Hi everybody
what do you think about this new format
website: http://www.bonkenc.org/index.html

I'll test it. But they obviously don't know anything about quality mp3s as they offer a link to Blade...

At high bitrates ~200KBit/s the quality is extremly good in my opinion, I couldn´t hear any difference, I also looked at the spectral view with cooledit: no cutoff at all, also with a view zoomed to yust one second I couldn´t see the difference between both graphs (normally the graph of encoded files are very blocky, exspecially with encoders like Blade, Xing, Plugger, Shine etc..). I tested castanets to check pre-echo: No pre-echo at all. I couldn´t hear/see any difference.
This format seems to differ from others very much, you also cannot set bitrate, you can set Quantization, Predictor Size, can also set downsampling (1:1 - 1:10). You can also activate/deactivate joint-stereo. My settings were: Quant: 0.40; Predictor Size: 107, Downsampling: 1:1, Joint Stereo activated. Maybe someone with very good hearing and a better system can prove this.
But at lower bitrates (~130kBit/s) it sounds a bit noisy for me, the background seems to get louder.
It also has an lossless mode, but the files are about 5% (from the original) bigger than monkey´s audio.

But the encoder inculded in the program are Lame, Vorbis and Bonk.

Edit: The site posted by Rommel is not the main-site of the Bonk-Format, just of the frontend, this is the main-site: http://yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au/~pfh/bonk/
The format is multi-platform open-source and licensed under GPL.
There is also a XMMS-plug-in and a other player. Unfortunately the winamp-plug-in doesn´t work.

Sure, it's a Blade encode, but hearing how good the format is, and seeing as the maker is not Bill Gates, I can't complain.

Copy smooth.dll to C:\Program Files\Winamp. (not plugin folder)

well, my experience tells me that if something "new" and "amazing" pops up from nowhere and has features comparable (or even similar) to competition which has been around for years, its most likely a ripoff.

First I would need to create this folder...
There is no error-message of missing dlls (because I already copied this file in the winamp-directory after this message appeared). winamp starts perfectly, but the plug-in is not found.

It´s open-source GPL and I don´t know any other similar audio-codec. It seems to work completly different, also the sourcecode is just about 20KB big. That´s what the author writes about his format, nothing like "CD-Quality at 64kBit/s" or site with thousands of flash-animations, there isn´t even one picture:

Advantages (as compared to MP3):
Simple algorithm, small code size
Compresses some types of audio better, especially audio with transients
Flexible: Bonk can compress music or speech at any sampling rate in either lossy or lossless mode
Disadvantages:
Slow: Requires a 300MHz or higher machine for real-time playback

Seems an interesting format, indeed. and open. hmmm, maybe time for a few new forums here

Looks like TNS

Menno

Bonk's lossless mode is included in the FLAC comparison page. For the reasons mentioned below it should give an idea about the codec complexity.

Even in the lossy mode everything is done in the time domain, similar to other lossless codecs' lossy modes. The things that are different about Bonk are: it uses a very large filter (128 taps nominal, max 2048 taps) for prediction, and it has an interesting method for residual coding. The lossiness is accomplished simply by quantizing the residual based on it's distribution, but the way the filter kernel is calculated takes the quantization step into account.

Josh

So is there anykind of psychoacoustics included in Bonk lossy?

Well, I tested with these setting, and I had no problem to hear artifacts with the first Celine Dion test sample I tested. And there was also clear pre-echo with some transients, which was clearly visible in spectral view as well.

I can provide examples if somebody is interested. I wouldn't be very excited about this codec.. The problems are also often in places you wouldn't first expect.

It will be interesting for me to check the lossless mode with various predictor settings ... AFAIK predictor size in MonkeysAudio is 4 bits which is insufficient on complex music where the sample change lies outside the predictor range ... then the predictor is being surpassed and MS coding is the only measure ... by increasing the predictor size you could increase filesize in lossless mode, I guess ...

Some notes about the Bonk format.

I am the author of BonkEnc and I think I need to clarify a few aspects of the Bonk format.

1. I am not the author of the original Bonk codec and I don't know very much about psycho acoustics. Paul Harrison did that work and he is responsible for quality issues and such. I made some changes to the format, but they do not affect quality, but only the binary format (i.e. the audio stream is exacly the same as in the original format).

2. Bonk does not use a discrete transformation as most other formats do, but uses a linear predictor. The drawback is that requires about the same time for decoding as for encoding (that's why you need a 200-300MHz processor minimum). The encoding/decoding time is greatly influenced by the predictor size - my 1.7GHz notebook is not able to decode Bonk with predictor size of 512 in realtime.

2.1. If you use lossless encoding you also have to select a downsampling ratio of 1:1 (i.e. no downsampling) to get real lossless encoding. The downsampling setting greatly affects the file size and quality.

2.2. Bonk uses an integer algorithm. It is quite fast and has the advance that different compiles of the same source code always produce exactly the same binary files. GCC and MSVC compiles of encoders like LAME produce different MP3 files mostly.

3. I changed the binary format of Bonk so that it allows seeking and supports ID3V2 tags. The files are still compatible with the original format, though. The format will change a bit in BonkEnc v0.9, but it's still compatible with any older format revision and any older decoder can read the new format. I sent my source code and a draft specification of the changed format to Paul, but got no answer, yet. Maybe he doesn't even work on Bonk anymore asa there were no updates for a long time.

4. There are two new Winamp plugins (v0.9; for Winamp 2 and 3) available on the BonkEnc homepage and on winamp.com. They don't require the smooth library anymore as they are statically linked. The Winamp 2 plugin supports ID3V2 editing now and automatically converts old Bonk files to the new format when you add an ID3V2 tag. I also plan to write a new XMMS plugin that supports seeking and ID3V2 tags as the existing plugin does not support these features.

Robert Kausch
<robert.kausch@gmx.net>

P.S.: The first versions of BonkEnc didn't support LAME, but only Bonk and Blade. That's why Blade support is still there. It's not even included in the main package, though, but only available as an add-on so most users will never notice that BonkEnc has support for Blade.

Bonk....obviously better than Real at high bitrates, formats like MP3(LAME), MPC, AAC, OGG, WMA easily beat Bonk

Bonk can't survive at low bitrates, Bonk will not be the future streaming format!

LONG LIVE OGG!