[mythtv] MythMusic and Windows Media Audio (WMA)

[Isaac Richards]

On Wednesday 18 December 2002 11:04 pm, Kevin Bowen wrote:
> >I don't like to listen to overcompressed music =)
>
> Nor do I, which is why I'm interested in adding support for MPC (highest
> quality lossy codec) and APE (lossless like FLAC, but better compression
> ratio and better meta data)... my XMMS idea would kill all those birds
> with one stone, and provide several other side benefits... benefits
> which would only be appreciated by audiogeeks like me, so I understand
> if you're not enthusiastic about making a structural change like this
> for something that most people would never care about, and would make
> setup more complex (require people to have XMMS installed/configured).
> Like I said though, it seems like it would be easy enough to do that
> even I should be able to figure it out after spending some time poking
> around the code, so I'll probably look into it, and if nobody else likes
> it, I'll just keep it to myself (yay opensource!)

APE's compression ratio is just very slightly better than FLAC, it doesn't 
really matter once you've accepted an ~2:1 compression ratio.  FLAC uses 
ogg's metadata system, which is completely flexible, so I doubt there's any 
advantage there.  And finally, APE's nowhere close to open source, so the 
whole comparison's pretty much moot.

And if you're using xmms as an equalizer, then you're not an audiogeek in the 
first place =)  xmms doesn't have a general purpose equalizer, they just take 
the easy (and generally fairly bad sounding) way out and fiddle with stuff in 
the MP3 decoder, so it doesn't work in any other audio format.

Anyway, making mythmusic a frontend to xmms is just halfassed, IMHO.  The 
decoder architecture in mythmusic is extremely simple, and adding support for 
whatever other formats would be easy.  It already plays back everything 
gaplessly, and it really wouldn't be difficult to add crossfading, but I tend 
to really dislike crossfading so I haven't bothered.

Isaac