus its good looking. Costs $699 - $999 depending on when you want this thing and which promotional offer you take.

    Are there any software mp3 players that have the beat matching and DJ abilities this has? Those are the kind of features I would put in a design of my own - can't do that on a CD player (without having your own personal DJ :)
  • For the features you get the price on this thing is actually right on. The machine I built has ended up costing me about 500 bucks so far total - between lcds, keypad ir stuff etc...and the computer. If I added some of the more advanced features this thing has Id spend days programming and still have to fork out another few hundred bucks for a multichannel soundcard. And It still wouldnt have the beatmatching feature which I think is really cool-If I can figure anyway to pull this one off on my box Its going in ther.
  • Ther is a difference but you really need a nice sound system to notice it. The biggest differences are really in extreme upper and lower spectrum, so unless you have some really tricked out speakers you really wont hear any difference at all.
  • Another thing to consider is the quality of the ripping/encoding software used to actually make the mp3's. Not all rippers/encoders are created equal (see NexEncode Studio version 1.0 - ick! - do they still make that thing BTW? I dont see how they GIVE it away). Some of the (free)linux software is lacking in this respect.Sure thers the Xing encoder....now if theyd just port audio grabber we'd be set.
  • "The cymbal crashes are the most noticeable difference - they are often a little distorted or have a "phaser" effect."

    That is almost always: a) a recording problem or b) an encoding problem.
  • i've found vqf to be slightly better for classical
    music

    i think you can get a player and ecoder for free from yamaha (www.yamaha.com)

  • If it is (#include &lt semigod.h &gt) Ken's system, using PAC compression as its core, i'd be ready to sell car & furnitures to buy it.

    Without going into much details, let's say I've had a couple of opportunities to see that this compression algorithm is for far the best I've ever seen yet - and I heard if first about 3 years ago. On a single CD-R, with about 145 megabytes left, I've seen over 210 songs. When listening to the music, I would never be able to distinguish between the compressed version and a CD-quality recording. And the decompressor would probably fit on a floppy if they wanted - but i guess they'll be using the DSP version they made before hacking the Windoze version.

    Must... have... one...

  • Re:MP3 (Score:1)

    by sluke ( 26350 )
    I know it's probably not the popular genere on Slashdot, but I have noticed that MP3 mangles classical music. I listen with a nice pair of headphones and there is a perceptable high frequency "hissing" for lack of a better word. It doesn't sound like white noise though and I don't get it when I listen to CD's through the computer. Bumping up to 192kbs doesn't seem to help either. Has anyone else experienced similar problems? If so what is a better format for classical music?
  • From their web site:
    Zero Error Processing (ZEP)TM
    The MZ3-5000 features ZEP processing, which is the industry's first system for dealing with 100% of all errors encountered on a physical CD.
    Sounds a little bit like IntelliSens e (TM) [microsoft.com] to me.
  • With my crappy speakers, it's hard to tell the difference most of the time. But when I put on just about any pair of headphones and really listen, I can usually spot the MP3. The cymbal crashes are the most noticeable difference - they are often a little distorted or have a "phaser" effect. Also, the stereo image sometimes changes in noticeable ways.
  • That is almost always: a) a recording problem or b) an encoding problem.

    I guess it's the encoding then. Xing at 128kbit. The differences are not obvious, but they are there if you listen. I do my A/B "blinded" test by having a friend play the CD or the MP3 through my soundcard and headphones. The MP3's sound great, but in addition to the differences noted above, are just not as "crisp" (I admit this is not a scientific term) as the CD. But definitely good enough for everyday listening.
  • Anybody out there using a multichannel (three or more stereo outs) sound card with Linux? I would like to do zoned audio at home from a single large HD and server, with client control via IR or home intranet. This way the wife can listen to her Tori Amos in the study while I'm piping Eric Johnson into the living room. Of course, multiple stereo systems would solve this, but that wouldn't be as much fun!

    The song attributes and ratings will be kept in a mysql database (with different ratings for each user), and playlist queries will be contructed with a simple intranet form.

    The last piece of the puzzle for me is the card. Any multichannel card recommendations out there?
  • Have you considered putting two single-channel (stereo) audio cards in one machine?

    Haven't tried it, but will consider it if it is cheaper and possible. I would really like at least three channels if I can get it.
  • I know that some professional studio recording packages (e.g. Cakewalk Pro Audio) support multiple sound cards in one PC, so there's no hardware issue preventing you from doing it. Just make sure you have plenty of free slots for those cards... =^)
    --
  • Ken used this compression for his own collection, but that's all. Ken is a computer scientist, not an expert on audio coding! PAC was developed by a team led by Peter Kroon.
  • Tori Amos CDs and LPs tend to be fairly good recordings. On reasonably good systems it sounds great, but on cheaper systems the music loses all its life. I have yet to listen to her from a compressed source, but I would guess from other experience that it would be sound pretty poor.
  • You must have amazing hearing because I can't tell the difference between an audio CD and an MP3 (provided the MP3 is at least 128kbps and 44KHz).

