Closing listening-tests.info Options

[Sebastian Mares]

This post is to inform you that listening-tests.info will close within the next weeks. The reasons for this decision are various and I don't want to go too deep into detail.

After the last test, a lot of people complained that the page is not very user-friendly which I have to admit is true. However, unfortunately I don't have the time and to be honest also the skills to improve the situation on my own. I asked several times in public if anyone might be willing to give me a helping hand with creating a new layout and how to write better how-tos, but never received any reply.
Also, several people complained that now that I work for Nero, future results might be faked to let Nero appear in better light (of course I would never do something like this).
Beside this, conducting successful tests became rather difficult because only few people are willing to invest time and test the samples - most people only want to see results without putting any effort, which is quite sad.
Broadband Internet and storage space also got cheap in the meanwhile and a lot of people either use lossless codecs to store their music or they encode at bitrates which are transparent for most users. If 128 kbps was such a big challenge, you can imagine that 192 kbps or higher is simply untestable. The demand for 96 or 80 kbps is no longer here.

Anyways, I would appreciate it if somebody from Hydrogenaudio could "port" the existing results to the Wiki so that the results are not lost. In case a HA admin is willing to host the site as-is, I could also provide the whole site as ZIP.

Cheers,
Sebastian Mares

This post has been edited by Sebastian Mares: Dec 3 2009, 13:53

[Sebastian Mares]

The site is online for five more days. In case anyone / HA wants to mirror it, now would be the right time.

Edit: Sorry for the confusion. Five more days doesn't mean that it will close in March (25. February + 5 days) but in five days starting today.

This post has been edited by Sebastian Mares: Feb 19 2010, 11:23

[C.R.Helmrich]

The site is online for five more days. In case anyone / HA wants to mirror it, now would be the right time.

Edit: Sorry for the confusion. Five more days doesn't mean that it will close in March (25. February + 5 days) but in five days starting today.

In case nobody volunteers, I am willing to host the tests without any downloadable material (ZIP or audio files) on ecodis.de. Some more tests might follow there anyway.

Chris