Hi, I´ve finally worked up the nerve to ask this.
I started getting interested in compressed audio about a couple of years ago, then my interest faded and it just recently started again (I bought an iRiver and an in-dash mp3 player).
Back when I started "the authority" was r3mix (it was recommended in the EAC site), but now I come to this forum and I find that r3mix is kind of an outcast and the sole mention of this name inspires either laughter or contempt.
I suspect there is some kind of soap-opera-drama-like explanation behind this. A story of loves past and hatreds deep, if you will.
I love that kind of stories.
Can someone indulge me, please?

The short explanation is that Roel (the r3mix creator) wrote a lot of misinformation & censored a lot in his site/forum.

As opposed to r3mix.net Hydrogenaudio doesn't promote any outdated pseudo standards, which are proven to be inferior to alternatives.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=ST&f=15&t=2959

I used to hang out at r3mix in the "old" days.. and well, even though Roel had his faults.. he still did a lot of good to the audio community IMO.. many, including me, knew next to nothing about audio (/compression) when we first started hanging out there, and well, there were very many fruitful discussions over at roel's, and the pages at his site were quite useful in many ways, although some of the information turned out to be not so informative or correct after all.. and roel sort of got carried away with it all sometimes. Anyway.. without his contribution, many, including me, wouldn't even have heard of lame perhaps, and who knows, maybe lame wouldn't even have reached the level of popularity it today enjoy (with all that implies) - and many of us would never have become so interested in audio compression that we would hang out at boards like this one. Sure.. I make it sound like the holy grail... but r3mix was at the right place, at the right time..

therefore, even though I realize many have their problems with things roel did, I still think it is sad that people diss him this much. All in all, I think he did a lot more good than bad.

Besides.. personally, I don't have very good hearing, or just not that trained to hear faults with compression.. that would put me in the same boat as 95% of people I suppose.. who couldn't even if their life depended on it hear a difference between -r3mix and -alt-preset standard.. now, I realize many/fair part of the people here perhaps fall into that 5%-category that CAN hear a difference, but I still don't think it's cool to diss and make fun of the -r3mix switch as much as they do.. because, 95% of people would find it more than good enough, and those 5% surely cannot mean it sounds like total shit either, eh.. of course, if the -alt preset standard is indeed superior, it is right to sway people away from r3mix (and i'm not saying it is not.. I personally just am unable to hear difference, so i couldn't possibly say).. but it's not cool when people make it sound like it's a whole world of difference. But then again, I am rambling as audio compression is often a field of small differences =p

Nobody try to slam me for this opinion, please, that's not cool. I've heard this discussion countless times. And even though I realize there are many finer points that I have long forgotten, they didn't matter to me back then, and they sure wouldn't do if someone brought them all up once more. It's al about perspective. And I know for a fact that me and many others enjoyed and benefited a lot from r3mix and his site. And I am not about to forget that simple fact no matter what. That's where I go from, anyway. Simple, really.

I agree... meny members, including me, found r3mix.net first, then came over to hydrogen audio after learning that there was something better... I also agree that i can't tell much wrong with --r3mix neither, but i like the warm fussy feeling knowing that even though i cant hear it, --preset standard is better/less likely to introduce errors.

Oh and another point, if i didn't visit r3mix, i wouldn't of found here, thus not known about MPC! The horror of it!

I also agree. R3mix was one of my first stops, albeit a brief one. We should be respectful of anyone's enthusiasm that can promote better audio technology. Certainly the intentions of r3mix were correct.

We should all strive to keep this forum open-minded and positive otherwise it will turn new members off and die a deserved death.

Heh. This is because although there is some valuable information available at r3mix.net there is also some misleading information.


Sidenote: From www.mp3dev.org and software which uses lame page.

MP3 Encoding Web Sites:
r3mix.net Up-to-date ripper and encoder information, and the truth about MP3 quality.


This is somewhat misleading as well. Perhaps this could be updated and maybe a linke to ha.org added.

http://lame.sourceforge.net/links.html
was last updated @
17. oktober 2002 16:26:02
really wonder why they didnt fix that yet.

r3mix.net used to be a pretty cool messageboard. There were lots of audio geeks and developers, and good information flowed freely. It was nube-friendly, and yet there was in-depth discussion.
IMHO, r3mix.net was ruined by Roel's ego.
When Dibrom began making the dm LAME presets which were clearly superior in quality to r3mix, Roel really didn't deal with it very well. Things got pretty ugly. Dibrom left, created a much cooler place, and even better LAME presets (alt). Virtually all the geeks and devs that were there moved over here.
At least, that's how I remember it. It's all kind of foggy now...

