Binary Freedom: Vorbis Recombinant

[ Thanks to minus
for this link. ]

“The guys at Xiphophorus have been very, very busy. Releasing
beta4 of the Vorbis CODEC, moving to a BSD license and forming a
non-profit corporation to champion free multimedia development and
distribution efforts are just the beginning.”

“So, how does this new version differ from the last in terms of
sound quality?”

“Christopher Montgomery: Much improved; more stable high end,
much improved preecho, and the encoder is twice as fast. Pure tones
are also much cleaner. Essentially at this point, if you find a
sample that sounds a little dodgy in Vorbis, chances are it sounds
like total crap in mp3. Booty being virtual ass, in this case.”

“beta4 was originally supposed to be an avalanche of features,
it ended up being an avalanche of optimizations, quality tuning and
[embarrassing to admit] bugfixes over beta3. beta3 actually had
some subtle encoder bugs that didn’t really break anything, they
just resulted in what sounded like bad quality. We killed every
analysis bug we found.”

Complete
Story