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Good news from Brazil, bad news about our codec coverage, good news from an Apple user and bad news: no Linux from Scratch.
Sounds better
When sound apps and music players come up in your magazine, invariably there’s only mention of WAV, OGG, MP2, and/or FLAC codecs. Please do an(other) article on the Opus codec. It’s a totally open, royaltyfree, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the net, but is also intended for storage and streaming applications.
As an IETF internet standard, Opus-encoded audio plays automatically in most major modern browsers (Firefox/tor Browser, Chrome/chromium/slimjet,
Opera, Edge), and music players (VLC, Audacity,
Clementine). People probably don’t realise it’s what’s being used by their streaming service, webrtc app or gaming platform. There’s a site of free Opus-encoded music you can listen to at http://bit.ly/lxf251opus. Jabari Zakiya
Neil says
Part of the problem is, as you’ve pointed out, that the people who will find Opus interesting are running services shifting gigabytes of audio, where compression improvements make significant savings in bandwidth. For Jane and her MP3 collection, Opus likely isn’t going to be of huge interest. Having said that, perhaps it’s worth us looking at the current and next-gen of video and audio codecs at some point.
Possibilities
Is it possible for the code from Onlyoffice to support Microsoft Office formats so they can be dropped into Libreoffice? Is it possible to do a regular feature on using LMMS? Another regular feature I would like to see is emulation, including MAME and Wine. Ian Learmonth
Neil says
We were being asked to cover LMMS back in LXF246 Mailserver. As it turns out, while we might not directly