If you guys think r3mix place was so great, then you must love this place in ten fold.
If you guys think roel should get credits for a semi good yet flawed place, then this place is heaven compared to r3mix.

All this mentioning of roel and Dibrom's name only get bought up once. You know, I don't like kiss ass but I think Dibrom and his team did an outstanding job!

Yea, I too got into audio compression at r3mix. I at least owe him that. Besides, I'd much rather get something encoded in r3mix than Xing 128.

It's not cool to leave that site up like that, though. I got through half my collection before I found this place.

I got to see first hand what happened when the whole community split took place. Basically Dibrom was being perfectly rational in his pursuit to create better presets however this infringed on Roel's pissing ground since his ego was practically embedded in --r3mix. When Roel started to see his grip on the community loosening (since people were beginning to wake up from Roel's "good enough for me" philosiphy), he basically threw a temper tandrum so to speak. There was plenty more than that as well as Roel was notorious for censorship and acting belligerent whenever people had opposing opinions. His testing practices have also been exposed to be seriously flawed and he has been caught blatantly lying on several occasions. Anyone who would call this man an expert should read their history books. Yeah its nice he sparked up some interest in people but how much different would it have been if a year later those same people got their first exposure here instead. If i recall correctly, Dibrom was playing with lame commandlines before he found r3mix so its not like Roel was some sort of messiah. Dibrom, if i have my facts wrong i apologize.

Thanks.
Now that I´ve read what happened, I feel I must add my 2 cents.
I do think that Roel´s intentions at the beginning were good, he just couldn´t take it when he was surpassed. I am from Latin America and we have seen that behaviour repeated dozens of times on our leaders
Most people just cannot handle that kind of situation.
I also think that Dibrom has his own issues as well. He just cannot dismiss Roel´s contributions to the community as swiftly as he does. I think that if you polled in this site how many of us started at R3mix as our first experience on high quality encoding my point would be proven.
Well, I guess this story proves that egos can wreck pretty much everything. Even know Dibrom, out of ego, has stopped working on Lame, leaving us who are not really interested in other formats hanging.

Is this some kind of troll?

First of all, I'd ask how well you are even acquainted with this whole situation. I don't seem to recall you having been present or active during much of these past events. I also don't recall having any discussions with you as to my thoughts on the matter. I haven't even posted on this matter (Roel or r3mix.net) in a long time.

I've already explained why I dismiss Roel's contributions many times. I believe I have made my points clearly enough and do not need to rehash this with another lengthy debate. In short, Roel helped to provide interest in some areas of audio compression, but that's it. He didn't do any pioneering work on LAME (--r3mix is just a bunch of basic commandline options.. oh wait, he did help with the LAME tag ), he didn't foster interest in other audio formats, he didn't work to try and bring developers and users closer together, and he didn't encourage progress.

I didn't take anything from Roel personally (I did not build upon any of his work), so I also don't feel personally obliged to him. The one thing I credit Roel for is for starting an audio forum. Compared to all that has happened since then, that is a relatively small accomplishment. He was not original in doing this either, there have been many audio communities before him (ever heard of usenet?).

Maybe some people credit him with providing some information, even if that information is flawed or intentionally misleading, but I don't see it that way. From a functional point of view, that is pretty much just as bad, if not worse, than not providing anything at all.

Now.. if you want to continue making judgements about me or my character, I suggest you provide something a little more relevant and substantial as to why you think I'm wrong, and why you are qualified to make these statements.



What point would that be? As far as I can tell, you haven't made one that would correlate to this theoretical poll.



And wtf is this?

So you think you know the story here well enough to again make a character judgement?

I simply cannot believe this kind of crap. I've contributed so much more of my time and money to maintaining this site and working on LAME than any of you people who think this way would ever imagine doing. Simply because, out of frustration and disinterest, I decide I can no longer work on some things (LAME being an example, and don't think that I didn't put forth a lot of effort to get things to change before I came to this conclusion), I'm the bad guy? And after all of this (which, ironically is much more than Roel ever did), the only thing you can think to say is how great of a guy/community Roel/r3mix.net was, and how I have "issues"?

Heh.

It's a lose/lose situation. If I discuss how things need to change, people get pissed. If I stop caring, people get pissed. Whatever...

In the past I would have dignified such a useless post with a more lengthy response.. but I've become more and more aware lately of how futile that is.

Anyway, I've had enough of this thread. If you guys want to rant about r3mix/Roel/me/etc, then find another board to do it on.

Oh, and btw, I hope you're happy now that you've gotten your little dose of drama. I can't possibly see any other reason for bringing up such a topic and saying these kinds of things after all this time.

