3rd party codec pack(FOSS encoders)

[Ashen]

I was wanting to suggest that Nextup offer an installer or a few installers for more common FOSS codecs.

Have the installer install some default baseline settings(tweakable by user)

codecs I would suggest would be

Flac: lossless audio compression, WAV quality without the size and no 4gb file size limmit)
Ogg Vorbis: Best lossy Audio codec per bitrate that has wide device support
Speex: gaining device support, and any device that has rockbox can play this format, its based on vorbis but optimized for voice data.

You can use the aoTuV or Lancer optimized encoders for vorbis(i can link them if you need them)

for speex and flac i can also link their current encoder versions.

They have multi options for encoder methods, dll and exe for example

these codecs are FREE no licence fees to use or support them unlike MP3.

Also a good option would be to check into RealAudio (.ra) as an option, a HUGE number of Asian/Chinese players support RA and all rockbox'd players support RA, and per filesize its quality for voice is amazing, 85mb for 6hrs of audio book(human read) no quality loss!!!

[Jim Bretti]

Thanks for the detailed info. I had no idea the .ra format was popular in some countries.

We'll check these out and possibly add support in future builds ... if you don't mind go ahead and either post or mail me some of the links you mentioned.

[Ashen]

lancer vorbis
http://homepage3.nifty.com/blacksword/index.htm
its not the newist encoder but its still the fastist and for voice audio q-0 is plenty(for mono that is aprox32k, but even in stereo if both chanels are the same it will be 32k)

now there are other vorbis encoders that would also be worth considering (since the encoder isnt going to be slowing down the tts process)
http://www.geocities.jp/aoyoume/aotuv/
aoTuV is an abbreviation for Aoyumi's Tuned Vorbis; it is third-party development/tuning of the Vorbis encoder.
its the best vorbis encoder at any bitrate, Aoyumi is one of the few people activly working to improove vorbis even more(its already the best music codec per bitrate!!)

here is an accelerated up to date vorbis codec(latist aoTuV 5.7 with lancer enhancements)
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ind ... 74345&st=0
you will need to read the thread and download from links in the thead, they all work well for me(i have tested all the builds in that thread)


for speex encoder thats optimized
http://www.rarewares.org/others.php (scroll down a bit)

for info on speex
http://www.speex.org/

Flac
http://www.rarewares.org/lossless.php latist encoder builds

for full info on flac
http://flac.sourceforge.net/

for RA you may just have to google I can look a bit later for some more info on possible encoders(i use dbpoweramp to encode to ra)

I was suprised ofr(optima frog) and monkey's audio(.ape) are also more popular in some asian countries then flac or other formats, RA is quite popular due to size to quality ratio and for the fact that its quite easy to decode compared to most other formats(its faster to decode on my fuze then mp3 is and sounds better for voice at 1/2-1/3 the bitrate!!)

its dinner time, I will see about finding you more info soon

RA may or may not be free to support I thought real made older RA(cook) free to use, just charging for helix(mp3 encoder)