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ROMBUSTERS Newbie

ROMBUSTERS

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Now that we've seen what Sony has to offer for HiMD in the 1st and 2nd gen units what would you like to see in terms of HARDWARE (i.e. not discs) for 3rd gen MD units?

One thing i'd like to see (just to kick it off with something rather unspectacular tongue.gif) is standard backlighting on all units

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Andy Newbie

Andy

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On the hardware level, I'd like the player to be able to play back audio files which have been copied across without any involvement by Sonic Stage. It is definitely a hardware change, and it means that there is less software required (always a good thing, and I'm a software developer)

Other cool things which aren't going to happen, but are cool anyway, and if someone reads this and is building an MD player (or some other type of player) then hopefully they will steal some of the ideas smile.gif:

- Built in non-volatile memory the same size as a disc - when playing back it will cache the contents of the disc to this, so it will never read the same spot on a disc twice (until it is ejected) -> ultra fast startup times, could allow you to continue recording while switching discs and lots of other cool things which I can't even think of.

- Double headphone jacks - that is one thing I love about my MZ-R70. What would make it cooler would be independant volume controls.

- Battery packs (I haven't heard these mentioned for any 2nd gen units)

- Built in microphone - sure it will be crappy, but it will be better than using headphones - note that this is probably not done because of the engine noise, however the non-volatile memory would solve this (no need to have engine running while recording)

- Touch screen

- Various useful apps like calculator, calendar (with summaries viewable over the remote control even if it is only 1 line), notepad (combined with touch screen, just make it so you can write stuff and it will save it). Some of these things are pretty useful, and wouldn't want to depend on the disc that is in there, which means that there should probably be more non-volatile memory smile.gif

- SIM card slot + built in speaker

- Toothpick and tweezers smile.gif

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ROMBUSTERS Newbie

ROMBUSTERS

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Flac and Shn are compressed lossless codecs. They're not as small as .mp3, but they are smaller than .wav.

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

http://research.umbc.edu/~hamilton/shnfaq.html

brief introduction for all people confused about lossless compression:

PCM data stream reads at 1411Kbps

it is read in binary (1s and 0s) and then decoded into useable audio information

Therefore the PCM data stream looks something like this: 001000111000101000100....

Instead of throwing out information (a la lossy compression like MP3 or Atrac), lossless just compresses the amount of information present in the data stream.

It could do this in many different ways (these vary by codec or encoder) but some possible ways are as follows:

Original: 001000111000101000100

Compressed: 0x2,1,0x3,1x3,0x3,1,0,1,0x3,1,0x2

or

Compressed: 010011001010010

in any event the end result is less information per second and thus a lower bit rate (usually between 300-900kbps) The great thing about lossless is when the music is played the decoder just puts the compressed information all back together giving you the same thing you started with.

Now the bad: lossless (although using a less than PCM bit rate) uses about the same if not more CPU power to do the mathematical calculations needed to put everything back together (and decoding is less power consuming than encoding). Therefore if we bearly get 7-10hours of PCM playback now, lossless playback could be even worse. Also recording on the unit in lossless (via line in or w/e) would probably require too great of a processor and battery life that it probably just wouldnt happen.

Also in a worst case senario event (random noise) lossless could take yup the same amount of room as PCM (and maybe more)

Example Original Stream: 010101010101010101010101010101

This would make it impossible for the unit to give an accurate amount of recording time left.

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Andy Newbie

Andy

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Also in a worst case senario event (random noise) lossless could take yup the same amount of room as PCM (and maybe more)

Worst case, the lossless compression will be larger, though it might only be bigger by 1-bit, so it is such a small margin that it doesn't really matter. Try zipping up a zip file, and unless the zip had lots of small files in it (the file names aren't compressed) then it will end up slightly larger - but not hugely larger, so it is still a good thing. When it comes to music, the compression is far better than worst case.

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cfairfowl Newbie

cfairfowl

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A simple method of getting it to record for you whilst you are busy doing other things i.e. a timer switch of some kind. This could be done simply (I think) when it receives a signal optical or analogue it starts recording until the signal is cut.

Also an optical output would be good so you can feed it through a good quality DAC unit.

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Breepee2 Newbie

Breepee2

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Worst case, the lossless compression will be larger

Nonsense. There is no way a lossless format could be bigger than it's raw equivalent. Your comparison with zip is faulty. They're just totally uncomparable formats. Zip is a text compression algoritm (it's stupid to use it for data, go with RAR or 7-zip if you want to save bits) and FLAC (or take any other compressed lossless format) is optimized for music. Comparing compressed lossless with zip is like trying to compress your data into an mp3, it just won't work smile.gif

Of course, some pieces of sound can be compressed better than others, but since I've got about 500CD's here on my drive, in FLAC, and none of them are bigger than 85% of a wav file, and average at about 55%, I've pretty good evicende against those rediculous claims.

