Suggestion: Add MP3Pro to streaming audio support

I guess this suggestion is directed more at the developers:

Is it financially feasible for LL to license the MP3Pro technology from Thompson (http://www.mp3prozone.com) for use in the SL clients? There are many streams out there (including mine) which use it.

If so, how about getting some of that tasty MP3Pro support? Maybe even make it only available to paying customers (or even have a one-time fee to add the feature to the SL client), to offset the cost of the licensing? It's something I would pay for (if it was USD$10 or less ^_^)

The end result would be a better audio experience for many users, and lower overall bandwidth usage

Just a suggestion,

Weasel

Weasel Radio Network
- Streaming retro requests to a few SL venues -
http://www.weasel.net

Don't see any real gain from using MP3Pro vs. MP3, Vorbis and AAC. Vorbis and AAC in particular are eating everything else's lunch at under 96Kbps. Supporting AAC streams would make more sense than a dead-ended tech like MP3Pro, though honestly a 64Kbps (-Q0) AoTuV b4.51 Vorbis stream, which SL can already play back, is probably as 'good' as it gets between compromise of bitrate and listening quality. Doing listening tests between iTunes 5's AAC encoder, Nero's AAC encoder, AoTuV b4.51 Vorbis, and Thompson's 1.1.0 mp3pro encoder at 64Kbps pretty much confirms how far in the dust mp3pro has been left behind. Even an untrained ear can distinguish the difference without resorting to double-blind testing methods. I can provide 20 second samples for this if need be.

All you'd need for Vorbis is an IceCast server, a decent streaming client using the AoTuV b4.51 libraries (i.e. Oddsock DSP for WinAMP or Foobar2000 or others like it) and you're set. Streaming AAC is a bit uglier now, since the only 'free' encoder is FAAC which is painfully out of date, leaving you with commercial encoders like Orban's Opticodec.

SAM Broadcaster, though seemingly popular yet moving nowhere in development, doesn't support using AAC, but it does support Vorbis and recently uses the AoTuV branch. Sadly, they've yet to license an AAC encoder and cling to an older codec like mp3 and mp3pro.

I use oddsock for winamp and icecast. Ogg Vorbis is the stuff .

I wouldn't like to pay a cent more because of MP3Pro!
There are good (or even better) free formats. My favourite is Ogg Vorbis. It's free. I think it should be rather requested, pushed that MP3Pro-only stations change to Ogg Vorbis. I don't think bandwidth matters that much -- SL already requires a lot of bandwidth, and a radio of 64kbit, 96 kbit or 128kbit fits the pipe. I think a rational choice might be 64-96kbit.

For the listeners, the downstream bandwidth to tune in is pretty much nothing. However, the server streaming to the clients, the upstream traffic becomes important. Let's say you're hosting this on your own and you have a 64KB/sec upstream with your DSL/etc.. A 64kbps upstream is 8KB/sec roughly and that means you have a max of eight listeners total before smacking buffering issues. In an ideal, perfect world where maxing out your upstream wouldn't impact you and variable bitrates wouldn't sometimes bleed over -- so realistically that'd be more like seven listeners max.

This is where paying others to use their servers with greater bandwidth comes into play, but even then it's a balance between the ammount of quality possible and the maximum number of listeners you can support at that quality.

That being said, really, I think if LL was to add any more streaming audio support specifically, I'd be interested in seeing AAC-HE support, though I'd likely be using Vorbis, anyway.

I've streamed MP3, MP3Pro, OGGVorbis, and WMA to SL before I joined Club69 Radio and at Club 69 Radio we use mp3PRO to encode the audio streams. Shoutcast supports both mp3 and mp3pro while Icecast uses OggVorbis, both are used on a regular basis in SL. There's no need to add support we already have.

What I'd like to see though is the addition of OggVorbis to the list of uploadable audio files. Why? Because Ogg's are much smaller than waves and very high quality (64kbits Ogg = 128kbits MP3 wich is the same quality of mp3Pro but without the licensing fees and has actual source code to work with for a base instead of having to reverse engineer code from a basic set of standards, its also gotten very popular amongst game makers for this reason). The smaller files would make downloading them much faster while maintaining high quality and honestly I think it'd really ease up some stress on the asset server.

Er... the wav files you can upload to SL are converted to ogg vorbis before upload by the SL client (you can even select the bitrate). You didn't really think LL would store the uncompressed wavs in the asshat server, did you?

Yes. Luckily I'm one of the ppl. who co-own a Linux server, so that's not a problem. Being not in the US, but europe, there are no traffic/bandwidth fees or limits for the data going out from the server. In fact, I think the ISP can even thank anyone who's sending data 'up' (out of the country), because that gets them a bit better peering rates.

You still have a maximum upstream rate regardless of where you are hosted, what OS you're running and how much you pay for traffic -- eventually that maximium rate WILL be tapped out with enough concurrent connections. So, no, it's not 'not a problem' and if you are smart you will plan for it if you're running a more popular stream attracting several hundred listeners -- given that just 64 listeners, at say 128Kbps, is pushing a meg a second up the pipe. Can you move five megs a sec, ten megs? More? Are you willing to use all your bandwidth just for the stream?

Maybe in your case you're only going to have to deal with ten to twenty people at the most, so yeah then it'd be 'not a problem', perhaps, but for others it may be. S'why the popular streams out there tend to have multiple mirrors to choose from, it's not just for location purposes.

S'also why Vorbis and AAC developers are trying very hard around 64Kbps and under to get good sound quality, because it's a serious boost to streaming.