Hi: At 1 GMT Saturday, that's 8Pm Eastern on Friday night, 5Pm Pacific on Friday and 11Am Saturday morning here in Australia, Amanda Tink and I will be doing a special broadcast using the totally cool Ogg Vorbis codec. Ogg Vorbis is a patent-free, royalty-free, lossy audio compression codec, which provides a totally free and superior alternative to MP3, Windows Media, Realaudio, etc. for more information on Ogg Vorbis, you can visit www.vorbis.com. So why is this of any interest? Well, in my not so humble opinion, 64kbps vorbis sounds better than 96kbps MP3 and, arguably, better than 128kbps MP3. It sounds great, and I'd like everyone to have a chance to hear it. So we'll be doing a broadcast for a couple of hours to show it off, and you're invited to listen and write in. To listen, you'll need a player that can play ogg vorbis. Under windows, Winamp is the recommended player. If you have winamp 2.80 or 2.81, you should already have the vorbis plugin installed. If you have an older version and don't want to upgrade, drop me a private E-mail and I can send you the plugin (it's only 100K). If you're using linux, then ogg123 from vorbis-tools will work for you, and there's also freeamp/zinf. Here is the address of the broadcast. For winamp users, place this address in the open location dialog (control L). http://linux-speakup.org:9000/test64.ogg If you don't have broadband or you want to hear what it sounds like at modem rates, there will also be two other streams. One will be for 56K modem listeners and is 22.05khz stereo (aprox 32kbps). http://linux-speakup.org:9000/test32.ogg The other is a mono stream for slower modems that cannot receive the stereo stream. http://linux-speakup.org:9000/test24.ogg Note that these two lower streams may have to be shut down if providing them takes up too many resources on the server machine (that's part of what's being tested). So, join Amanda and myself for a couple of hours of great music from the last 20 or so years, including Australian music, and us rambling on about whatever and whoever suits our fancy. During the show you can write to us at amanda at acbradio.org. Enquiries of a technical nature please write to me privately at gshang at uq.net.au. Please forward to anyone or any mailing lists you think would be interested. We look forward to having you join us at 8Pm Eastern, 5Pm Pacific, that's 01 hours GMT Saturday! Note: for those interested in the software being used. I'll be running ices 2.0beta from CVS at my end. The server is icecast2 (CVS as of a few months ago). The transcode for the lower quality vorbis streams will be done using streamtranscoder (http://transcoder.sourceforge.net) version 0.2. Both the source and server machines run Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (Woody). Geoff. -- Geoff Shang <gshang at uq.net.au> ICQ number 43634701 Make sure your E-mail can be read by everyone! http://www.betips.net/etc/evilmail.html Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
