Dibrom&JohnV -how you see the future of LAME? Options

[FinCoder]

Topic should be:Dibrom&John and others, how do you see the future of LAME?

So tell me. I wanna know.

This post has been edited by FinCoder: Nov 30 2002, 03:36

[Dibrom]

speaking as a complete outsider to lame-dev i see the situation something like: lame-devs on one side making their best efforts (knowing that there is no real competition in the mp3 zone) and the user on the 2nd side, from the users point the encoder is only a 'black-box' with certain output.

The problem is that I don't think we're seeing the "best effort" from the developers. This may seem like a rude thing to say, but I honestly don't believe that most of the people who work on LAME could say they are giving it their best, certainly not if they are being honest. Furthermore, if people have the time and energy that it takes to argue about trivial matters (3.90.2 not being "official", 3.93 not being buggy), then they also have time to be coding and making improvements, or to use that energy to create a better development framework. It appears to me (and I've seen it said this way specifically) that most of the LAME developers view LAME as simply a pet project or hobby.. something to do when they are bored and have a little bit of free time, not something that is a real priority. This is fine, but it becomes a problem when the program has such a huge userbase. I discussed this before, and I think that it basically boils down to a matter of responsibility. If the developers do not want the responsibility that a project like LAME requires, then they should do something to remedy the situation. I believe that they owe at least that much to their users. Releases like 3.93 are unacceptable.

There is a big gap and probably the only way to implement such testing framework would be a 3rd person/community capable of talking to both sides and also that way the framework would be usefull for any other encoder out there that way.

I believe that I was that 3rd person for awhile. The problem is that for this situation to work, both parties have to participate equally. There was no shortage of users willing to provide feedback to the developers to improve quality, but there was little interest on the developer side in using that information and constantly providing improvements (again, we're seeing some now.. but a year after the fact, a time when many have lost interest in waiting). Furthermore, I feel that there is a bit of disdain for the common user from some of the developers. I saw some of this first hand when Alexander (the "unofficial" release manager) came to this board and implied that we were all basically a bunch of whiny windows users begging for more features, when in fact we (or at least I) were concerned that 3.93 would be released without proper testing and with quality issues. Lo and behold....

I feel that the biggest problem of all though is that I seem to be unable to reason with the developers on any of the issues which have come up. In most of the proposals I've made, I believe that I've presented a well reasoned and valid argument. In return, I see a lot of "missing the point" and simply completely misinterpreting or not understanding (or ignoring) the problems at hand. It seems that there is some sort of poor communication along the line. A good example of this recently is Gabriel's comment that this whole situation is basically about a "different frontend" that users here want. I don't even know where this notion comes from because it's so far from the critical point of the matter that if one were to interpret the argument this way, there could really be no fundamental understanding (hence it's no surprise that we have such a big problem here). Another example would be the one I pointed out above, with Alexander confusing the fact that we wanted 3.93 to be "quality oriented" with meaning that we wanted it to be "feature oriented". Ironically enough, the concerns of this board were ignored, and the "stable" release that Alexander spent so much time arguing about (which was basically the same thing we all wanted, we just wanted to approach the matter differently, or dare I say more properly) never actually came to be.

For more information on this, I suggest going back and reading this thread:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=ST&f=15&t=3836

Particularly ALeidinger's (Alexander, the "unofficial" release manager) comments. As you can see, a lot of effort was put into arguing as to why Takehiro's code shouldn't be used for 3.93, and why the 3.93 (the buggy one that was recently released) indeed had no quality problems other than the fast presets. Alexander "knew" this from reading the code, from the fact that developers perfomed "listening tests" (questionable in itself), etc, etc, etc. And then the bit about Windows users. Oh, and I was accused of seeding FUD . In the end, 3.94 (or Takehiro's code) was tested much more than the released 3.93, which ended up being buggy despite Alexander's vigorous assertion to the opposite. Oh well. After reading that at least, it might become more clear, even from only this single matter, how disheveled the development process is and why I am ultimately fed up with it. I also feel that it is getting worse, especially as the confusion continues over what will be in 3.94 or 4.00 (or whatever it will be) and what is what in the different CVS branches.

<sci-fi> what about certain xchat/bitchx/mirc <-> eggdrop(s) <-> main database - web page solution, certain scripts could be writen so everyone running his own eggy could participate (sort of a half-p2p solution) </sci-fi>

The technical implementation is trivial really. It's who is running it, and how, that is important.