Month: 24 Sivan 5783 (June 2023)

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox Just want to add to this thread that Mastodon, and any other software concerned with saving space so that it can be run on low-cost infrastructure, is more concerned with space than audio quality, and also that even though it's 2023 browsers as a whole don't support much more natively other than mp3 and wav. I know this makes audio nerds cry and I simpathize. Sort of.

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox Yeah that sort of thing happens when you try to auto transcode. What I'm trying to say is that perfect quality audio is most likely never happening on the web, which is where this stuff lives.

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox It's kind of like MathML. Which is excellent. Except no one supports it so if you want nicely formatted math you have to do stupid shit with js that almost never works.

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox Certain things about it are, definitely.

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox Also, we're about to do this all over again with heic, which is Apple's newish high-quality image format. Really pretty pictures, nothing supports it, so you have to convert to jpg or png for performance but if you do that you're sacrificing quality.

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox Yes they definitely are complaining. And just like with audio nerds, I really do simpathize. I promise I wasn't being snarky about that part at all. Unfortunately it's the trade-off you're stuck with if you want, say, people on slow connections to be able to view your stuff.

In reply to @weirdwriter.

@weirdwriter No actually it's because (a) on Twitter we needed to save space and (b) lots of us work across other disciplines that use numeronyms all the time and I promise we can fit accessibility on a coffee cup just fine and (c) plenty of us working in that space are disabled and have no problem with it.

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox Do you know of a ruby on rails library that will do this properly while not breaking other t hings? Because I imagine that's what's in play here and if there's something that can be switched out it might be worth filing an issue and patching.

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox Unfortunately I just don't know enough about audio to even think about tackling a task like this. I do remember that ogg and I believe opus were created to solve this problem though. They just didn't get enough adoption outside audio circles.

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox What would be the ideal bitrate for this particular problem? like, if bitrate==128 return; or similar? Maybe bitrate can/should be expressed as an integer which can be easily discovered by analyzing the file or if it's readily available without analysis so server resources aren't being eaten on this task? Just thinking out loud.

In reply to @BorrisInABox.

@BorrisInABox So just to add more fuckery to this, Lame specifically can't be used in FLOSS projects because not FLOSS and will absolutely create nightmare scenarios. I'm not sure what happens now that the patent on mp3 has expired and so far is looking like it will not be renewed.