Linux must be buggy as hell these days. Maybe Andre Buschmann could use a new PC too?

I personally find that quite amusing too. How come noone mentioned the possibility of giving a PC to Andree when the donation started, since it was just as a "thank-you" gift and not an attempt to bring the developer back to the format, as the fund organizers say?

I'm pretty confident Andree worked much more on MPC than Frank. Andree took the format out of nowhere (or, granted, out of MP2), and, when he gave up working on it, it was already the best format for high bitrates. Frank took it and tuned some artifacts here and there, sped it up, and added some features to the encoder.

Andree was also more interested in working with users and listen to them to improve the format/encoder. That is another reason to be more thankful to him than Klemm.

Agree. We all thank Andree for give birth an excellent format, but Mpc is like a baby. Who takes care, feed and give love to it is the real mother. So Frank, go, go. Soon Mpc will be the most famous format. Thanks Mr Klemm.

But my point is, who took care, fed and gave love to it until it grew up was definitely Andree. And he did it until the format's maturity. Klemm took that mature format and polished imperfections here and there, added new features to the encoder frontend, worked on replaygain support...

The bottom line is, we wouldn't have MPC today if it wasn't for Andree. But we would have MPC (although in a more primitive state) without Frank.

... and if it wasn't for MP2 there'd be no MPC. This could get silly.

Is this sort of discussion really necessary?

Yes, Andree did a lot of cool work on MPC. But Andree also kind of disappeared from the scene and has shown no real interest in MPC for a long time. There's no indication he would ever have been interested in something like a new PC. That's not to say that people shouldn't thank him for the work that he's done though.

And as for Frank, well, it's certainly true that there are a lot of people expecting that he will eventually make some new releases, but even if he doesn't, I'm not sure that it's really appropriate to try and second guess his work.

As far as I'm concerned, anybody who has ever made any sort of coding contributions to the audio encoding scene should be thanked, given the relative lack of good tools and the relative difficulty that is required in making many of them. And let's not forget that Frank also gave his work away for free along with sourcecode to boot.

All I'm saying here is that Andree deserves such kind of gift from the community at least as much as Klemm does.

That's a very important point, and exactly the reason why I refused to donate for Klemm's PC, even though I've used MPC extensively in the past.

Personally, I thought the entire PC donation situation was a slap in the face of all the other people who are doing great things in the audio encoding scene, often for free.

Yeah, deserves ok.. But it just doesn't go like "Frank got a PC, so Andree has to get one too!" I'm sure you understand that this gift, the arrangements and the stuff around it was the sum of lots of things, like Frank having an active member of the forum as a friend, him being the last person to work on mpc, the people's hopes for further development etc. - plus definitely some luck. You could say that Andree just didn'quite meet the requirements .

Of course everyone is grateful to Andree too, but it's not that easy to raise fund for every software developer, even if they "deserved" it.

The Q.'s raised now are a knot of moral and practical if's that cannot be given any answers, only personal viewpoints....
What the donation did do was bringing Klemm back in the limelight long enough to LGPL the stuff, so that now, in theory, anybody could pick up the development....
In the real world I guess just not anybody can. It's not an easy task.
And that said: We do not know whether Klemm has abandoned Musepack yet, or if it just takes a looong time to make any improvents that are releaseworthy.

you assholes. have you ever considered that frank himself might be reading this, and be seeing non-developers, ie "users," who don't do anything but harp and complain going about how someone's more deserving than he? the simple fact is, the purpose of the pc donation was to restart development of MPC. and since Frank had done the most recent work on it, he was the logical choice.

I thought it was supposed to be a pure thank you gift? No presure to do anything with MPC?

If anyone thinks that someone else deserves a gift, then they could always try and organise it.

Frank Klemm is not a God we need to bow down to & praise, all he did is take an existing format & tweak it slightly. If he is reading this maybe he could take a few hours to post his opinion, news on his progress , & (I dare say it) add a few improvements to the Musepack code at least for those users who got together, & gave their hard eared dollars to buy an extravagant gift for someone who seems to care very little about them.

I gave willingly. I have no complaints. I expected nothing in return, but was hopeful.
Next up for donations:

Dibrom, Gabriel, QuantumKnot, Garf, Peter, John33, etc...

Edit: I've gone lossless, so it doesn't matter for me anymore,

Err... "tweak it slightly?"

Do you have any experience coding? Because if you do, it's hard to understand how you could consider a complete rewrite of a decoder and encoder to be such a trivial task. Not to mention the performance improvements, bug fixes, etc.