I got interest in audio compression ever since i discovered real audio (ver. 2 or 3 i think) and mp2. Much later after a brief misleading with Blade claims about quality, i found the very interesting mp3encoder ML. Back then they used a single list for devs and users, which was very nice, things flowed very nicely. And i remember Frank Klemm working in lame and later carrying on with other projects, as there were some "issues" with the other developers (so, these things are not new, history repeats...). In that ML someone (maybe roel?) was promoting the r3mix forum, and i have been there following the discussions until HA got started, and you can see by my lower id number, i did attent the very first or second day call. I have seen how things developed. I also knew in r3mix first about mpc and other formats, which would not be discussed there in that much in detail because the forum was supposed to be for talks about lame, and also about cd-rw.

It was my idea to start an IRC channel for that forum on openprojects.net. I got inspired by the vorbis channel there at that time. It was nice that even that idea was preserved when HA got done. Also the HA project seemed better, leaving all personal issues aside, it was good to have a place to discuss about more formats. And i remember infamous people like J, and his page, among many other things and crazy anecdotes.

I don't thing it is wise to "compare" people with certain "stereotypes". Everyone is different, Latin America or not, and you will know where i am from in this post. I know what it means to maintain a public forum, i did in the BBS days, because i had a public dialup BBS before the internet days. I know very much about users, flames, and only special people can survive long supporting users while maintaining a good tone and behaviour. Dibrom has a lot more patience and dedication than most other forums moderators i have seen before. And i have seen many, trust me

The main goals of HA are very nice indeed. Everyone of us are learning more about the topics in question, there should be no need for such offtopics to come back from the past again and again. About --r3mix, its simply deprecated and obsolete, there is not much else to say about it. In my own opinion, tho, the mp3 format itself is also deprecated and obsolete . But if you still have to use it, the alt-presets are the best choice. The other forum is just the other forum, and i think it even works at this time, and you can use it, everyone is free to. For me i try to not use too many forums, as i tend to forget coming back at them, so i try concentrate in a few that attract my interests.

It is also wise to understand, that no one is in position to demand anything. And most especially, users from open source developers. If you really want something done, do it yourself or pay someone to do it. Thats how open projects work. You can not go attack someone because he/she decided to not continue working with it anymore. Things may be a bit different with commercial/closed stuff, specially if you paid for it, but when people volunteer their time and resources for such altruistic things, you are at best supposed to thank instead of demand things. In normal situations, a good ol' ignore you will receieve. Some others like (ahem) would inmediately lock the thread

Oh, in my opinion r3mix is not a bad word at all. Its simply an old, almost forgotten one. Part of our history, i guess. mp3 may soon be, as well

I think what AtaqueEG meant was Roel's contribution in terms of the number of people he got involved in the beginning. That is an irrelevant point as to how things have progressed now. It may or may not be your first experience but that doesn't matter.

EDIT: I realize that irrelevant is not the word, but rather negligible or moot or something like that. I mean its something but its not that too big of something to make a dent on my car.

I'll make an analogy here: Does anyone know the martial art of Aikido? I'm willing to bet that a lot of you knew of its existence because of an actor with long hair pony tailed. But he's a Hollywood figure. He makes movies. (I live near Japan so my first exposure was from someone else.) I like the movies actually. So he spread the knowledge and he gets promoted to 8th Dan. But I'll still get my training from someone else.

Back to topic: Regardless of what's happened before, its what's happening now (or has happened recently) that really counts. Not too many people care about what happened 10,000 years ago when the first cavemen invented fire but now I enjoy light bulbs because of Philips or General Electric or whatever. It's in your history or archaelogy books if you want to read about it.



As far as I can tell, Dibrom has created the last, best, easiest to use version of LAME. If you are not interested in other formats (Like me, for example - or not yet anyway) that's not his fault.

The only thing more he could do is make an idiot-proof version that will only accept input.wav and turn it into output.mp3 with a hard-coded --alt-preset standard switch (similar to Bruce's md5sum.exe)


Personally, I got involved with my first mp3 back in 1996. Even had a group to distribute stuff. But as of all things like that I'm not really keen on telling everyone.

Drama is not really my type of thing either.

There's probably a glimmer of truth to this if you consider how it's possible that you are percieved. You've made quite a few statements to the effect that good things are gonna happen, stay tuned...then 2 months later you say the same thing. It becomes frustrating, and shines badly on you. The fact that you took up the lame presets with great fanfare, and then announced that you were not going to play nice with the lame-devs because they kept changing the playing field...well, that's something that you should have anticipated before you started the project. The lame presets were basically a hack that worked very well for that particular version of lame. It would be very difficult if not impossible to make a set of presets that would be flexible enough to evolve gracefully with changes to the lame source code. Lame as it stands is nowhere near complete enough to be considered stable. In order to improve measurably, it has to be changed drastically. There is no rhyme or reason behind development milestones; if someone decides they want to make a change to the source, cause they feel like it, they do. They also don't make a big deal out of it if something happens to 'break' their modifications, because they realise that it's all on the road to something better, and greater knowledge in the long run. There is no rigorous testing performed, since the stated mission of the lame dev team is not to make an organized push for dominance over other brands of encoders, it was developed basically as a living experiment into the development of audio encoding technologies, specifically layer 3. If you want to use it for something different, that's fine, but don't go crying foul when their releases break something that has nothing to do with the mission of the official project to begin with. Maybe forking would have been a good idea after all?


