General discussion of future public test Options

[IgorC]

Hello,
Now when it’s sure that Apple encoder represents AAC standard very well the next step will be a public multiformat test.
No particular date or plan. It’s a general discussion with the purpose to hear the opinions, points of view, suggestions.

Items to talk about (these numbers are first approximations):
1.The number of codecs: 4+low anchor. 4 is affordable number for one test.
2.The selection of codecs (basing on curret previous votes):
http://listening-test.blogspot.com/2011/06...reparation.html

Apple LC-AAC - the most optimal AAC encoder. (Well, though FhG was quite good too).
MP3 LAME – 10 votes
Vorbis AoTuV – 8.5 votes.
Opus/CELT – 6 votes. (still no info when there will be Opus 1.0)

It’s possible to change your votes.

(?) USAC (working name of future AAC’s successor ). No information about future availability of it.
(?) low anchor
(?) Settings, versions, etc.

3. Bitrate:
VBR 96 kbps. The last AAC public test was at 96 kbps (well, it was actually 100 kbps).
Also I think it will be more interesting to compare MP3 128-135 kbps and AAC/AoTuV 96-100 kbps. Probably a lot of people are interesting to trade off between compability/compression efficiency

4. Samples.
Last time we have applied the technic of random selection of the samples. 20 samples.

The developers are very welcome to participate in this topic.

This test should be more interesting as it will include interesting (for use) codecs.

[Gecko]

+1 for keeping the number of codecs small. Consider only three perhaps? Four is stretching it. I really struggled with the five in the last test (AAC @ ~96 kbps [July 2011]).
+1 for using a low anchor which doesn't fall so far behind in quality (like in the last test). It was an understandable choice back then, but I think it's quality was so low, that it didn't help to put things into perspective. (edit: never mind the next part, quality is probably too good to serve as a low anchor even at the lowest setting) How about using lossywav at rather extreme settings? Though I'm not sure if it is a good idea if the low anchor has completely different types of artifacts.

This post has been edited by Gecko: Dec 26 2011, 13:14