Wanna laugh?
Read the discussion about the Ogg Vorbis 1.0 Release at the famous heise.de Forum.

Some very nice (tanslated) exmaples:







dev0

Not to be offensive or what, but generally in such very public german forums, you get a lot of crap to read. And please don't try to argue with them. Mostly they're not insightful. (This doesn't mean all the germans are like this, I'm just talking about the majority of the heise forum users)

--edit--
Ok, there was a lot of comments that did disprove Darwins theory of evolution...

The thing at heise.de is, that most users post about things they hardly know anything about. They say "Lame is great", because they heard it from somewhere, then they say "...because of the inofficial VBR support in MP3", which shows clearly that they know less than nothing about what they are talking.
I tried stopping reading through the heise.de boards, but sometimes they're just too funny.
dev0

I agree... the quality gap between the heise publications and the accompanying forum discussions is huge. I wonder if those guys ever read c't magazine... sometimes it seems as if they're all hooked on "Computer Bild".
:rant:

i could be wrong, but i'm pretty sure i read in iso 11172-3 (mp3) specs that VBR is a possibility (after all, the track iZ splitted into seprate frames) but not a "must-have" ability of what you call a "standard" decoder.

Yah.

Tho I'm not german, I can read and speak it. And the funny thing is, that on well known and/or public boards, people usually also start to fight over spelling and/or start flaming someone just coz he doesn't know something 'apparently obvious' according to them. Best example for this madness is the Chaos Computer Club newsgroup, where they're all acting as Internet gods. Hell I would beat each one of them.

ROFL!!

Not necessarily. You should have seen the MP3 forum at chip.de before I and later Benjamin came there to clear up. I don't want to sound arrogant, but we did actually manage to get things right there. Newbies are now using EAC and LAME or Vorbis (or even MPC, believe it or not) without even having looked at Audiograbber before, and because most of them realized how good the software is, even the most arrogant users have at least tried it.

Even the editors noticed all the talk about EAC/LAME/Vorbis, they suddenly praised LAME as the "best mp3 encoder available", and in their latest review of audio formats they used John33's OggDropXP as the Vorbis encoder. (Heck, on the download page for OggDrop 1.0 RC3 they even link to Benjamin's website as the official Vorbis site! )

It was hard work, but I'm sure that would work with other forums as well. Benjamin and a "clear-up squad" from the chip forums are currently trying to work on the PC-Welt forum, don't know about the progess there.

OK you had good luck then

What a quick turnaround. I guess they don't know much more than before, but at least they are using the right tools

QUICK? We've been at it since October 2001, that's not exactly what I regard as quick...

Oh, I thought because you wrote suddenly. Then a long exhausting way with a sudden breakthrough

It is a must-have capability. If not, it cannot decode an MP3 stream that is perfectly per spec, so how could it be compliant?

VBR is not required for MP2, but it is for MP3. If something doesn't support VBR-MP3, it doesn't support MP3 at all.

--
GCP

correct.

here's a quote from the specs :