...but you know what? It don't matter. If you can't be criticized it's your own problem. We, as community members, are quite capable of criticizing, and it would be unreasonable to force us to stay in line. This forum is build on critiqueing in the first place, asking us to refrain from critiqueing you would be like asking us to only be human on certain days of the week. Criticism is a good thing, it awakens us to problems. If we have any drive to better ourselves or the lot of the group, criticism is the first step in identifying and rectifying the situation. And again, if the problem is in the eye of the beholder, it's easy enough to ignore. If it bothers you to the point that you become rage-blinded from it, well....



Let it slide, getting worked up only proves his point. R3mix, for most of us, was the starting point into the hobby of uber-teaked and hyper-efficient audio compression. As such it's always gonna occupy a place in our hearts, whether you disapprove or not. HA is definitely a great place, which I can't go more than a few hours without a fix on. Kudos to the time and energy spent, but it's a continuation of an idea started long ago at r3mix. R3mix without the sheep leading the sheep? Perhaps. It's nice to see a scientific approach to verifying hypothesis and resolving problems. R3mix without the ego? I'm not entirely sure about that...





Simple, nostalgia. Most of us in the beginning came from there. If you yourself didn't like it, there's no reason to get worked up over people who may have. Besides, we're in the here-and-now, and HA is obviously where we're gonna be for a while. It's fulfilled niches that r3mix never did, and it's quite a cosy place. There's not much of a drama here...I guess that's kinda also what I miss about reading r3mix. There's just something about reading flamewars refueled by a group of people who obviously had nothing better to do, or felt a need, to ruffle feathers and proudly display their own. It was entertaining, some of the posts were downright hilarious to those of us removed from the immediate factions.

Anyways, I fully expect this post to be removed by the mods. *sigh* If it's still up tomorrow, I'll be surprised.

My two cents,
James

Yyeessss!

So happened that I've discovered R3mix first, then HA. Beautiful that between these two occurencies a little time was! Unfortunately, the fame of HA is undeservedly low in mass.
I say more: the fame and advantages of Ogg Vorbis, MPC too. And listen: a lot of people around me haven't ideas even of VBR mode in MP3!
One my friend has good ears (he think) and good equipment and he says to me, he's made some blind tests on MP3 and WMA at 256 kbit and concludes WMA is better in stereo representation. I ask him: how you done MP3 encoding? He answers: by lame at cbr 256, of cource, what else has sense? I talk him a little about "what is SBR"...
Want to say: only real enthusiasts would dig forums in search the structural view of audio encodings. The others need in a good site, or a couple of good articles covering such themes. Happens that R3mix is such kind site and beginners starts to learn it with pleasure
Would nice to have site like one but on the HA materials!
I do myself some work in promotion the new formats and, to begin, right look on lame and his options. But it is so small...

On HA - yes. But not in wide world. Not so soon, I think.
(Oh, I'm about mp3, of course )

How long till this shit gets moved over to off-topic & we get back to constructive audio discussions?

I never knew there was such a long soap opera behind LAME.

Either way, if you want, use the alt preset standard. If not, get a spectral analysis graph(like the trial cool edit pro), and try screwing around and making your own command line stuff, and see what works for you if you don't like the presets. Remember, mods/admins, developers, teachers/professors, etc, they are B]NOT[/B] better than you, they just used the potential they had a lot more than the average joe, which is why they are in the high places they are in now. Any old person who has knowledge of this stuff and puts their mind to it for a really long time can find something right for them, and that can beat the stuff we have now.

Why in the world would you use a spectral representation to rate lossy encoders? You need to LISTEN to the result (and use Double BLind Listening Tests) to determine whether encoder (or command line ) X is better/worse than Y....

I'm disappointed you think this.

Why, because it works. The guy on r3mix.net used that same thing to show why xing sucks, what happened in earlier musicmatch versions, etc. The guy here used them to rate stuff too, even if he used different types of MP3s, he still tested in the same general fashion that I doi(except I do the whole song).

Yes, yes, Graph is very important.

pay close attention to the 6th post in that thread...