    -Cerberus
  • I know that the SoundBlaster Live! is designed to drive 4 speakers (And the software included under the windows enviornment reflects this). I'm not sure if there is a full feature driver for this card under the linux environment.

    I am sure that it probably wouldn't be too hard to redirect output to the second audio out channel on this card.

    In addition to those two analog outputs I just talked about, there are two additional digital outputs (SPDIFs I believe) that can also be used as outputs. Sure, this card isn't cheap, but I like it since I can send up to 16 WAV (is this the right term for this?) streams to the card at the same time, and have them mixed on the fly.

    Overall, I think this is a really high performance card and would probably work with what you want if you want multichannel and high quality audio. The mixing ability for multiple WAV inputs would probably be very useful if you want to write your own DJ software to interface with the card.

  • The highest-quality consumer format for most any music is an 180 gram virgin vinyl LP (preferably manufactured by RTI) with direct metal mastering, played back on a quality turntable, amplifier, and loudspeakers. There is is no consumer digital audio format that can top the dynamic range and frequency response you can acheive from a well-produced LP.

    Granted, this is audiophile-level quality; some Joe Schmoe listening to Nine Inch Nails wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the difference.
  • Just a suggestion (and a question): Have you considered putting two single-channel (stereo) audio cards in one machine? It would probably prove to be far cheaper. And is this possible?
  • Not at all. In theory, an audio CD includes a lot of redundancy. You should be able to drill a 2.4 mm hole through a CD and still get no errors from the decoding. Even if you increase the diameter to 8 mm, there should no adverse effect on the music. Now, try to play such a CD on your own CD player. If it works according to spec, please report the brand.

    A very detailed and interesting explanation of compact discs on the physical and logical level can be found at http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/cdau dio/95x6.htm
  • With regard to Ashwin Philips: Ok, I've known Ashwin for roughly 3 years, beginning when I first hired him as a consultant on a (successful) large-scale client/server development project. In this time, I have never known him to engage in any kind of vapor promotion. I've never had reason to question his personal business ethics. As far as the product is concerned - wait a bit longer, then judge it by its own merits. We've had a few techincal discussions, and - though I have some doubt - I believe it will deliver what's been promised. As for due diligence - 'Evidence' is one thing, slander is another.
  • Multi Sound cards is a good idea (i've been playign around with it for a while myself). There's just a couple of things to watch for ...

    1) Some sound cards don't like running in the same computer with another one of themselves. The old soundblaster cards were notorious for this. These days with PCI soundcards negotiating (is that spelt right?) their resources, it SHOULDN'T be a problem, but I've still had some problems with it. I have two Yamaha PCI DS-XG cards here that refuse to run together (under Winblows, anyway). Both detect and negotiate just fine at startup, but the drivers conflict like nothing else. I haven't yet bothered to go lookign for Linux drivers for this card, to see if they'll work together with a decent set of drivers, tho (as my multiple channel autio output needs are under Winblows at the moment). I ended up getting one of those cards, as well as an ESS Solo-1 PCI card working together quite happily tho.

    and

    2) Synchronisation between the cards. It doesn't look like this'll be a problem for you, but output over multiple soundcards, can lose synchronisation after a while. (Well, technically, it was always out of synch, but you tend to notice it more the longer it plays). This is only a problem if (like me) you've got one song takign up multiple channels over several sound cards.

    Eg, I record stuff for my band to have as backing for when we play. We're trying to make this stuff output over 4 channels so that we have a greater controll over it at the PA. What we've got is 2 mono drum tracks coming out of the stereo output of one sound card, and then two mono keyboard tracks coming out of the other cards output. Problem is that the cards don't quite have perfect synch between their respective sample timings, and so one card can end up outputting the waveform slightly quicker or slower than the other. Now, the difference is less than the space of a sample (1/44000th of a second), but it's still there, and the longer a song goes for (we play 8 minute songs on average, with 12-13 minutes being about our ceiling) the more this slight difference gets compounded. For short songs you may very well not notice it at all. Bear in mind too, that the problem only starts everytime you start playing something, and stops when you stop. It's only for extended playing times that you'll really notice it.

    Anyway, if you're planning on having seperate (unrelated) waveforms output from each card it's not an issue for you. If, however, you want the outputs kept in synch for some reason (say, you want the same song comign out all outputs so you can listen to it in 3 different rooms) you may (and I say, only may) start to notice the synch difference.

    ANyway, I hope this is helpful to you.
  • Sounds cool!!

    So where do we get it from? :)

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