Re: G2.10 Module Proposal: Sound Juicer

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Sun, 26 Dec 2004 11:08:22 +0900, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> Adding something to a discoverable place like yelp would be A Good
> Thing,

Hm, since when are the help files discoverable? I think that's the last
place anybody would look. Typically people seem to only read the help
files when something has gone wrong, or they can't figure out how to do
something. Nobody reads it as a general introduction.

I say this as the person who wrote the Sound Juicer help by the way. I
didn't put an explicit warning in:

"Here you can choose which file format you want to save your files to. The
default is Ogg Vorbis, which is recommended due to its high in quality,
low in size nature, as well as being an open format available to all. Ogg
Vorbis can be played by virtually all Linux installations out of the box,
and WinAmp for Windows also supports it. Other formats are available
however. The MP3 codec is widely known and used, and has good hardware
support. If you have a portable MP3 player that doesn't accept Vorbis
files, you may wish to use this so you can upload it to the device."

Back when I wrote that WinAmp was pretty much the most popular music
player on Windows. These days I know more people using WMP which does not
support Ogg out of the box, and a few people use iTunes which obviously
also doesn't support it.

>        but a warning dialogue or something else than injects itself
> would be exposing too much technical detail and cause the user to
> believe exporting to OGG is a bug. We'd then have to explain the whole
> patent and quality issues in the same breath.

>From the users perspective of "how do I most easily play my music on all
my devices" using Ogg is a bug, sorry.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it though. But it's something we should be
aware of. The non-free software world doesn't seem to care much about
Ogg/Vorbis.

It's worth remembering though that similar concerns didn't stop Microsoft
making WMA the default ripping format for WMP, and Apple I think rips to
AAC by default?

> I think this is a reason enough for providing an audio
> profile for mp3,
> and to expose a semi-decent UI for changing to mp3 output, but honestly
> did you receive a warning from your DVD player that it wouldn't play
> VCDs? No you had to read the manual and do some basic research before
> you put your money down.

The difference being that VCDs are not a de-facto standard, whereas MP3 is.

thanks -mike