By Rob Leslie, the author of the fixed point MAD decoder. Also has a detailed response from the people at Xiph.

He has a few interesting things to say about the "openness" of Ogg Vorbis.

Find it here

To his objections I can offer only "eh". Having better optimized Vorbis software would be nice; If he doesn't want to do it, he's certainly well within his rights and I for one bear no grudge for what he does with his free time, but his objections are too theoretical. It might change out from under him. A meteor might fall on my house overnight.
Yawn.

It's "Open" in the "Open" sense, unlike say "OpenVMS", which is "Open" in the "now runs on Alpha!" or the "Open Group", which is "Open" to taking your money

The Arla folks could implement an AFS-compatible client (before OpenAFS existed with the pathetic ancient and non-existant specs that existed up until that point, so perhaps you can understand why I'm at best unsympathetic.

That reminds me, one of these days I should really build hostafsd for ARM, so I can export the contents of my empeg via AFS.

By Rob Leslie, the author of the fixed point MAD decoder

..and long time empeg owner, not to mention webmaster of the empeg developers site at empeg.mars.org.

I've not seen any posts from him here in a LONG time though!

Rob

Yeah I was wondering what happened to Verement. I wonder if he still reads the board at all.

I was hoping he would transfer the registry onto riocar.org too.

Well after that article, he's probably too busy fending off a barrage of emails from /. and k5 trolls to stop by the BBS.

In reply to:

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Well after that article, he's probably too busy fending off a barrage of emails from /. and k5 trolls to stop by the BBS.

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Well not really. There have been several enlightened responses, and I think the article served its purpose.

Ultimately it was my purchase of an empeg that got me involved in audio codec software in the first place. I wanted to do a number of hackish things with my empeg involving CDPD and GPS, but I found the closed nature of the empeg's player software to be a hindrance. So I set out to reimplement everything and release it under the GPL, starting with the MP3 decoder.

What I didn't expect was for this decoder to take up a life of its own, and now I am more involved with that and related subjects than I am getting back to my empeg project.

Cheers,
-v

Good to see you again. Did you see the thread where the Ogg Integer guy is gonna let us have the decoder for the empeg?

In reply to:

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Did you see the thread where the Ogg Integer guy is gonna let us have the decoder for the empeg?

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Yes. Since he knows he can't make any money off the empeg, it was a nice gesture.

As a consequence of the points I raise in my article, of course, it might have been possible to have Vorbis support for the empeg long before now had Xiph.Org produced a specification.

In any case, this deal really only helps you guys. You can be grateful, but it doesn't mean all that much to me or anyone else still waiting for the specification.

Cheers,
-v