Yeah, this must be the most poisoned thread we've had in a long time Two clever-cloggs blabbing about personal issues they don't know a thing about or don't seem to understand, another one promoting spectral analysis... ouch.

You have got to take into account that all of us are doing this for free, in our spare time. If there's time and motivation, great things happen. If there's lack of either, nothing happens.

Time is always an uncertain factor for a hobby and depends on a lot of things. Motivation is mostly the feedback you get from the work you do.

Both of these two are variable, and you should never count on someone who develops free software from being able to deliver his promises, however honest they may be.

I won't comment on the situation between Dibrom and the LAME people because I don't know enough about it that I feel confident making comments about it.



Being able to write a point by point rebuttal of your post after being called a complete egoist and having 'issues' is not being able to be criticised?

Wow, man, I hope you never see _me_ angry.

I credit Roel for setting up a forum and kickstarting the original comminity to get into serious testing and discussion. He gathered suggestions and created the first specific preset based on (mostly ) objective testing. I just reread Dibroms post and it seems he agrees with this. I don't think Roel did anything else he specifically deserves credit for. I just reread the entire thread and I didn't find anybody mention anything either.

Now, reread AtaqueEG's post and tell me whether Dibrom was really overreacting. The last sentence is as close to a troll as you can get.

There are, like, three factions at work here. Dibrom's side, who got pissed off by some of the things roel/r3mix did/stood for.. and then we have my camp, who, more or
less, believe that while roel might have done some bad stuff
yes, all in all the board was pretty much fun, gathered the
community, and taught us lots of stuff.. r3mix was at the right place at the right time, and therefore, will always have a place in our hearts. And although we realize dibrom and others justifiably had issues, they make too much out of it and that it is not cool that they have tarnished the name of roel and r3mix as much as they have. Think about it.. the faults of roel were simply those of human kind, nothing more.. what Roel did, people do CONSTANTLY in real life and on the internet.. as a matter of fact, or perhaps it's just me having visited the wrong places, r3mix was in fact more informative than most other forums.. I mean, just take a look at your average internet board or newsgroup.. A LOT more BS and misinformation and EGO there than r3mix ever had IMO (although there was some, but then again some drama and flame wars is sometimes a good thing when discussing stuff that can sometimes become a little bit boring). Besides, Roel was not really ever trying to be intentionally a "bad guy" either I think, his mistake was as I've said just that he was "too much human", and didn't manage to hide it or let logic prevail all the time.

R3mix was fun, it was informative, and there was less annoying BS there than on most boards. R3mix gathered, or perhaps even created, the sort of community that HA today enjoys. And that easily makes me say: so what if the person in charge did some bad stuff or whatever? In the end, then and there, and even now and here, it didn't matter/still doesn't matter. Hydrogen Audio is a lot better than r3mix in many ways, I'll give dibrom that.. but at its best, r3mix did exactly what HA does for us now. Anyway, we try to understand why dibrom and others have/had such problems with r3mix.. but we _DON'T_ have to agree or even _APPRECIATE_ the fact that he and others have managed to ruin, at least on this board, the name of roel and r3mix.. it's far from justified, I feel. Actually, if I wanted to play the same game, I would say that it is a very bad quality about dibrom and others here on this board that they cannot be a little more forgiving, or simply chill a little more and put it all in perspective.. it WASN'T THAT BAD, r3mix.. at least not in the eyes of most of us who hanged out there Problem is, the people who had the biggest issues with r3mix, are the same people who speak loudest/have the most influence, so the picture becomes skewed.

Oh, I mentioned a third faction.. well, they are the people who couldn care even less

r3mix have a place in our heart as "the first", nothig will and can change that. Dibrom takes this all too serious and personal sometimes.. or so it seems anyway, as Dibrom likes to point out all the time, not many of us really know anything about his character RL (actually that same thing could be said about roel too). Anyway, I may sound hostile towards dibrom and whatever, but that's not my intention.. just as i feel roel did much good, I also feel dibrom is doing much good, and probably, if hydrogenaudio is gone one day, we will look back at it too very fondly. And who knows, if dibrom somehow has a bad exit, like Roel did, I and many others may one day too stick up for dibrom or whatever.. uhm, just a random thought.

wanna have another random thought of mine? the anime show neon genesis evangelion.. many in the west started out with this anime.. and have special feelings for it.. even though it is one of the most-discussed animes ever, especially for its controversial ending(s). And even though it is sort of childish in many ways compared to many more serious anime.. and even though those who "don't get it" say it had a lot of BS in it.. am I making any sense? you still couldn't replace NGE with anything else, no matter how much mature or whatever. (watching rahxephon right now.. quite similar to NGE in many ways.. and a lot more mature too in many ways.. and rather good this far.. BUT.. will it ever manage to replace NGE?
not a fat chance. [ps: not saying HA cannot replace r3mix or whatever, it did that quite well a long time ago, just saying the first one's the first]) Well hope some of my words made any sense.. and sorry if some of the english was bad.

