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Poster: xtifr Date: Jul 28, 2004 6:30am
Forum: etree Subject: there's more than two (or three) platforms out there!

Is Monkey's whatever really cross-platform? Does it run on Linux/PPC? On Solaris/Sparc? On HPUX/hppa? I have friends who run each of those three as their primary platform.

The thing about shorten and flac is that they're both available as source (even if SHN isn't technically "open source"), so they're fully portable to just about anything. Most of the other lossless compression formats I've seen are binary-only, and are limited to a handful of platforms. They may *say* Linux is supported, but what they really mean is that Linux/x86 is supported, not Linux/PPC, Linux/Sparc, Linux/Alpha, Linux/MIPS or Linux/ARM (Playstation/Netwinder), etc.

In 20 years, our computers and operating systems will probably have warped beyond all recognition. However, shn and flac will still work because the source is available, and the programs can be recompiled for the new platforms. Is the same true of Monkey's thingie?

(This is an honest question; I really don't know. If the answer is: yes, the source to Monkey's doo-dad is freely available, then I have no real objection to its use on the archive. But otherwise....)

To quote Steve Winwood: "who knows what tomorrow may bring?" Open source (or near equivalents) help make the archive more-or-less future-proof.

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Poster: simon c Date: Jul 28, 2004 7:17am
Forum: etree Subject: Re: there's more than two (or three) platforms out there!

I think it likely that the Archive will be sticking to SHN and FLAC for Etree - SHN because it's still the de-facto standard, and FLAC because it's open-source (hurrah!) and is also extremely popular.

Nothing against .ape, but for starters, we don't have any mechanisms for making derivatives from that format, which makes streamable preview/MP3 versions pretty impossible, and I think they're important for the Live Music Archive (where allowed!)

There may be a few shows hanging out in .ape (just as there are a very few in .mkw), but hopefully they will be replaced as time goes on.

Regards,
s!

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Poster: TomHorton Date: Jul 28, 2004 10:26pm
Forum: etree Subject: Re: there's more than two (or three) platforms out there!

The only reason Monkey's Audio was used was because it was the only software that would compress 24bit audio files. This was before FLAC supported 24bit. Now that FLAC supports 24bit, there should be no need for .ape or Monkey's Audio to be supported due to the reasons xtifer mentioned. I have personally re-encoded 2 24bit ape shoes to FLAC and uploaded them to the archive.