Using PCM in favor of a compressed lossless format is like throwing 45% of your discs away, plain stupid. It's not the 80ies anymore, the technology is here (it's opensource even!), and there is just no good reason not to support it. It's 2005, I want to use 2005 technology! PCM was nice in the 80ies, lossy compression was fun in the 90ies, now it's the time of compressed lossless!

And about power usage: FLAC for example uses less computing power than wav, so this should save power. Add up that the discs would have to spin 45% less, it's a great improvement over PCM.

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ROMBUSTERS Newbie

ROMBUSTERS

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Nonsense. There is no way a lossless format could be bigger than it's raw equivalent. Your comparison with zip is faulty. They're just totally uncomparable formats. Zip is a text compression algoritm (it's stupid to use it for data, go with RAR or 7-zip if you want to save bits) and FLAC (or take any other compressed lossless format) is optimized for music. Comparing compressed lossless with zip is like trying to compress your data into an mp3, it just won't work smile.gif

Of course, some pieces of sound can be compressed better than others, but since I've got about 500CD's here on my drive, in FLAC, and none of them are bigger than 85% of a wav file, and average at about 55%, I've pretty good evicende against those rediculous claims.

Using PCM in favor of a compressed lossless format is like throwing 45% of your discs away, plain stupid. It's not the 80ies anymore, the technology is here (it's opensource even!), and there is just no good reason not to support it. It's 2005, I want to use 2005 technology! PCM was nice in the 80ies, lossy compression was fun in the 90ies, now it's the time of compressed lossless!

And about power usage: FLAC for example uses less computing power than wav, so this should save power. Add up that the discs would have to spin 45% less, it's a great improvement over PCM.

going back to my comment it is theoretically possible for a lossless compression to have the same end result size (and maybe even larger) than its PCM brothern.

in a PCM stream the audio is read in binary 1s and 0s

the same can be said for any file type including lossless like FLAC

now the difference between lossless and PCM is that the lossless codec needs to have the following: a header and possibly ending tag, as well as information regarding how to restore the audio stream.

So for example the PCM stream could be: 10101010101010101010

The lossless stream would be [tag]10101010101010101010[tag]

or worst case [tag]1x1,0x1,1x1,0x1,1x1,0x1,1x1,0x1,1x1,0x1,1x1,0x1,1x1,0x1,1x1,0x1,1x1,0x1,1x1,0x1[tag]

the chances of this EVER happening however are so small that you would never come across it (even intentionally)

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dex Otaku Newbie

dex Otaku

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* Built in non-volatile memory the same size as a disc - when playing back it will cache the contents of the disc to this, so it will never read the same spot on a disc twice (until it is ejected) -> ultra fast startup times, could allow you to continue recording while switching discs and lots of other cool things which I can't even think of.

Memory, unless it's flash, requires power and processing in order to maintain its contents [i.e. refresh]. What you're suggesting is either putting 1GB of RAM in there, which would suck battery power at an incredibly alarming rate, or putting 1GB of flash in there, which would call to question - since you now have a flash player, why are you using discs at all?

There's also the slight issue of it taking about 30 minutes to copy the entire [1GB] disc to the memory.

Nonsense. There is no way a lossless format could be bigger than it's raw equivalent. Your comparison with zip is faulty.

ROMBUSTERS is correct, actually. With a truly random noise signal, the compression would be 1:1 or worse, due to overhead thanks to subcode et al.

The likelihood of this ever actually occuring is small enough to consider zero, however. How often do you find sound sources that are actual white noise [i.e. even distribution over the entire recording bandwidth]?

Of course, some pieces of sound can be compressed better than others, but since I've got about 500CD's here on my drive, in FLAC, and none of them are bigger than 85% of a wav file, and average at about 55%, I've pretty good evicende against those rediculous claims.

It's not a ridiculous claim, but it -is- the difference between theory and practise.

And about power usage: FLAC for example uses less computing power than wav, so this should save power. Add up that the discs would have to spin 45% less, it's a great improvement over PCM.

In terms of computation, PCM requires no processing at all for raw stream playback, and FLAC requires probably about as much as decoding an MP3 does.

Lossless-packed formats require processing; PCM doesn't, unless you're oversampling, EQ'ing, or the like.

