Hello!

We didn't quite know where to put this topic, hopefully it's fine placed here?

We're 2 students of Media Technology at the Technical University of Ilmenau in Germany. Actually we're working on a project for which we created a survey you can find here (avalaible both in german and english). A more accurate explanation of what exactly we're doing you will find on this page, too.

We found a lot of perfectly useful stuff in this forum, including especially all those listening tests. Now, we really need some people, who both do listen to classical music AND are interested in technics and the internet. We would appreciate your participation on this survey

If you notice any faults in the english version, please tell us, as english isn't our first language. Also discussion about the results might be interesting. And, of course, feel free to post any other comments here.

Thank you very much!

Sonja and Daniela

I get a 404 when I try to visit the page you linked to.

please check your link, it's broken for me


What do you mean by formats? Either I'm stupid or you did a strange translation.

According to the profile information the homepage is http://www.stud.tu-ilmenau.de/~sola-mt
German Version http://www.stud.tu-ilmenau.de/~sola-mt/index.php?lang=ger
English Version http://www.stud.tu-ilmenau.de/~sola-mt/index.php?lang=en

Since I don't use mp3 much I could be wrong, but afaik mp3 lacks a feature that's important to classical music: ability to access (jump to) segments within a file.
A lot if not most of the classical pieces consist of several parts, like a symphony in 4 movements, violinconcerto in 3, opera even more. Splitting up the piece into many small segments makes it difficult to organize. Perhaps I've overlooked this feature so I'd be happy to learn if it's possible.

Uh, most formats don't really have that kind of support. That's what CUE files are for.

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12. You are:

männlich
weiblich

??


Side note about quality.
MP3<128
Vorbis<128
etc...
don't mean anything. MP3 at 112 kbps is pretty decent whereas MP3 at 32 kbps is unlistenable.

Concerning question 9: pertaining to what, per minute, per track, per album, per month?

Also, it’s a bit simplistic to harp on about bitrates only. There’s more it like freedom, compatibility et cetera, even (short-term) history. My earliest vorbis encodings (libvorbis from 2001) for example have bad stereo problems despite having a rate of more than 192 kbit/sec.

I classify classical music (99.9% of my collection) by always including TITLE and SUBTITLE - this latter tag is reserved for the individual movements when they exist.
If the piece is "indivisible" (say, a symphony in 4 movements or a cycle of Lieder) my convention is to start the subtitle with Roman numbers:
TRACK - COMPOSER - TITLE - SUBTITLE
01 - Mahler - Symphony n.9 - I. Andante comodo
02 - Mahler - Symphony n.9 - II. In Tempo eines gemächlichen... (etc.)

If the music is "divisible" (say, a loose collection of Lieder) my convention is to start the subtitle with a decimal number:
TRACK - COMPOSER - TITLE - SUBTITLE
06 - Brahms - Sieben Lieder op.48 - 3. Liebesklage des Mädchens
07 - Brahms - Sieben Lieder op.48 - 4. Gold überwiegt die Liebe

Album view permits one to see TITLES only or to open a tree of SUBTITLES as required.

The other way - CUE sheets - may not always be feasible, as classical pieces usually already come splitted into individual movements or parts.

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But you've probably guessed that yourself

(PS I'm Dutch, not German)

Leave it blank if you don't know the answer

The bitrate question is really problematic, since the encoder is more important than the bitrate. If this survey is directed at listeners of classical music and technic savvy people, it's safe to rather use encoder and their quality settings instead of audio codecs and bitrates, since most people here will have a more realistic feeling about what quality setting they prefer than what bitrates the their encodes turn out in the end.

Also I would remove all references to WAV... lossless compression means it's lossless, so there's no need for non-compressed lossless downloads as WAVs or AIFFs.

I'm also missing a question whether DRM protected music files would be acceptable or not.

Then I'd also differenciate the DSL speeds a little more. In Germany and other countries, too I guess, there are many people who still have 786kbit/s downstream maximum, but also many who have 1MBit or 2MBit or much more, mainly only depending on how good their telephone line is now. So "faster than DSL (e.g. satellite internet, power-line internet): Downstream more than 1024 kbit/s" is a bit... outdated.

About the surround audio files: Please note, that there are also other surround formats besides MP3-Surround, even lossless formats. The question was a bit misleading... I'd buy surround music, but only lossless. So I choose "No, not at all" twice at question 5, because I don't want my answers to be used in advantage of MP3-Surround.

Question 6 is also problematic: How did you like the sound quality of your downloaded classical music? How can I tell if the downloaded music sounds good or bad compared to the original CD, when I only own the downloaded version (that I've just bought and downloaded). So... at least "I didn't spot any differences to the sound of a CD." makes no sense.

4. Haben Sie schon einmal klassische Musik aus dem Netz heruntergeladen? < for some reason you translate this to english as an ambiguous question that can be read either as 'have i ever downloaded music that wasn't in the Public Domain' or 'Have i ever *bought* classical music from a store'

assuming the german phrasing is the correct one, i'd suggest changing the english to something like a more straight-forward
'have you ever downloaded classical music (either from an online store or 'for free')?'

further, there really is no difference between 'flac' and/or 'lossless', so you might as well remove flac from the list of preferred formats

Actually there are differences to lossless codecs. For example FLAC, WMA, Wavpack and some more are multi-channel capable. APE and OptimFROG are not. And WMA lossless and Apple Lossless can be protected via DRM.

I guess the people for whom they are making this survey for will decide on their own based on this survey and what features the potential customers are willing to pay for / not willing to pay for: DRM, multi-channel, 24bit/48kHz,... things like that can easily looked up in the codecs' specs. It's not necessary to ask what lossless codec they prefer, but it doesn't mean choosing the right lossless codec is trivial.

Whether they need a codec that supports one of the above features depends more on codec-independent questions (Question 7 for example, the surround sound question) rather than the actual codec preference of the people being surveyed. It's a lot more fuzzy and harder to interpret if you ask people what lossless codec they prefer, I'd suggest to ask them about the features that are available in the pool of lossless codecs, look at those results and then decide on your own, or let them choose between several candidates that all have the desired features.

There are several sites on the net that compare the various lossless codecs, luckily since those are lossless and not lossy codecs, making ABX tests to eliminate subjectivity is unnecessary, the whole sound quality question is "out-of-question". So all these comparisons will be more or less objective (unless they are outdated or the authors used wrong info/made mistakes), at least they are verifiable:

http://www.firstpr.com.au/audiocomp/lossless/
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossless.htm
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/All.htm
http://members.home.nl/w.speek/comparison.htm
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...less_comparison
(taken from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_data_compression)

Btw, in my opinion decoding speed and available features of the lossless codec are more important than compression ratio. Those few extra bytes during download won't hurt, but if the playback stutters on grandpa's old Pentium PC because the codec has such a "highly efficient" compression ratio, it will definitely hurt.