Targeted at the more 'expert user', oggdropXP retains the same Bitrate Management Options as the regular version, but the Quality Options consist of an Edit Box into which to enter a quality setting of 0 - 1000. There is no slider, nor target nominal bitrate shown, except when encoding begins, just greater control over quality settings. Enter a value of < 0 and it will default to 0; enter a value of > 1000 and it will default to 1000.

If you are comfortable with the use of the quality settings and don't require a 'helping hand', this may suit you. Initially offered in the basic colours. The full colour range can be offered if there is demand for it.

Soon to be available at: http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/

I hope the more familiar users of the quality settings will find this useful.

john33

Given that quality 10 is around 500 kpbs, how large are files at quality 1000?

is it just me that can't connect to http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/ at the moment?

rjamorim's site is certainly up now.

Jon, as you will probably know if you've looked at the code, the quality settings, internally, run from 0.000 to 1.000. The entry of quality settings in the range 0.00 - 10.00 is quite arbitrary. I just took the decimals out and made it integer 0 - 1000. It's just one less character to enter.

john33

I'm sorry. Please bear with my University's f***ing server.

The files are already there.

Update: At 2:00pm GMT, the server started working again.

No worries, I'm gonna go cook and try again later

Perhaps you didn't see the smiley ( )? .
Semi-seriously - wouldn't it be better with the decimal point in there? After all, the user visible quality *should* go from 0 to 10, not from 0 to 1000...

I've noticed on oggdropXP that it doesn't update the nominal bitrate display until it starts encoding...

bug or feature?

Neither, really!! I could put it back in if you really want it. I just thought, maybe wrongly, that most people using this version would probably pretty much know what they were aiming at.

If the general consensus is to put it back, I will. I can't say fairer than that can I?

Thanks for the feedback.

john33

I don't mean on the settings screen, but on the main one with the little image of the fish? when you stick your number in the encoding options shouldn't the text under the fish change?

That's what I meant too! But, hey, if this is causing confusion, maybe I'll just put it back in. Watch this space!

john33

OK, you win!! I put it back in again.

On reflection, you're probably right really. it looks more consistent that way. New version has been uploaded to Roberto, so should be there soon.

john33

Top stuff

(Hey... I didn't say anything. Go figure...)

for what it's worth i like hearing you say you've updated your site

So is it up yet or not, damnit?


"One Xiph to rule them all"

Great! This edit box is what I've been wating for. Any chance for a combination of both slider and edit box?

If you put the nominal bitrate in the main windows why not just also put it in the encoding options? There is still the issue where you can select a nom bitrate in abr mode and the other two boxes don't adjust appropriately (sp?). Thats just cosmetics though.

Nice work!

Hey, I see what you mean about the ABR. I didn't even think about that! But, what should Min and Max do? If you change from CBR to ABR, then all 3 are the same. If you then adjust Nom, what should happen to Min and Max? I suppose the only certainty is that if Nom is lowered, then Min should be reduced to match, and if it is raised, then Max should increase to match. Clearly, both could also be zero, but that must be a manual adjustment. I think those are the only rules that can be applied.

If you can think of anything else, please advise, but I will work to that on both versions.

Showing the nominal bitrate on the dialogue box for the quality entered can't be done really because the value isn't read until the accept button is hit.

Thanks again for the feedback, I'll get this done ASAP.

john33

Look at the two last posts in this thread page :

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showth...57&pagenumber=1

Having corrected the ABR situation, it now works on the basis that Min will always be <= Nom and Max will be validly either zero , or >= Nom.

Oh, BTW, I just made oggdropXP redundant! The regular oggdrop now provides quality settings via the slider and the left/right arrow keys of 0.00 to 10.00 in 0.01 increments. So, no more oggdropXP, everything thru the one, the only OGGDROP!

I can't think of anything else left to do on this aside from the possibility of auto tagging, but don't expect anything too quickly on that!

Enjoy.

john33

PS. Obviously these will be available at Roberto's site sometime soon - they have already been uploaded.

Truly excellent john

Absolutely, very and all very nice and neat!!

Great work john33 !

Just one question in the subject of usablity:

Why don't you allow user inputs in the "white boxes" (the one showing the quality level and bitrate) below the quality slider, that would make it more intuitive as when I started it up I thought I could input figures into those dialog boxes, therefore by doing that you can make it more intuitive to the user. Another suggestion is to make those boxes grey out as to make it "user input prevented" thus user will automatically directed to the slider bar at the top.

Just a suggestion tho' (coming from a software/web site designer/student, (I don't code much) I just design the way the thing works)

But great and easy program as it is for me and other Project Mayhem users.

Cheers
AgentMil

Thanks guys!!

Allowing data entry in the boxes is not really what I wanted to do. I had the boxes greyed out originally, but I thought that if they greyed when in Bitrate Mode and became white when in Quality Mode, it highlighted the fact that you were in Quality Mode a little better. Anybody else have any thoughts on the subject? Changing it is a 2 second job, but I don't want to do it one way and then have someone else ask for it to go back again.

Unless I hear any strong views, I'm inclined to leave it as it is.