Yes, drama baby drama!

Though i'm in a hurry, i just had to comment about this...
Look, yes, they had "issues", damn good issues. And no, they didn't "make too much out of it". At ALL. And they didn't "tarnish" the name of Roel and r3mix! Roel pretty much did it on his own, pretty well too. Yes, his faults were of human kind, so what? Many people have faults, let's "forgive" everybody! Sorry, but there's NO sense here. Some things must not be "forgiven" so easily, think about THAT.
R3mix did good, but in my opinion did much more bad than good. Faults, whatever, some faults are just too big, some people just don't have much responsibility for their actions, and are "blinded" by their "ego". Faults, yes, some faults i much prefer not to "forgive".

You are of course right here. Keep in mind this board was started exactly because some of us had gotten so serious issues with r3mix that we considered continuing there senseless and counterproductive.

As a result, more or less all the core posters come directly from r3mix.net. We all liked it, even though the reasons for the split left a particularly bad aftertaste.

Considering that now many people who come here learnt from *the current* r3mix.net that --r3mix is holy and the fact that it still promotes spectral analysis, and I hope you can see why it's dissed here. *Right now*, I'd say that it does maybe as much bad as good. But that is a matter of personal opinion. In my case reinforced by personal experience of seeing many newbies here also trusting in spectral analysis, even in this very same thread.

Should it be forgiven because of it's past glory? Not sure. But I hope you'll agree that it's important that newbies 'get' that r3mix.net is not a reliable source for objective information though.



Dibrom IST DEATH!!!

This thread has just reminded me of one of the useful things about the r3mix site that hydrogenaudio doesn't do. You could point a newbie to r3mix, and if they read through it, they would come away making reasonable quality mp3s.

If there's something as basic here, I've missed it. I'm not even sure there's a prominent link to a useful accurate site that offers this information. This is one thing HA currently lacks. In every other respect, it beats r3mix hands down.


Now, this graph thing... If only the r3mix message board was still up, I could point you to a great thread! That's one of the things I love about HA - you post a message, and it stays posted!

Basically, frequency graphs (if missused, which they usually are) can do two problematic things, sometimes at the same time:

1. Show you things that you CANNOT hear.
psychoacoustic codecs make use of the limits of human hearing, and change parts of the signal that are inaudible. These parts still show up in graphs! Looking at a graph, you don't know if what's changed was or wasn't audible - the only way to find out is to listen!

2. Hide things that you CAN hear.
Frequency response graphs integrate information over time. This is because 1 sample has no frequency response! typically 1024 (or a higher power of two) samples are analysed. Sometimes the whole file is! What this will hide is the temporal or transient details in the file. This is a particular problem with most transform codecs, which give pre-echo. You can rarely see this pre-echo in a spectrogram or frequency response graph.

In a related problem, a smearing of the transient information can cause a file to sound "brighter" than the original, even when the measured frequency response is identical. This is a blatent example of the quirky nature of human hearing meaning that the graphs don't even show you what they claim: the measured frequency response doesn't match the perceived frequency response!


Back to the orginal question...
Without the r3mix site, many people wouldn't be here. Without his lame tag idea, I wouldn't have come up with replaygain. He was in the right place at the right time to help lots of people learn more about audio compression, and bring together many people who learnt even more from each other. There must have been some hard work went in to putting the r3mix site together, and running the forum. He did (especially before nspsytune came along) suggest some good command lines that improved default lame behaviour, and helped people know where to start with lame. He wisely publicised EAC. The success of the r3mix site, the number of people who posted to the forum etc is a largely serendipitous fact (many came over from mp3.com when they messed up their forums), and not down to Roel. When he lost interest in improvements (because lame was good enough for him), and rejected those who still wanted to see further improvements. That was the beginning of HA and the end of r3mix (though I wonder how many thousands of hits it still receives?). So, whilst Roel's personal efforts and acheivements don't match those of a certain Mr D and the HA team, it would be wrong to say he did nothing. Sadly, many of the good things that came from r3mix were coincidental, and it's demise was due purely to it's founder. But it most certainly wasn't all bad. It was mostly good to start with.


Dibrom and team deserve a lot of respect and gratitude for this site. I hope they enjoy the work they've put in - I think they do, and I know that I enjoy the results! It's an amazing acheivement, a valuable resource, and a great place! Thank you guys.


