Blind listening tests for audio compression

[jast]

Hi guys,

I'm sure all of us have seen their share of listening tests for various lossy audio compressors. I'd like to collect some results drawn from a more specific audience, namely us music folks... particularly since I want to know whether my ears are completely horrible if I can't hear any difference.

I have set up a small page that has a snippet from a random song compressed to FLAC three times: once directly, once after pulling it through an MP3 encoder, once after pulling it through an Ogg Vorbis encoder.

So, if you ever wanted to know whether you can actually hear the difference between lossless and lossy, or if you want to help collect data, head on over to: http://jk.gs/abctest/ (or http://jk.gs/abctest/abtest.php for comparing only two files).

Feel free to participate as many times as you like (the order of the files is randomized each time), but please only submit serious guesses. Also feel free to report your results here.

So far I have not managed to correctly guess all files, and certainly not several times in a row.

[Billy's Little Trip]

I tried. I can't open the files after downloading. I gave it 5 minutes, got bothered and moved.

[jast]

Not every player can play FLAC files. VLC can, for example. So can mplayer, foobar2000 and probably many others.

[JonPorobil]

Not every player can play FLAC files. VLC can, for example. So can mplayer, foobar2000 and probably many others.

Well, most players on the market today can play FLAC, provided they've got the right codecs. Many of them just don't come with the right codec (the one exception I've come across, quelle suprise, is iTunes - you need to add two plug-ins and change the FLAC extension to .mov to get iTunes to play it). A lot of people like VLC because it comes with all these fancy codecs and appears to be able to play files that other media players can't, but really it just works better out of the box (and it's kind of ugly, in my opinion).

BLT, what's your media player of choice?

[Billy's Little Trip]

BLT, what's your media player of choice?

I guess if I had to say one that I use most, it's windows media player. And yes, I sound like a noob for spelling it out, lol.

[JonPorobil]

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/ogg.htm

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13843/ho ... er-player/