I'm quite sure that Frank put forth a significant amount of time and effort to accomplish what he did. Maybe you and Roberto don't seem to think that it was worth much, and that's too bad, but that doesn't change the facts of the matter.

Anyway, I think that this thread is moving very rapidly into a distasteful direction. From the beginning, the whole PC thing was seen as a "gift." Nobody ever said Frank would owe us anything, and most everybody should have known that.

Yeah, it's understandable to be frustrated with the lack of progress on the MPC front ( I myself am at least ), but I don't think that it's appropriate to drag things into this direction. I think part of the reason that Frank has seemed to steer clear of HA for awhile is because of some of the kinds of comments seen here lately.

There was a period in the past that he left over some similarly lame comments. For the people who are still interested in him coming back here at some point, it might be prudent not to give him a reason to continue to avoid this place. As it stands, if he were to come back and start posting even right now, he'd be in a bit of an awkward position given some of the discussion that has already occurred.

And of course Frank isn't a God. But that doesn't mean that people have to be so disrespectful towards him either. Whatever you happen to think of him now, he did do something nice for this community. You could say that he was rewarded fairly for that too with the whole PC thing, but that still doesn't mean that he has to come back here.

All I meant by this is that Andre Buschmann is no less deserving than Frank Klemm.



Donation for Frank Klemm's new PC


Because this was one of the first paragraphs I think many users may feel dissatisfied with the outcome of the PC donation.

Anyway with the progress ogg is making I think whether MPC development continues will become a dead issue soon.

Let's face it HA has never been a very friendly place & I don't think this has to do with individual users but the non casual, Nazi like environment that the founders, & moderators have set which has caused many people to leave & some developers to stay clear.

I think there is a mistake here. In one breath, you are showing disdain for Frank and downplaying his contribution. In the other, you are saying Andre deserves credit too.

Which is it?

Most of the people in this discussion seem to already recognize that he should get some credit. How does that change anything? In fact, if you're so worried about him getting credit, why not send him an email asking if he wants a new PC? Or why don't you offer to donate some money to him?

In reality, these comments aren't really about Andre at all in my opinion...



Well then they should have read further:



This was also mentioned many, many other times. If other people feel that they've been cheated, well it's their mistake for not making themselves clear on what they were putting their money up for.



Ok. So why all the fuss?

Godwin's Law proved yet again.

To facilitate discussion, may I suggest not mixing complaints or using those comparisons.

Umm, excuse me?

So you and some others decide to post flamebait to this thread, and all of a sudden it's HA who are the bad guys?

One of the other people who has been participating in this discussion is exactly why Frank left before ( and I'm sure he'll chime in soon enough to gloat about it too ), and it had nothing to do with my so-called Nazi-like behavior.

And for what it's worth, if you don't happen to like the way this forum is run, please feel welcome to leave. I've done my best to keep this place decent and fair, and have sacrificed a lot a long the way. And this just goes for myself, not counting how much the others who have helped with this site have done. Every once in awhile we get people who come along and complain about how "bad" we are because maybe we don't happen to put up with as much crap as some other more childish forums do, but I've never once seen somone in such a position offer anything constructive -- instead all we get is name-calling and vague, non-substantiated complaints just like this...

Comments like this & this (even though this is a minor example you can find many others) from moderators is I think what keeps some from participating in the forum.


Another good example . From now on I'll try to keep my participation level to a minimum.

Heh, right. This kind of thing happens on just about any forum of any decent size, but I can assure you that it happens much less on HA than in many other places. And for the few times when you might be able to point out a mod or admin "not being nice," I can point out far more times where we've had to take flak over complete nonsense, like what is going on here and now...



Right. I can just imagine how my comment would be so devistating to someone. Sure beats calling someone who has spent large amounts of time and money maintaining a free resource for people like you a Nazi, doesn't it?

At any rate, whatever you decide to do, I suggest you stop trolling this thread.

but why you should feel bad about his words? he only said that if you don't like something, you are not obliged to like it ... i do feel that sometimes people are a little harsh ... but is maybe the nature of a forum that wants to be "serious", and that is constantly being apporached by inmature persons (the ones that asks for the 19.000 time what lossless coded is the best? for example)

EDIT: what i do remember is how lost i felt that time that HA closed for like a month, and i don't want to repeat ...

i'm surprised this thread isn't split...

anyhoo, stop pointin fingers and just realize that frank isn't excited about musepack. these attitudes aren't going to get him back here either, so just calm the &*%$ down.

i'm anxious for the next release too (7.5, datastream fixes, etc.) but i'm not going to get all bitchy about it...