Cheers,
David.

aabxx:



Well... I'd agree with you if we were only talking about the occasional spill that happens to all of us here, but there have been far more outrageous happenings that simply cannot be justfied by just saying "everybody does it sometimes". (Signing up to other discussion forums under a fake name and calling one of your fellow moderators a liar for promoting Dibrom's preset; accusing Garf of "just having made something up" when he published listening test results which didn't reveal --r3mix to better than 192kbps CBR; and all those issues with Dibrom which I've lost track of )

I always believe(d) that r3mix is dead. ?!?!
(that all former r3mix guys adopted the Alt Prese(n)ts )

What I 'blame' them for, is that they keep this outdated info online (dangerous: newbies!)


I must say I didnt know this - what the thread starter called a



- , probably because I only got to know the 'scene' when HA had already started (March)

Wow, talk about some over-analyzation. Anyone agree?

I visited r3mix.net when I first learned about LAME, started ripping with --r3mix. Then I discovered HA, and found out I should be using an alt-preset. Oops. No biggie, I went back and re-ripped everything over a long period of time.

I think the point here is that Roel's intentions WERE NOT bad. Besides, why even judge someones character just from their level of involvement in psychoacoustic audio compression? That's ridiculous.

Furthermore, judging Dibrom's character from the simple fact he left LAME development is incredibly shallow and again, ridiculous. I can't believe how drawn out this discussion has become.

Deeply analyzing audio compression is good. Deeply analyzing topics like this is childish and pointless.

What we CAN agree on is that r3mix did some good, some bad.. just that we all because of differences in character and experience quantify "some" very differently. And that is just the stuff opinions are made of, eh. But, and this may as well only be my opinion and nothing more, sometimes the naysayers of r3mix and roel are not completely level-headed about it, or at least they do not seem to allow enough room for other opinions.. now, this may of course be intentional.. but that's also exactly what leads to discussions of this sort.

Simple fact is.. this matter will always have two different camps.. nothing can change that, as many discussions have shown. The regulars knew this, I knew this.. but we came
for the drama Dibrom gets annoyed, sure, but in the end, I hope he can do like the rest of us and have a good laugh about it. But then again, for Dibrom this is much more "up close and personal" or whatever, so most of us cannot really completely understand or even appreciate the way Dibrom feels about it, I suppose.

This was supposed to be a "and then we all shook hands" sort of post... if it comes off like something else, it's hopefully just poor english

This better not be THAT kind of board. If this thread goes, so do I.

*seconds*

Some people seem to have the idea that HA is the direct continuity of r3mix-forum. Well, it isn't.

For me and some of the guys here, vqf.com/bbs was the first and its glory days were before r3mix-forum.

VQF.com/bbs was practically the main MPC-forum, since the original author of Musepack (mp+ at that time) Andree Buschmann presented the new format there when it was very young. Also it was the place for discussing the early versions of Psytel AAC. People there became familiar with a young talented guy named Ivan Dimkovic, who had made his own AAC implementation and who had a tough fights with a guy nicknamed "km" who was the promoter of another new (at that time) format called TAC.
IMO VQF.com was the first place where blind listening testing became widely used, and thus the forum never became a promoting place for the actual VQF-format (for obvious reasons. ) Then, when time went by, VQF.com forum became more and more a place for spamming and trolling, and it died, as did the actual VQF-format.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is, that from the beginning of HA it was clear that HA aimed to cover more than r3mix-forum ever did. Roel was not interested in any other format except MP3. HA wanted to cover more audio formats and gather more people and more developers than that, so we created General audio, Vorbis,MPC,AAC and MP3 forums from the very beginning, later we added lossless, CD-r and audio-hardware -forums. HA never was a "direct copy" or a "direct alternative". That's why imo one can't even properly compare r3mix-forum and HA together..
Also, despite the 4 different codecs covered, imo we have succeeded to keep the "codec wars" quite in the minimum here, which I think is/was essential for the success of HA.

I'm not sure about the previous 2 incarnations (there have been 3 so far, i guess) But the latest is at double u double u double u dot audiofora dot com at this time . And the very top topic at the "General" forum right now is: "alt-preset sucks for radiohead"

Oh so people are still posting links to threads at HA in there, hehe... topic: "Highest quality with LAME".

About graphs, in the "Why not using graphs to compare codecs ?" thread of the FAQ, JohnV gives a good example of a graph looking good and sounding bad.

Ah, the vqf forum... MP3 IST DEATH!

Yes, and all the discussions from the beginning are still online.

It reminds me that I gathered a list of all threads related to the work on Lame, from the dm presets to the early alt presets. I gave it up because both boards changed the URL of the messages, but I see that all r3mix links are closed (I closed them when I made the list), so it would be easy to rebuilt the list.