Thanks,as ever, for the feedback!

john33

That's exactly what I had in mind for the abr boxes . I dunno if maybe it would be good to default min/max to zero when switching to abr (am I right that max=0 leads to no top limit?) so you have "no limits" abr. But then again, for this type of situation there's allways vbr (depends on how stable bitrates are in vbr, haven't done enough ogg encodes to tell). Just a thought, nothing more.

Of course it would be nice if you could edit both the quality setting and the bitrate by hand in the edit boxes. But shouldn't there be a way to have the edit boxes read-only but remain white? You could also change the value back to the original setting, whenever the user tries to type something in.

One question: what happens, if a new version of ogg is released? Do you have to start from scratch?

All good thoughts guys.

New version sent to Roberto. Quality and Bitrate equivalence boxes greyed, ie. no editing. Instruction to use Slider and Arrow keys to adjust quality setting added beneath slider. Added Cancel Button as positive way to abort changes to settings.

The frontend is actually fairly independent of what happens in the encoder. Any official changes in the oggdrop backend code are unlikely to necessitate changes to the frontend. In any case, I have submitted the code to Chris Wolf, the official maintainer of oggdrop, for possible inclusion as the official version. I'll report back what happens on that front.

Thanks for the input.

john33

rjamorim are they up on your server? The oggdrop executables that john33 has just made.

Thanks

Now they are.
And the new sources are there too.

Regards;

Roberto.

Thank You for your speedy service :cool:rjamorim:cool: and :cool:john33:cool:.

I'm using john33's latest version of oggdrop, (oggdropc1.exe). No matter what quality setting I put it on the moment it begins to encode it changes to 438.2 on the display and then back to what I had it set on (which was 192). When I look at the file it has actually encoded it with a nominal bitrate of 498.

Thinking it might be a problem with my reg file because of all the different versions I've been using I opened it up and deleted the oggdrop key, yet the problem still continues.

Anyone got any ideas? :confused:

Hey I got my OggDrop to do what crowfax has just posted b4 this post. When I try to encode at 192Kbits the dang thing goes back to 128Kbits. Any suggestions?? And yes the encoded files is set at 128Kbit. Please help!!!

Thanks
AgentMil

I've already e-mailed John so that he can take a look at your bug reports.

I think I found the problem. It seems ogg quality settings for ogg drop are going only up by one decimal place.

If you look in registry, values of 1 to 100 in hex there theoretically you can only assign values to one decimal place.

An example is 6.2 would read as 62 in decimal and in registry as 3e. Therefore by adding the 2nd decimal place you completely screw oggdrops decimal placings eg. 6.25 becomes 625 which is far beyond oggdrop limit of 100.

john33 I think you need to expand the decimal placing in the quality key in the oggdrop registry, to be able to accept values from 1 to 1000, therefore allowing the two decimals places after. (eg. 1 = 1 and 1000 = 10.00)

Cheers
AgentMil

Sorry guys, I confirm the problem. Give me a short time and I will fix it. Can't think how this happenned, but I'll fix it v. soon.

Bitrates are OK, just quality I seem to have screwed up!:mad:

john33

OK, fixed versions have been uploaded to Roberto, so should be there some time soon. The revised source will be there too for anyone who wants it.

Yes, the registry entry for the quality value needs to be increased, but it does that automatically the first time you change the quality value. All it was, was a simple case of forgetting to change the divisor in a calculation from 10 to 100, having gone to 4 significant digits for the quality level.

Sorry about that!

john33

Any chance you feel up to the task off adding support for replaygain tagging that Garf implemented in Vorbis into Oggdrop? Something like dropping a folder of wavs onto oggdrop, encoding them and then performing replaygain ananylsys and tagging on them? If not then perhaps I'll have to dig up my old Visual Basic skills (no laughing please) to draw something up. Any thought? Oh and thanks for the great work you've been putting into oggdrop already.

Thank you very much john33!!! Your dedication to this is very much appreciated by and me and the rest of users of Project Mayhem.

Cheers
AgentMil

Thanks guys, it's nice to be appreciated:D

I've not really looked at the replaygain stuff of Garf's yet, so I can't comment at the moment.

However, I have cooked up what will probably become the new oggdropXP. It's looking like the official version will be a 'quality only' version. My new version is basically a putting together of the current version and the old XP version. I t has what's in the current one, but with the addition of being able to enter a quality value directly in to the text box. When I'm satisfied there are NO bugs, I'll release it!! I'm too embarrased about the recent buggy versions to let you have it yet!!!

With luck, it will probably appear later today; I'll let you know.

john33

HEHE buggy versions, but at least yours aren't life and security threatening, like some company software (/V$). Still its great that you provide us users with a version that is according to me is perfect (except for the bugs).

Cheers and THANKS
AgentMil

The new version has just been uploaded to Roberto, so it should be available, in all colour options, soon at a friendly site near you!!(http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/ ).

Roberto was my official tester, so you can shoot him if you find a problem!!

If there are any further 'enhancements' I will let you know, but for the moment, subject to there being no 'bugs', that's about it.

Have fun!!

john33

Poor, pitiful me... [img]3339824a41[/img]

Files are there.

Regards;

Roberto.