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I Built My Own Audio Player

(nexo.sh)
292 points nexo-v1 | 6 comments | 22 May 25 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.221s | source | bottom
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wvh ◴[23 May 25 08:00 UTC] No.44070862[source]▶
I've been building a music collection in FLAC format for 25 years, and last year I bought an (Android) phone and a MicroSD card of 1TB that fits all of my music. It's been a long project for technology to catch up, but now that it's possible to have all of it in my pocket, I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm sure I can't be the only one that doesn't want to be a renter, give up control and stream anything the industry wants to push or deal with ads. It's cool to see some even go to great lengths to write their own application.

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eviks ◴[23 May 25 08:48 UTC] No.44071116[source]▶
Technology has caught up many years ago, it's just that you insist on an format not fit for purpose. With good reencoding you get transparent audio quality (impossible to hear a difference) to fit all of your music on a much smaller card. (and as a backup you can always have those FLACs on the desktop)
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1. hulitu ◴[23 May 25 17:49 UTC] No.44074908[source]▶
> Technology has caught up many years ago

citation needed. Youtube still gives you crappy, unlistenable 153kbps crap.

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2. duped ◴[24 May 25 00:20 UTC] No.44077807[source]▶
There are a number of studies on this but this one has a good summary (1). The TL;DR is that over 256 kbps for MP3 there's no significant data that listeners could perceive a difference to CD quality audio. Lower than that you can perceive artifacts.

I'm too lazy for finding this but I recall this study or similar repeated for trained listeners (musicians and mastering engineers) with the same results.

Note that MP3 is 30 years old and newer perceptual audio codecs can beat it.

YouTube picking lower bitrates is a problem but the qualifier here is "at sufficient bandwidths."

(1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257068576_Subjectiv...

3. eviks ◴[24 May 25 04:29 UTC] No.44078780[source]▶
You're not limited by YouTube, it's your library, your encoding settings. And you don't even need any citations, do a proper AB test yourself to confirm the well established
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4. dotancohen ◴[28 May 25 09:30 UTC] No.44114216[source]▶
Does there exist an _objective_ method to test the sound quality difference between two files?

I could take a 54 kbs rip of Rust in Peace and reencode it at 256 kbs. It's not going to sound better than the 196 kbs rip, even though the bit rate is higher. What software would detect this? And other artifacts, such as clipping?

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5. eviks ◴[28 May 25 09:49 UTC] No.44114312{3}[source]▶
For some specific issues like clipping sure there are objective methods, and encoders use objective quality levels (so you don't target bitrate), and if it's not a tricky "subjective human experience can't be objective" question - the method to test is do A/B testing and see that humans can't detect a difference. That's audio transparent encoding. And since you don't care about other people for your personal phone use case, you can do this test yourself to detect the encoding quality level that's transparent to you.

And your examle doesn't make sense. You compare reencoded to the original, not to some 3rd sample. The issue here is whether to store large flacs or their smaller reencoded lossy variants. If you get a better quality flac, then you'll need to do another encoding to get a better lossy version

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6. dotancohen ◴[28 May 25 12:26 UTC] No.44115281{4}[source]▶
The idea is that once I have my CDs ripped to flac, I could run an encoder to MP3 for e.g. listening in my Tesla. But I don't know if the settings that work best for Dark Side of the Moon are going to be good for Rust in Peace. If there were some automated tool review hours and hours of audio, finding the discrepancies, that would save me a lot of time and provide me much enjoyment listening.