Would anyone be interested ? The discussions are very very long, there are more than 1000 posts in total, they are old and outdated, but they give a good idea of the amount of work that has been done in Lame tweaking.

I miss all the good stuff don't I.

That's exactly what mpcfiend was doing with Dibrom, which is indeed ridiculous. The people who are qualified to make statements about Roel's character (I don't claim to be one of them, even though I am not as poorly informed on these issues as some other people in this thread are ) have *much* more evidence than simply his "level of involvement in psychoacoustic audio compression".

Ummmm....back on topic

1) r3mix is recognized as being inferior in quality to --aps
2) r3mix generally has a lower bitrate than --aps

Q.E.D.

Where is all the poison coming from???

Like I said at the beginning, I had just worked up the nerve to start this thread. I knew that something like this could/would happen. I had figured out by reading this site that the hole r3mix thing was a sore point in this forum. I never meant to start a flame war, to troll, to judge anyone or to upset anyone. I just wanted to know, and then maybe express my opinion, however flawed it may be.
Now, to the point: I´m sorry Dibrom. You were the last person I even wanted to post, much less get upset in this thread. I should have known better when I made those remarks, but hey, that is how I really feel. Weren´t people pissed and frustrated when the Beatles split? I meant my remarks from that point of view. I am very grateful for what you´ve done, really much; but on a selfish, childish human point of view (humans are allowed to be selfish and childish, aren´t they?) I am also frustrated that the LAME project will be spared of your contributions. When I am frustrated I tend to say/type silly things. Now I feel I will never be able to post in HA and be taken remotely seriously
One last thing (don´t get mad): my point about that "theorethical" poll was that no matter how hard anyone tries, no matter how many people think it was full of crap, no matter how obsolete, the ultimate R3MIX legacy, the one it should get credit for is showing a lot us who didn´t even know how mp3 worked (and you would say I still don´t know ) that there was a lot more that 128 kbps CBR, and giving us a simple alternative. From that point on, I think that mostly everyone who´s ever read/posted this site has moved on to better things. Simply put: for most of us, the seed was planted by R3MiX.
And finally, just don´t ask me to contribute anything to LAME except my incorrect opinions...I´m a medical doctor!
To anyone else, can you please let Dibrom know that I´m sorry?

If it wasn’t for R3Mix.net, I would still be using MMJB @ 160kbps! It was my starting point in exploring the audio encoding world, and led me to find such wonderful things as OGG Vorbis. Some of my old albums are encoded using --r3mix & LAME v3.92, and I still find the quality acceptable. I can't comment on any of the old "issues," but I can say that things come and things go, and that not everything along the way is smooth sailing. As Rodney King would say, "Why can't we all just get along?"

EDIT - "Coding" changed to "encoding" and "Coded" changed to "encoded." (It was late )

Once there was a time...

The first to push the r3mix preset further were others.
Not the ones you think about now. You should have
been in the Newsgroups 2 years ago and so...

Wombat

Its interesting to see how mired down this thread has become with euphoria. Unfortunately all of this is really quite irrelevant. At the end of the day it doesnt really matter who had good intentions or who's ego was in the way of progress. What's important is the product of a person's efforts, or hell even a person's best shot. Roel was probably a nice guy in person but who cares if his antics undermined progress whether it was towards the end or all along. This board holds to many key principles which preserve the potency of the information exchanged here. One very important principle is the dissolution of FUD and anyone who who thinks FUD is harmless should think again. The scope of this goes well beyond audio compression and discussion forums as there are plenty examples of the repercussions of disinformation. Everyone in the know understands what im talking about.

People can become obsolete which seems to have been the case here. Like a defective cog in the machine, roel was replaced by community consensus. He might have been useful at one time but there is little to build on and there is nothing to show for it now except fond memories since the interest has always been there for people and probably always will be. I agree also that it is not productive to go about judging these people's characters since it really doesnt have any bearing on what they contribute. I give Roel credit for being a strong leader but this did not build a character for him. See? Do you really care that i said that? I give him credit for giving Lame better exposure but this did not build the --alt-presets and in the end, lame is dead anyway.

Reminiscing about the good old days is really out of place and should be reserved for the off-topic forum. There was no soap opera as some of you seem to perceive, rather just some broken ties that are pointless to discuss. Nobody was good or evil, it just was what it was. So now can we call this horse officially dead and move on?



AtaqueEG, you shouldnt apologize. If you have a question ask it, just make sure it hasnt been asked 100 times already and if you have an opinion, express it, just be prepared to substantiate your claims. Btw, i hardly call this a flame war. Just like any subject it is annoying and frustrating to have to revisit problems that have been resolved over and over again.



This is absolutely offensive and im not even an admin on this site anymore.