WAV [a container format], incidentally, is usually used to store audio in PCM [a data format that goes in the container]. The CPU overhead you'd see with it is likely either from I/O or directsound mutilatiing the signal, not the audio being decoded - since it doesn't need to be decoded.

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samplehunter Newbie

samplehunter

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My dream of a hiMD would be:

-recording in all modes at the unit (not only A3+/PCM on HiMD)

-customizable bitrate (not only 256 OR 64kbit)

-using a portion of anti-shock memory alternatively as storage for custom expansions (other codecs, like ogg, wma, real or effect plugins like reverb, delay, loudness maximizer)

would be funny to route these effects from line in to line out.

-Oh, a true line out with SPDIF out was nice, too.

-UNLIMITED TRANSFERS from self recorded material to the pc!

-instead of crappy software with high restrictions (DRM) it would be nice to have a simple ATRAC ACM or DirectX Codec at the PC/Mac/Whatever to encode and decode atrac files on the pc and transfer them as simple files from and to the unit.

-Backlit display on the portables would be nice. (Already done on some 2nd gen models)

-And finally: We want home decks!

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Artstar Newbie

Artstar

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My ultimate list of ingredients:

Portable:

Must have record button on remote with access to manual level control from it too (keep the backlight on it!!).

Higher capacity 3GB to allow for long PCM recordings such as concerts.

No bullsh_t DRM restrictions - I want unlimited transfers of my own analogue recordings thanks (I know it's software, but that'll be the reason to upgrade my hardware from the NH1 I have now)

A cradle that will function as a complete docking station so I'm not messing with cables every time I want to connect to my PC or other moments when I just want to charge it up.

A STANDARD DC SOCKET for charging on the go!!

Car:

All I need there is a HiMD version of my MDX-C8900 (and therefore still support my XM-210EQ DSP)

Component/deck:

JUST FRIGGIN' MAKE ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!! A nice solid one just like my MDS-JA30ES will make me a very happy boy.

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Andy Newbie

Andy

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Nonsense. There is no way a lossless format could be bigger than it's raw equivalent. Your comparison with zip is faulty.

Do you want a formal proof? I will happily supply one if so. Otherwise:

You have a PCM wave which might be 1000 bits long. You compress it, by your logic, it must now be a less than 1000 bits. This new compressed data can be interpretted as another PCM wave (after all, PCM is just a list of numbers), so you can compress it again and it will get smaller. Repeat lots more times and you will get down to a single number a 0 or a 1. Now, do you think you will have a good chance of decompressing a 0 or a 1 and getting back your 4 minute song?

What if instead of getting smaller the signal stays the same size? If this is worrying you, then look up the pigeonhole principle and have a read, it is a fairly simple idea but also quite cool smile.gif

This is a fairly theoretical result, and you will rarely encounter something which gets larger after 'compression' (recording static from the radio, or possibly something with lots of cymbals might do it) so you don't really need to worry about it. But to go through uni doing computer science and all its related maths courses to be told that you can do the impossible is a bit rich smile.gif

Oh - and comparing with zip is quite valid. You can compress audio with a zip just as you can compress text using FLAC. Zip is a general purpose encoder so that is trivial. To compress text with an audio codec (must be lossless) you just create a wav file with a header which says how long the text is (in bytes) and make up a sample rate, give the bit depth a value of 8 and then put the text after it. Although it probably won't compete with zip, it will still compress the text (and in a way that you can decompress it later, which is kind of important smile.gif)

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Breepee2 Newbie

Breepee2

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Do you want a formal proof? I will happily supply one if so. Otherwise:

You have a PCM wave which might be 1000 bits long. You compress it, by your logic, it must now be a less than 1000 bits. This new compressed data can be interpretted as another PCM wave (after all, PCM is just a list of numbers), so you can compress it again and it will get smaller. Repeat lots more times and you will get down to a single number a 0 or a 1. Now, do you think you will have a good chance of decompressing a 0 or a 1 and getting back your 4 minute song?

