[thelist] audio / mpeg 4 on a site

kasimir-k kasimir.k.lists at gmail.com
Fri Mar 30 15:05:40 CDT 2007


> On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 21:31 +0800, Birdie wrote:
>> Firstly. is this the best format to save them in ?

Shawn K. Quinn scribeva in 30/03/2007 19:07:
> I would save them as Ogg Vorbis. I'm not sure what exactly he means by
> an "MPEG 4" audio format; last time I checked, that was a video
> specification.

Maybe you should check again :-) Part 3 of MPEG-4 is for compressing
audio. [0][1][2]

Both MPEG-4 audio and Ogg Vorbis are "better" than MP3 when it comes to
audio quality, but MP3 is "better" if you must reach widest audience 
possible.

As the audio in this case is speech, I'd argue that MP3 is just as good 
quality as any other format - MP3's weaknesses typically affect mostly 
very low bass and sharp transitions, which are unlikely to appear in 
speech recordings.

So my vote goes for MP3 here, definitely.

For video MPEG-4 is IMO very good choice, Flash being another good one 
(see Google Video or Youtube).

>> they automatically opened in quicktime on both my mac and pc machines.
> 
> Running which operating systems?

Just to remind you Shawn: when people don't specify operating system of 
their computers, then they pretty much are using the most common OS for 
the given platform - for Mac this is OS X and PC Windows.

Yes, I know that Macs and PCs can run other operating systems too, but 
when people do run those other OSes on their Macs and PCs, they tend to 
mention that.

And before you reply "yes, but in order to help people asking questions, 
I must know what OS they are using, and I don't want to guess that they 
are using the most common OS if they don't mention otherwise" have a 
look what OSes Quicktime is available on[3] (it's Windows 2000/XP and OS X).

>> What happens if someone doesn't have quicktime, will they
>> still play but on a different player ? And is this the same
>> for audio. ( I don't have any audiofiles to play around with)
> 
> That depends entirely on how the browser is set up. If it opens in
> something weird like Quicktime, it's because your browser is set up that
> way.

This is quite correct - it depends how the user's browser is set up (and 
what players/codecs they have installed on their system). However, I 
wouldn't say that Quicktime opening MPEG-4 files is in any way "weird": 
On Mac, Quicktime is THE player, and on Windows, IIRC, WMP can not play 
MPEG-4 files out of the box, so nothing weird with QT opening there too.

.k

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG4
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_3
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding
[3] http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/version.html




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