Hi Monty (and others)...

This question might be premature and seem a bit impatient, but how is RC3 coming along? Is the goal to fix all known problems (stereo-hiss, pre-echo etc) more nor less - and will Garf's tuning to the high bitrates be included in RC3?

(Sorry for sounding so lame )

regards stoff

I'm a little curious of this myself

I think that mostly vorbis is sounding really pretty decent right now, and that pre-echo is by far still the largest issue to be worked out. I'm sort of taking a wait-and-see approach to see how this can be addressed before start to experiment a little bit more with the codec. I've provided a good deal of samples which exhibited post-echo issues which I understand have mostly been fixed now (haven't really tested this yet though I should. I believe ff123 reported that the problems he heard in death2.wav were fixed though). They can still be found here for those interested:

http://www.animus-facticius.org/vorbis/

(Files are encoded with LPAC which can be found here: http://www-ft.ee.tu-berlin.de/~liebchen/lpac.html)

At least now, I believe the clip which may exhibit the biggest problem is nuane. There is a sort of crunchy, rumbling type sound in the background of this clip which is amplified quite a bit when encoded with vorbis. Garf attempted to tune this problem out, but even with his vbr mode it was still an issue. Surprisingly enough an older build of vorbis encoded this file better at 128kbps than a recent one with Garf's vbr mode at near 180kbps. Anyway, Monty knows about it though so we'll see what happens

Btw, most of those clips are a little extreme in nature, but they happen to come from a genre of music that I listen to quite often even if other people find them rather artificial. I do realize they may not be representative of the majority of music out there, but theres no reason to not try to achieve perfection across the board

As far as a timeframe is concerned, Monty has recently said 'end of next week' for RC3.

I think that means the actual release will be somewhere halfway november

--
GCP

I once facetiously suggested that somebody ought to set up another interview with Monty in a major publication. That should push RC3 along some :-)

ff123

I have my doubts whether those strict deadlines are very good for the mental sanity of the developers.

On the other hand, they do seem to be effective. I know the Gnu C Compiler uses them too, and it results in a madness of people all having to do last-minute work on each release

--
GCP