What if instead of getting smaller the signal stays the same size? If this is worrying you, then look up the pigeonhole principle and have a read, it is a fairly simple idea but also quite cool smile.gif

This is a fairly theoretical result, and you will rarely encounter something which gets larger after 'compression' (recording static from the radio, or possibly something with lots of cymbals might do it) so you don't really need to worry about it. But to go through uni doing computer science and all its related maths courses to be told that you can do the impossible is a bit rich smile.gif

Oh - and comparing with zip is quite valid. You can compress audio with a zip just as you can compress text using FLAC. Zip is a general purpose encoder so that is trivial. To compress text with an audio codec (must be lossless) you just create a wav file with a header which says how long the text is (in bytes) and make up a sample rate, give the bit depth a value of 8 and then put the text after it. Although it probably won't compete with zip, it will still compress the text (and in a way that you can decompress it later, which is kind of important smile.gif)

ZIP is NOT a general purpose format (although Niko Mak is trying to convince you otherwise). It was originally created for text and optimized for text and it still is. That's why 7zip and RAR do the job so much better in general purpose tests (because they are optimized in a different way). FLAC, and other compressed lossless formats like Apple Lossless, Monkey's Audio or WMA Lossless, are optimized for raw audio. Bitstreams of text have certain caracteristics, as does raw audio. Altough they're both ordinairy bitstreams, they show patterns against which you can optimize a compression scheme.

That aside, what you say is indeed theoretical. Although it's indeed fun to think about it, the technology is available, it's been done tens of times and it's smart. Good encoders use multiple passes to filter out bad segments that don't compress but inflate for example. That, even theoreticly, almost never happens anymore, so it's not an issue. If you wanna talk about it's theory, fine, but not in this thread. The technology is done (FLAC being open source even) and reaches an avarage compression rate of 55%. That's what counts.

Edited by Breepee2
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ROMBUSTERS Newbie

ROMBUSTERS

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ZIP is NOT a general purpose format (although Niko Mak is trying to convince you otherwise). It was originally created for text and optimized for text and it still is. That's why 7zip and RAR do the job so much better in general purpose tests (because they are optimized in a different way). FLAC, and other compressed lossless formats like Apple Lossless, Monkey's Audio or WMA Lossless, are optimized for raw audio. Bitstreams of text have certain caracteristics, as does raw audio. Altough they're both ordinairy bitstreams, they show patterns against which you can optimize a compression scheme.

That aside, what you say is indeed theoretical. Although it's indeed fun to think about it, the technology is available, it's been done tens of times and it's smart. Good encoders use multiple passes to filter out bad segments that don't compress but inflate for example. That, even theoreticly, almost never happens anymore, so it's not an issue. If you wanna talk about it's theory, fine, but not in this thread. The technology is done (FLAC being open source even) and reaches an avarage compression rate of 55%. That's what counts.

ha welcome to our side, this 'argument' was never about average compression, it was always about theory and now that we all awknowledge this, we can continue with the 3rd Gen thread tongue.gif

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Breepee2 Newbie

Breepee2

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ha welcome to our side, this 'argument' was never about average compression, it was always about theory and now that we all awknowledge this, we can continue with the 3rd Gen thread tongue.gif

Someone doubted if the theory of compressed lossless could ever get practical. I just pointed out it can and has been for a long time.

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ROMBUSTERS Newbie

ROMBUSTERS

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Someone doubted if the theory of compressed lossless could ever get practical. I just pointed out it can and has been for a long time.

then allow me to settle this

the fact is it is possible for lossless to be larger than the source PCM. however it is also possible that the molecules moving randomly in your hand when placed against a wall will line up (again randomly) with the walls molecules and allow you to pass right through the wall. Now in practical terms neither will happen

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Breepee2 Newbie

Breepee2

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then allow me to settle this

the fact is it is possible for lossless to be larger than the source PCM. however it is also possible that the molecules moving randomly in your hand when placed against a wall will line up (again randomly) with the walls molecules and allow you to pass right through the wall. Now in practical terms neither will happen

Anything 's possible, but its useless to stress things that are not going to happen. The chance of a black hole eating up the Earth within 10 seconds is also not zero, but you don't stress it every time you talk about the Earth.

Compressed Lossless = a Good Thing

Edited by Breepee2
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kalo Newbie

kalo

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I would like the 3rd gen to have:

video record and playback and all codecs supported,

a number and letter keypad,

Bluetooth,

Colour Screen,

Email / Web,

GPRS, IRDA,

Infrared,

Java enabled,

MMS enabled,

all MP3 bit-rates compatible,

Radio,

Vibration,

5-line display remote,

at least 50 hours battery life,

faster transfer rates (USB 3.0),

larger screen on unit,

the option of drag and drop (without software),

customizable bitrate when track is IN the unit,

the option to buy 5, 10, 20, or 40 gigabyte discs,

touch screen,

SIM card slot,

built in speakers,

memory card slot,

the atrac codec to become mainstream like mp3, wav, etc.

the option to put tracks back onto ANY computer even when recorded from a CD

5 mega-pixel camera

DVD player

See, I don't ask for much wink.gif

Edited by kalo
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