Hey guys.

I was listening casually to my mpc collection when this particular song from the Smashing Pumpkins final album came up (Machina, the Machines of God). It's track 6, "Try, try, try." The artifact...well, two instances of one artifact, occur in the first 30 seconds, and involves the hi-hat and splash cymbals being played. The splash especially seems overly strident and distorted. Just not as clean as the wav. Using --xtreme, I informally AB'd the wav and the wav from mppdec16, and could fairly easily tell the difference between the two.

If someone has some webspace availible, I'll upload the clips. And if someone tells we where to find that ABX software, I'll test myself. I think I've been lurking here long enough to know that claiming artifacts with no backup is mucho no-no.

You can upload to:

ftp.ff123.net
userid:
use anything for a password

To perform ABX testing, see:

http://www.pcabx.com/

ff123

Hi hats? That sounds familiar. You can get ABX for Win32 here:
http://www.pcabx.com/training/license.htm

I'll get right on it.

I'm curious if you normalized the wav file before encoding, or anything else to it?

I am similar to this song by SP...
This album is actually full of hisses and other engineered stuff...
Are you sure it's only on mpc and not in wav?

also have you tried the very latest binaries?

mppdec16 is kinda old...

you should go here: http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/ and download the latest binaries.

oh and by the way that cd just for some reason drives me nuts... not sure why

i love the pumpkins and all but this cd is really hard for me to listen to... not sure if its the lyrics or maybe all te over production with all the little effects and stuff

At first when i got that album, only a couple of songs were cool to me, but the more i listened, the more i've heard. All songs are so carefully executed, everytime i listened, i've heard something new... This album has kinda grown to my heart.

While we're talking Smashing Pumpkins, has anyone else downloaded the three EP's and Machina II? They are all 320 kbps MP3's, and freely released to the public. If anyone wants the link, just let me know!

Ooops. I went to sleep. Sorry about the long delay.

I got the mppdec from Franks' site, and it says v.90o, so I assumed it was the latest one.

Nope, I don't normalize my music. I tend to leave it as is.

It's not my favorite album of their's, but it has some tracks on it that make it worth it.

When I was casually listening to the song, the hi-hats and silibances just sounded...wrong. It reminded me of RC2 Ogg a little bit. Because it wasn't washy sounding like MP3, just ...not right. So when I listened to the track on the CD, I found that the difference wasn't so much the sound of the splash and hi-hat, but rather the cleanness of them. The splash IS bright, and the MPC gets that right. But the mpc leaves it less defined.

I'll hold off uploading until I know that mppdec16 (which I assumed meant 16bit precision) is an appropriate decompressor. Wouldn't want to upload something useless.

Dan, just upload the original wav sample.

Just get a ten or fifteen second sample from the original wav and LPAC it. You might want to check with ff123 before you try to upload it. I know he doesn't like to leave anonymous access open to his ftp server.

K. I'll upload in a minute or two. Let me cut the wav a little more.

I could log in, but there was no write access. Sorry about that, my fault.

Also, what directory should I put it in? pub?

Yeah, I had problems like that the first time I tried to send ff123 a sample. I ended up blowing it off and I still haven't heard the end of it. You might try to private message him to see if his server is still open for anonymous access. I used the CuteFTP client.

There should be no "pub" directory if you logged in properly. There should be an "incoming" directory, and you can put your file there.

Make sure you use the user id:

which includes the "@ff123.net" portion

It's not like normal anonymous ftp servers in that respect.

ff123

Weeee! It worked.
Sample is there.
SmashingSample.pac, that is.

Ok, I'll make the sample available in 4 or 5 hours (in the evening, my time).

ff123

BTW, I don't like to leave anonymous FTP open because I got burned once when I had a shell account with what used to be Netcom. I left my account open one month to find that a prankster had left a surprise for me there in the form of a hydra-like monster which reproduced as fast as I could delete branches of it. I think I was allocated an average of 5 MB of space per month, but this thing ate up almost 200 MB. Netcom wanted to charge me something like $1500.00 for that month! I had to hire a lawyer to make a phone call to them for me (because they refused to listen to reason when I called them), which cost me about $250. After that, they made a one-time allowance for me, since I was a long-time account holder. But I cancelled my account there shortly thereafter. I still get Christmas cards from the lawyer after 5 years or so.

No doubt! Wouldn't be prudent. BTW, it is VERY considerate of you to provide this service!

BTW Dan, did you get a chance to abx it yet?

[Mouth hangs open] **** dude, no wonder you dislike doing that. I certainly wouldn't blame you! Yes, thanks very much for providing the service.


I'm going to ABX it after dinner. Mmm chicken strips.

Uh...so I tried the ABX program, and did some listening, and on trial 9, it greyed out the listening buttons, and only gave me the option of choosing one over the other...so uh...does that mean that I was doing very poorly, or did the program mess up?

If I started a new trial series, it started with the buttons greyed out. I could only resume normal operation if I exited and re-started.

No - that sounds like a bug to me. It should let you be as wrong as you want to be!

Or maybe its just that Billy went psycho and thought he was talking to god

Alrighty. I'll give it a listen tomorrow, as I have to finish a Scenarist template tonight, and then go to sleep.

I should post on it sometime around 10-11am CST tomorrow.

Sample is up as SmashingSample.pac at:

http://ff123.net/samples.html

ff123

I have also uploaded another sample called SmashingSample89.pac, which is the same file, except attenuated 1 dB using SSRC.

I noticed that the original file will clip upon decode.

ff123

Well, I tested the first version. I thought I heard several things, like not so well defined hihat hits, noisyness in the continuos cymbal backround, noise spreading in the 1.5sec loud "tambourine" sounding hit.

But I couldn't get high ABX score yet. Will try later again.

In my opinion it's at least nothing very audible or serious. Again you can find original to sound "distorted" as well..

Oof, bad sleeping schedule.

I ABX'd (the program screwed up on me twice more...XP bug?) and couldn't reliably ABX it either. 8/20. I'll try again on more sleep, and with headphones. Not to mention I did more like 50 trials' worth counting the crashes. I was probably fatigued by then. *I* know I had trouble concentrating.

I saw that the sample clipped when it decompressed, but I didn't know whether that would make an audible difference or not. I have other mpc's that sound fine but still report clipping, so I tend to ignore the warning.

Just to let you know, another Smashing Pumpkins song does this, and quite effectively. It's "Mayonaise" from their Siamese Dream album, if I'm not mistaken. It starts off very quiet, but then crashes into the main portion of the song with a very loud cymbal crash/guitar chord/drum beat, etc. It just doesn't work, and I'm using the -xtreme preset. If you'd like me to upload the sample, I don't have it with me at the moment, but can get the CD from a friend and post it tonight.

Sure, post a sample.

I've got that album as well, so if you can't get it, I can upload it to that FTP or however its to be done. It's not in terribly good shape (the album), so if your copy is clean, it would definitely be a better idea.

Sure thing, I'll post to the ftp as soon as I get a chance. Other than these two Pumpkins songs, however, I must admit that I've been unusually happy with the quality of MPC. It really seems to be able to handle a lot of encoding trouble areas pretty well. Have yet to try it out on a dolby pro-logic system, however

I have a number of files that fit this criteria. Is this the method you reccommend, rather than setting replaygain to a manual value that prevents the clipping..?

So I may infer that attenuating the sample solved the problem..?

Thanks.

If there is no internal clipping upon encoding, using replaygain will work just as well.

--
GCP

So SSRC should only be used to attenuate the .wav when internal clipping occurs?

Thanks for the clarifiacation.